The Ramp


On our first dive at Yonaguni I took Wolf to a very curious structure that I had discovered in late June 1999.

It stands in 18 meters of water 100 meters to the west of the terraces of the main monument. When above sea level 8000 or 10,000 years ago I suggest that it was originally a natural and untouched rocky knoll rising about 6 meters above ground level. A curving sloped ramp 3 meters wide was then cut into the side of the knoll and a retaining wall to the full height of the original mound was left in place enclosing and protecting the outside edge of the ramp.

I lead Wolf to the base of the ramp and as we swam up it I pointed out how the outer curve of the inner wall -- which rises two meters above the floor of the ramp and is formed by the body of the mound - is precisely matched by the inner curve of the outer wall, which also rises to a height of two meters above the ramp floor, so that both walls run perfectly parallel. Moreover when we swam up and over the rim of the outer wall we could see that its own outer curve again exactly matches the curves within and that it drops sheer to the sea-bed - as it should if it is indeed a purposeful wall and not simply a natural structure.

I showed Wolf that the ramp floor itself, though battered and damaged in places, must originally have had a smooth, flat surface. I also showed him what I believe may have been the function of the ramp. As one continues to follow it round it leads to a platform offering an impressive side-on view of the two huge parallel megaliths, tucked into an alcove in the northwest corner of the main monument, that constitute a spectacular landmark in the Yonaguniunderworld”.

Later we discussed what we’d seen:

GH: Okay, Wolf, the first dive we did I brought you to a structure [attempts to draw ramp structure on notepad] - I’m sorry, I’m hopeless at drawing..


WOLF: Me too [peers at drawing] OK, so I recognize it.

GH: Hey, you’re a geologist, you should be able to draw. [Continues drawing] And here is a rather nice wall going round on both sides, and in the middle is a bedrock channel or ramp. And it rises from here around to this corner and, in fact, if we follow it all the way round it leads us to a view of the megaliths. Now this wall is not a bank. It is a wall. It’s actually about half a meter wide wide. And it’s high more than 2 meters high

 

WOLF: Round about.

 

GH: Above this above this ramp, whatever you want to call it. So I simply cannot understand the combination of clean bedrock here [indicates the ramp floor], admittedly very eroded and damaged - but clean bedrock here, and these heavily overgrown walls, which are definitely wall-like in appearance and rather high in the sense that they have an outer and an inner edge, and the curve of the outer edge matches the curve of the inner edge; and the same on the other wall.

To my surprise Wolf immediately admitted that this rather innocuous looking and only recently discovered structure, which he had not been shown on his previous visit, was a “real challenge”. He was later to describe it as “the most impressive thing” he had seen at Yonguni:

“The most impressive thing for me was the wall, the wall which is totally covered by living organisms nowadays, which should be removed to have a look at the structure of that wall, which can also be explained as having been done possibly by nature, but to get it sure we have to do deep research on that.(14)

Nevertheless Wolf would not have been Wolf if he had not at least attempted to come up with a calm, level-headed and unsensational geological explanation for the problem. He therefore drew my attention now to a place on land on Yonaguni called Sananudai that we had taken a look at the day before where he had shown me wall-like formations - admittedly only half a meter high - that had been formed entirely naturally:

WOLF: Okay, this is a real challenge to solve. But if you remember, the day before we have been on a platform on land - I forgot the name of the point -

GH: Sananudai?

WOLF: Right, correct. And by chance we went further down near the sea, and I showed you these encrustation patterns and maybe you remember that I..

GH: I remember distinctly; you told me that a hard patina formed on the outside of the rock and that the water softened out the inside, leaving a wall -like shape in place.

WOLF: Correct. And on the other side, the relatively soft sandstone had already begun to be removed. So And I told you that this could be a possible way that a wall can be made by nature OK, it’s a theory.

GH: It’s a theory. I mean what I saw at Sananudai was actually no curved walls running in parallel with each other, but rather straight and they were about half meter high.

WOLF: They were at beginning stage. Right. And if you had a look closer down, you would have seen that there was a little curving, not as clear as this, I have to admit. But I mean that was really the beginning stage so we don’t know.

