S P O T ／ SPOT-361

Yoshimi Hyakuana (Yoshimi Hundred Caves)

吉見百穴よしみひゃくあな

On a sandstone hillside an hour north of Tokyo, a slope erupts into a honeycomb of square holes — 219 of them, cut into the rock more than 1,400 years ago. They are not dwellings, though Meiji-era scholars once insisted they were the homes of a legendary lost people; they are tombs, horizontal burial chambers from the late Kofun period, arranged across the cliff like the cells of an enormous hive. That alone would earn Yoshimi Hyakuana its strangeness. But walk to the right and the hill opens again — this time into a vast, blast-cut tunnel, part of an underground munitions factory dug in the desperate final months of the Pacific War, a project that destroyed a dozen of the ancient tombs to make room for aircraft parts. Add to this the luminous moss that glows faint yellow-green in the dark of one chamber, a nationally protected natural treasure, and you have a single small hill where Bronze-Age death, wartime total mobilization, and rare botany are stacked one atop another. Few places in Japan compress so much history, and so much eeriness, into one cliff face.