Читать книгу Monument Future - Siegfried Siegesmund - Страница 327

The landscape of modern Japan is world-renowned for the vertical development and multiform skyline of its megalopolises, shaped by the intense urbanization begun in the post-war era. However, it endured changing fortunes in the course of history, in view of the countless natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, volcanic eruptions) and human-made disasters (wars, fires). Indeed, many social and religious traditions in Japan rather keep a strong cultural bound with the underground world, and with the protection, isolation, and quietness that it offers. Over the centuries, sacred hypogea have been frequented for Buddhist and Shinto practices and for burials, caves used as shelters during wars and persecutions, tunnels excavated for raw-material exploitation or industrial manufacturing. Our interest dwelled on three among the many underground historical sites in the Kanto region, in central Japan (Fig. 1):

— Taya Caves (Yokohama) – excavated and sculpted by Buddhist monks of the Shingon Esoteric sect from the Kamakura until the Edo period (13th to 19th century), and dedicated to ascetic training, rituals, and later pilgrimage. The caves are a maze of halls and galleries extending for about 600 m on three stories, decorated with hundreds of rock-cut high and low reliefs, picturing deities and masters of Buddhism, shrines, real and fantastic animals, vegetal motifs, mandala, zodiac signs, and family crests (Ogata 2019).

— Yoshimi Hundred Caves (Yoshimi) – a composite Kofun, term used for sacred tumulus and megalithic burials of emperors, kings, and aristocrats, widespread in Japan about 1,500 years ago. The Yoshimi Kofun includes 219 hillside-cut tombs dated to the 6–7th century. A part of them were destroyed and tunneled during the Pacific War, making room for a production plant of aircraft parts and munitions, sheltered from the American air raids (Ikegami 2018).

— Oya quarry district (Utsunomiya) – a complex of underground sites of extraction of Oya stone, a popular building and carving material exploited since the Edo period (17th century) up to the present. Many quarries were abandoned, others converted into geoheritage and tourist attractions (e. g., History Museum, Heiwa Kannon monument, Keikan Park) (Seiki et al. 2017).

Figure 1: The underground sites under investigation (photo of Taya Caves by S. Sonoda).