Japan is a country that can surprise anyone. The culture and mentality of local residents, the legacy of its history and even traces of the use of ancient stone processing technologies. One of the most mysterious places is Mount Nokogiri on the Boso Peninsula in Honshu. From a height, the rocky outcropping of the mountain looks like this:
Yes, this is a quarry with traces of technological mining. And it is located on the top of the mountain. Apparently, the extraction of the stone (blocks) went from the top. In order to assess the scale and immediately have an idea of this place from the outside, I suggest looking at the footage taken from a height with a quadcopter:
Personally, I do not understand why this mountain was attractive for the extraction of stone and where all those stone structures from all the extracted material are. This is not a modern development. This quarry dates back to the Edo period (or Tokugawa period): 1603-1868.
So far nothing unusual can be seen, except for the scale and complexity of work at such a height. But if you get closer to the steep walls of this quarry, it becomes clear that the stone was not mined by hand:
Promotional video:
If you look at the photographs taken by tourists on the ground in this place, then the most common and, apparently, the most interesting for ordinary people are the high relief image of the Canon and the sculpture of Yakushi Nyorai (31 meters high).
But pay attention to the horizontal marks on the walls! These are not chisel marks or anything. Such traces are left by mining equipment:
Enlarged image of footprints on the wall. Similar tracks can be seen in Longyu Grottoes in China. There are also very strange grottoes with completely similar marks on the walls.
Another place in this career:
There are similar footprints here, which say that the mechanized principle of stone extraction was applied throughout this quarry. Or some kind of tool that, like a serrated knife for cutting bread, leaves traces of scratches in the oil:
Following their hypothesis that the ancients quite recently could not cut a hard stone, but a plastic one, the analogy with a knife and butter is very useful. Then there is no need for an explanation to accept the presence in those days of miraculous grinders, mining equipment, etc. Why could mountains be composed of plastics? These are the outcrops, or rather the uplifts of the strata, which were at a depth during rapid mountain building. And somewhere they were liquid.
There is also an obvious quarry on the peninsula, where a large volume of stone or plastic mass was chosen.
For more confirmation of the version of not manual sampling of rock with a chisel, I suggest looking at more photos from this place, where traces of the mechanical method of stone extraction by some aggregates are more clearly visible:
I wonder how it was possible to pass some kind of technique and form such a narrow tunnel? And the grottoes may say that the rock was simply dug out like clay. It is possible that these were workers' dwellings or tool storage rooms.
After viewing these photographs, there is no doubt that the quarry was not hand cut. The tracks are also very similar to those that remain after driving a combine harvester in a salt mine:
All in all, this place in Japan is another mystery of history about the underrated technologies of the past. But historians do not notice it, they are not technologists or miners.