GH: So would you want to explain those walls [on either side of the ramp] that way, as a hard patina which was preserved, and the soft part was cut out?

WOLF: At first, and then subsequently overgrown by organisms as we saw. But to get clear what that really is, so I underline repeatedly, it is a challenge, and this is the first and only explanation I have for this. But to really get clear of this fact, we should have to remove the encrustation on one spot, or just from top to the bottom. This is the only way to find out of what material this wall consists - there’s no other way; or to drill a hole through We are obliged to find out what these walls are made of. Are they made of single patterns like stones or something?

GH: Well see, I don’t I very much doubt if the walls will turn out to be made of blocks. I think they’ll turn out to be cut. I think we’re looking at a megalithic culture which cut rock. I think they cut down into the living rock, and they created the walls by cutting, and then later on the encrustation came and grew on top of the walls. That’s my theory.

WOLF: I mean, if this was the case, then it would still be very useful to have a look on the core of these. It would tell us exactly what sort of material it was - was it soft sandstone, was it hard mudstone or what else? And we would be possibly able to find any marks on them, which then would give us the clear proof

GH: So what we have here is a bit of a puzzle which needs some serious research done on it.

WOLF: Correct. That’s what I would say.

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The Tunnel and The Megaliths


On our second dive we visited the twin megaliths (click image right), weighing approximately 100 tonnes each, stacked side by side like two huge slices of toast in a west-facing alcove in the northwest corner of the main monument. As noted earlier, a prime side-on view of these hulking rectangular blocks unfolds from the top of the curved sloping ramp explored on the first dive. And we’ve seen that the ramp appears to have been cut down (either by natural or human forces) between two parallel walls out of a pre-existing rocky knoll.

The knoll in turn co-joins other massive, heavily overgrown structures presumed to be outcrops of natural bedrock which form an almost continuous barricade, three meters high and five meters thick, thrown out in a loose semi-circle in front of the megaliths - all at roughly 15-18 meters water depth. The barricade is penetrated at only one point, and there only by a narrow tunnel a little over a meter wide and about a meter and a half high through which a scuba diver swimming horizontally may pass comfortably.

The tunnel itself (click image left) looks “built” - as opposed to rock-hewn like so much else at Yonaguni - in the sense that each of its sides consists of two courses of huge blocks separated by straight, clearly demarcated, matching joints. There is insufficient room to stand up within the tunnel, indeed barely enough even to crouch, so when it was above water 8000 or 10,000 years ago any human entering it would have been obliged to crawl through to the other side. What is striking then, as soon as you emerge, is the way in which you now find yourself directly opposite and beneath the twin megaliths which, from this angle, rear edge-on above you like the paired sarsens at Stonehenge or the pair of upright granite megaliths worshipped since antiquity in Japan’s Ena region as “the sacred rock deity, the object of worship” (see Chapter 25).

The swim ahead to the base of the megaliths is a matter of 20 meters and you observe immediately at this point that they do not stand on the sea-bed but are elevated about two meters above it, with their bases resting on a platform of boulders, and framed in a cleft. The side of the cleft to your right is formed by the rear corner of the main terraced monument; the side to your left is formed by a lower ridge of rock which also shows signs, though to a lesser degree, of terracing. Both megaliths slope backwards at the same angle against the cleft and both are the same height (just over six meters). The megalith to the right is distinctly thicker than its otherwise near “twin” to the left. Both megaliths taper at top and bottom so that the gap between them, about the width of a fist at the midpoint, is not constant. Although roughened, eroded and pitted with innumerable sea-urchin holes, the megaliths can still be recognized as essentially symmetrical blocks, all the faces of which appear originally to have been smoothed off to match - although, again, whether the process that brought this effect about was entirely natural, or at some point involved the input of human skill and labor, remains thus far a matter of a very few contradictory professional opinions and no facts.

I allowed myself to float up, towards the surface, along the slope of the megaliths, resting my hand in the gap between them as a guide. The light was good and I could see right into the gap; looking back at me from the far recesses a plump red fish eyed me with horror and hoped that I would go away.

