Yoshimi Hyakuana: Japan’s Layered History
Authors: Mark TURIN, Andrew GORDON
On a crisp and windy Tuesday morning in mid-February, members of the Heritage Studies and Global History Groups based at Tokyo College, together with a small contingent of associated academic visitors, visited Yoshimi Hyakuana in Saitama Prefecture.
We were fortunate to visit this extraordinary site with Korea University Professor Jung-Sun Nina Han, whose excellent presentation to the Tokyo College Heritage Studies Group the previous day on her recent book, Dark Heritage in Contemporary Japan: Relics of an Underground Empire, offered an invitation to understand the multilayered connections between the memories of imperial wars, colonial empire, and place-based politics in postwar Japan more deeply.
An important historic site with overlapping layers of history, Yoshimi Hyakuana is a cluster of corridor-type tombs dug into a sandstone cliff located in the town of Yoshimi, Saitama, in the Kantō region of Japan. It was designated as a National Historic Site on March 7, 1923 and the luminous moss that grows at the site (Schistostega pennata, commonly known as ‘goblin gold’) was subsequently designated to be a Natural Monument of Japan on November 30, 1928.
Often referred to as ‘The Hundred Caves’, there are in fact a total of 219. Most of the caves have an opening that measures approximately one meter square, with a narrow entrance tunnel leading to a larger inner chamber, commonly only two to three meters square, but occasionally extending further into the hill.
Han’s book examines civic activism around the conservation of dark heritage of wartime exploitation of labor from colonial Korea in contemporary Japan. It was the unusually direct presentation of this contested history that drew our group to visit the site. While the Yoshimi Hyakuana caves are certainly an important historic and archaeological site, in the final year of World War II, they were repurposed to become an underground munitions plant and aircraft engine factory for the Nakajima Aircraft Company. Several thousand Korean laborers were mobilized to work here under punishing conditions. Protection of the Korean workers seems not to have been of much concern to the Japanese authorities at the time, but the network of underground tunnels was intended to shield the aircraft company workers and the equipment from American air raids upon completion.
However, the factory never became fully operational before the war ended in August 1945. Unusually among the many such underground facilities desperately constructed from 1944 to 1945, the efforts of local activists, part of a national network, convinced the town of Yoshimi in the early 1990s to set up a standing exhibit at the Yoshimi Hyakuana visitor center offering a detailed account of the construction of these tunnels and the harsh labor undertaken by the Korean workers.
Looking into the cave tunnels of Yoshimi Hyakuana. Photo by Mark Turin.
Many of our group also visited the Iwamuro Kannondo temple which is located 150 meters to the south of the caves, close to the main road that leads back into town. Its origins date back to the 800s, making it a site with a rich history of about 1200 years. It is said that Kobo Daishi, a revered Buddhist monk, carved a statue of Kannon in a rock cave, which became the foundation of this religious landmark. The statue is about 36.4 centimeters in height and was placed in the cave, through which it received the name Mt. Iwamuro.
The site was protected and revered by the lords of Matsuyama Castle for generations. In 1590, during Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaign in the Kanto region, Matsuyama Castle fell, and the original template was destroyed by fire. The current structure of Iwamuro Kannondo was rebuilt during the Kanbun era (1661-1673) of the Edo period by Ryusei-in III Koon, with the support of the local community. The openair hall is noted for its rare hanging style architecture from the Edo period.
Roof beams in the Iwamuro Kannondo temple. Note the senshafuda, stickers pasted by pilgrims to signal that they have visited, typically including their name and town of origin.
One question that several of our group had—given that the visitor center was well constructed with an impressive display of Yayoi and Kofun era artifacts from the site, as well as the wartime visitor center—was who bore the cost of the development and ongoing maintenance. We saw very few other visitors during our two hours at the site, although a cold mid-winter, mid-week morning was likely not a representative day. An article in the Asahi newspaper (11/07/2022, evening edition, p. 3) reported that other than during the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual total of visitors in recent years has numbered in the vicinity of 60,000. Even with the modest 300 yen entry fee, the town should be getting a reasonable return on its investment in the Yoshimi Hyakuana site!
Our ‘field trip’ was a welcome opportunity for scholars at Tokyo College to meet with one another and be in dialogue outside of the office environment. Through the visit to the Yoshimi Hyakuana site, we were fortunate to experience an important cultural site in person—in an embodied manner—and learn more of Japan’s layered history—ancient, early modern, and modern.
