S P O T ／ SPOT-353

Akiyoshido Cave

秋芳洞あきよしどう

Beneath the rolling karst grassland of Akiyoshidai — Japan's largest limestone plateau — lies a void that water spent eons hollowing out. Akiyoshido runs 10,300 meters in total, the third-longest cave in the country, and about a kilometer of it is opened to visitors as a path that plunges 100 to 200 meters below daylight. What you walk into does not feel like a single room; it feels like a geology that has gone strange. The signature sight is the 'Hundred Plates' (Hyakumai-zara), a vast cascade of rimstone pools terraced like flooded rice paddies, on a scale almost unmatched anywhere in the world. Above the path rises the 'Golden Pillar' (Ogon-bashira), a 15-meter flowstone column built grain by grain from dripping calcite, the cave's emblem. Add the 5-meter 'Cave Fuji' and a procession of forms too large to read as anything but otherworldly. The cave was once known by the plain name 'Takiana,' the waterfall hole, until the future Emperor Showa visited in 1926 and it was rechristened Akiyoshido. It is a National Special Natural Monument — and one of those rare places where a single photograph tells you exactly why it belongs among the strange.