As I neared the top of the megaliths (click image right), submerged under just five meters of water, I began to feel the ferocious wash of waves pounding against the surrounding rocks. I clung on and for a few moments allowed my body to be tugged back and forth by the swell. Enshrouded in a cloud of foam I could see the northwest corner of the main monument still rising above me the final few meters towards the surface.

After the dive Wolf and I again discussed what we had seen and quite soon, after some fruitless trading of opinion, our argument began to focus around a single - potentially decisive - issue. Had these very striking parallel megaliths been quarried, shaped and lowered into position beside the northwest corner of the main monument by human beings? Or had they arrived there through wholly natural processes?

I had drawn another rough sketch map to which I now pointed:

GH: There’s the two blocks, and we see above them here, not very high above them, the mass of the structure which leads round to Iseki Point. Explain to me how those blocks got there.

WOLF: Okay. You have seen lots of blocks fallen down -

GH: All over the place.

WOLF: On the shoreline we saw from the ship -

GH: Many fallen blocks, yes.

WOLF: - lots of blocks have fallen down from higher parts -

GH: Agreed.

WOLF: - from beddings which have been broken, which were harder than the underlying layers; because what happens is that you get an an undercurving and undercutting of softer material under harder banks. So in my belief, these two blocks have been once one block of two sandstone banks, with either softer material in between or nothing in between, just only the bedding limits.

GH: Well, I want to know how they got where they are now.

WOLF: Okay. My opinion is that these blocks have fallen down from a very, very high level, relative to their present situation.

GH: But no high point overlooks them. You would have to go back -

WOLF: Nowadays.

GH: Well, yes, fair enough, nowadays. Nowadays you would have to go back in a northward direction some 50 or 60 meters, maybe more, horizontally, before you reached the cliff.

WOLF: Right, that’s clear for nowadays. I’m talking about a time range of at least 10,000 years maybe more.

GH: That we agree on.

WOLF: So then there could have been places of a higher position from which these stones could have fallen down.

GH: So you are hypothesizing a pre-existing higher place from which these fell?

WOLF: What I’m hypothesizing is that they have fallen down, so and this must have happened from a, let’s say, sufficiently higher place. So what this may be then -

GH: Do you agree with me that this place [Indicates top of northwest corner of main monument 3-4 meters above top of megaliths] is not sufficiently high? The place we see immediately above it now?

WOLF: I don’t have it in mind clearly, so I just can imagine from -

GH: But do you remember when we came to the top of these columns, of these blocks we were coming close to the surface. You could feel the swell hitting you quite hard and the foam above your head very strong. In fact, it’s like looking into clouds almost. And you can see the mass of the rock above you, probably not more than another four meters above, and you’re going to hit the surface there.

WOLF: Yes, I would think this would not be high enough.

GH: No?

WOLF: No.

GH: So we need a hypothetical high place to do it?

WOLF: Yes.

GH: And I, of course, need a hypothetical civilization -

WOLF: Yes.

GH: - capable of moving it here.

WOLF: Yes, of course, yes, yes no doubt about it.

GH: So we have two hypotheticals there.

WOLF: I’m not going to discuss any presence or absence of any civilization because that’s not my field

But the problem I feel - and shall continue to feel - is that the very odd combination of major stone structures lying underwater at Yonaguni, and the very odd combinations of characteristics found within every one of those structures, simply cannot be said to have been properly evaluated until the possible “presence or absence” of a civilization - specifically the Jomon - has been very thoroughly taken into account.
 

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The Path and The Terraces


Our third and fourth dives were spent examining the ‘pathway’ or ‘loop road’ which runs along the base of the main monument directly beneath the terraces in its south face at a depth of 27 meters; and the terraces themselves which begin 14 meters vertically above the pathway.

The Terraces
At this level a spacious patio about 12 meters wide and 35 meters in length opens out and in its northeastern corner, at depths decreasing from 13 meters to seven meters, the structures known to local divers as “the terraces” are found (click image right). There are two main ‘steps’, both about two meters high with sharp edges and clean near-right-angle corners. Above them there are then three further smaller steps giving access to the top of the monument which continues to rise northward until it comes close to the surface.

