One of the goals of the trip was to find traces of a highly developed civilization on the territory of modern Japan. There are such facilities, they are concentrated in the Kansai region, 60 km from Kyoto, in a place called Asuka.
It was quite difficult to find these objects, even with a map, since some of them are located at a considerable distance from each other (in mountains, forests, and even among fields).
Local Japanese do not speak English, and many are not familiar with the megaliths in their area. Children and taxi drivers, who are ubiquitous as always, helped us - they showed us the way. Sometimes I had to catch a taxi to find an object within a radius of 1 km from the village.
Here we have found the first largest megalith in Japan "Masuda Iwafun". At this sign, the village ends and begins a mountainous many kilometers bamboo windbreak, in which you get lost in 5 minutes.
The place is not at all popular with tourists, we did not meet anyone. The megalith, as expected, turned out to be huge:
Promotional video:
At the top of the megalith there were niches, which, by the way, were perfectly cast, cut, melted … (choose the right word yourself)! No traces of rough manual labor with a chisel or chisel were found. The material of Masuda Iwafun is granite, as it is written in the description near the megalith, and I myself, when I extracted a sample of the rock, took about 30 minutes in order. It is difficult to leave even a scratch on the rock!
Since rainwater accumulated in the niches, and it was not possible to see the bottom, it was decided to measure the depth of the niches using a bamboo trunk. This experiment can be viewed in the video version of the report.
Renowned researcher and writer Graham Hancock also visited Masoud Iwafun, as reflected in his blog. Next on the list we had the megalith of Sakafuneshi, for some reason the locals believed that with the help of this granite block, very skillfully cut many thousands of years ago, they made Sake! I wonder who could design such a moonshine still in ancient times for distilling alcohol ?!
Asuki's next artifact is the Devil's Pot megalith, which has two parts. One of the parts of the granite monument fell from the hillock, the second slab is popularly called the Cutting Board. The local peasants explain the name itself by the fact that in their understanding such blocks could only be moved and used by demons, people cannot do it. Megaliths bypass … just in case.
They tried to enter the excavations now closed from outsiders, in vain.
Access to the "sarcophagi" is closed - see how Asuki's granite sarcophagi are carved (Photo from the archive of Evgeny Shlakin)