Here, very clearly, I could see the basis for the argument advanced by Wolf in Der Spiegel that the whole mass of the structure - with all its striking and emphatic terraces and steps, its perpendicular and horizontal planes - could be explained by the effects of high-energy wave action on a large outcrop of naturally bedded sedimentary rock.

When it first began to form, aeons ago, the sandstone (or more correctly in this case ‘mudstone’) of the body of the monument was deposited in layers of varying thickness and consistency, traversed “by vertical cracks and horizontal crevices.” As sea-level rose and turbulent waves began to strike progressively higher levels of the structure these cracks and crevices were gradually exploited and opened up -- with the softer layers separating into flat slabs of assorted shapes and sizes which could then be washed out by the sea. In such a fashion, explains Wolf, “perpendicularity and steps” gradually developed in the fracture zones creating, entirely without human help, the most striking effects of the structure as we see it today.

According to this reasoning, therefore, I was to envisage the 12 meter x 35 meter flat-floored patio as having been cut out of the side of the original outcrop by wave action which removed the sedimentary mudstone layers in slabs -- with the terraced sections being formed out of the surviving harder members of rock after the softer layers had been washed away.

I helped Wolf measure the two highest steps, then drifted off to the edge of the patio and looked down the sheer 14 meter wall that drops to Professor Kimura’s “loop road” -- the flat rock-floored ‘pathway’ that runs along the bottom of the channel immediately to the south of the monument. Although 25 meters wide at the depth of the terraces the channel narrows to a width of less than four meters at the depth of the path. It’s north wall is the sheer south face of the monument; its south wall is at first not sheer but slopes for some distance further to the south at an angle of about 40 degrees before rising more steeply towards the surface. The 40 degree section is heavily but rather neatly stacked with blocky rubble that consists of an infill of smaller stones supporting a façade of a dozen much larger blocks arranged, as Professor Kimura points out, in a straight line “as a stone wall”. Kimura is in no doubt that this wall is the work of human beings.

But because it is 27 meters down, and our dive computers didn’t like the decompression implications of doing it as the fourth dive of an already hard day, we decided to leave it till the following morning.

The Pathway
We dropped in near the twin megaliths, then followed the clearly-demarcated rock-hewn pathway that seems to start (or finish?) here, veering to the left of the ‘entrance tunnel’ that we had passed through the day before, winding gradually to the south into deeper water around the western side of the main monument, then finally turning eastwards into the channel in front of the terraces at a depth of 27 meters.

As we entered the channel I pointed out to Wolf a pattern of three symmetrical indentations, each two meters in length and only about 20 centimeters high, cut at regular intervals into the junction of the northern side of the path and the base of the main monument. I also indicated two other details that I find particularly impressive in this area:

(a)  the way that the floor of the path appears to have been deliberately flattened and smoothed to give almost a paved effect

 

(b)  the way the path is completely free of any rubble until a point about 30 meters to the east of the terraces (where several large boulders and other stony debris have fallen or rolled)

When Wolf and I later discussed the path and the terraces he remained adamant that all the anomalies in these areas could have been produced by the effects of local erosive forces, mainly waves, on the ‘layer-cake’ strata of the Yonaguni mudstones. In short while he could not absolutely rule out human intervention he did not feel that it was necessary in order to explain anything that we had so far seen underwater.

At this point I drew his attention to a project done by Professor Kimura and his team from the University of the Ryukyus in cooperation with the Japanese national TV channel TBS. The result had been a high-quality six-hour documentary, aired over New Year 2001, that made many useful and original contributions to the debate on the Yonaguni controversy.(15) I wanted to acquaint Wolf in particular with the comments and demonstrations of Koutaro Shinza, a traditional Okinawan stonemason who had shown himself to be an expert in exploiting the natural faults, cracks and layers in sedimentary rocks to facilitate quarrying. According to Shinza, who TBS brought to Yonaguni:

“When I saw the undersea ruins I knew instantly it was a stone quarry. I showed photographs to other stonecutters also and they all said the same. I conclude that it was done by human hands. Its absolutely impossible for something like this to be produced by nature alone”(16)

Since Shinza’s technique of quarrying along the lines of weakness of existing joints and fractures is functionally identical to the “method” used by the sea in Wolf’s scenario to break up and separate the Yonaguni mudstones into the terraces and steps we see today, I asked him whether he could be absolutely certain that he could tell the difference. He admitted that he could not be certain -- although the fact that he had as yet seen no definite tool marks on any of his dives was another reason to assume that humans had not been involved.

GH: Kimura makes a lot of the tool marks issue. He says he has definitely found marks. But I wouldn’t be very hopeful after 10,000 years of submersion underwater to find tool marks. It’s a long time. This, of course, is hard stone.

WOLF: Very hard stone, yes. And it is heavily overgrown with organisms in many places. So we might find some marks, indeed, if we were looking a bit and if we knew where to look exactly and how to identify them clearly. But this I mean is necessary.

Had the sea randomly removed the rock layers to leave the terraces, or had it been ancient stonemasons working to a plan? Neither scenario, we realized, could be unequivocally falsified - or proved -- by the empirical evidence presently to hand. But there was another way to come at the problem which could at least test the logic of both propositions.

Part of Professor Kimura’s evidence for human intervention in the construction of the main Yonaguni monument is the stark absence of fallen stony rubble in the pathway beneath the terraces - which he suggests should be cluttered by debris, perhaps even completely buried under it, if the terraces had been cut naturally by waves breaking-up the pre-existing bedding planes. Where we do see debris on the path itself it is in the form of a cluster of large boulders (not slabs) 30 meters to the east of the terraces. And the only other area that might be described as debris lies neatly stacked at an angle of 40 degrees against the sloping south face of the channel, touching but never trespassing the southern edge of the path. This is the embankment with a façade of a dozen megalithic blocks arranged in a row that Kimura has identified as man-made. I confess, however, that on all my many visits to Yonaguni -- including these March 2001 dives with Wolf -- I have regarded this embankment as nothing more than rubble fallen from the south side of the channel and thus paid no special attention to it. It has only been since March 2001, looking back at the photographs and video images, that I have begun to realize how odd it is that not a bit of the supposed “fallen rubble” transgresses the path itself, how very ordered it seems to be in general, and how very probable it is that Kimura is right.

But on the trip with Wolf I focused only on the issue of the apparent “clean-up” operation that had been done on the path.

I began by reminding him of our earlier discussion about the twin megaliths, each six meters tall and weighing 100 tons, which he claimed had fallen from above into their present position on the northwest corner of the monument from some hypothetical former high point.

WOLF: I see what you’re going for.

GH: Well, what I’m going for is the problem of the path as we come in front of Iseki Point, as we come in front of the main monument. There’s a sheer wall above the path 14 meters high and then the terracing begins. Now if ever there was a place on this structure where large slabs of stone should have fallen it is here on the path, directly under where the terraces were created. And so what’s bothering me is if you can accept that the two parallel megaliths fell from a high place and lodged in position in the northwest corner of the monument and stayed there permanently, why don’t we find the path in front of the monument littered with the equally big or bigger slabs of rock that must have been dislodged during the formation of the terraces?

I sketched the north and south walls of the channel, with the path at the base, and the embankment of “orderly rubble” gathered up against the south wall.

GH: Piled up here against the south wall is a huge amount of large stones which continue, in fact, up to this level (click image right). And I can very well accept that those stones fell off the top of the south side and found themselves in this position. As a matter of fact Professor Kimura doesn’t say that. Professor Kimura says that these stones were placed here by human beings.

WOLF: Yes, yes, I know I know.

GH: And he may or may not be right on that matter, but I’m prepared to accept that the reasonable possibility, with the forces of gravity as I understand them, is that stones which had been up here along this also rather flat area on top of the south side, may have been washed off in water and tumbled down and piled up here [indicates embankment]. And that’s what I see. I see stones that fell from up here on the south side. What I can’t understand, once we come to the huge main terrace with its steps on the north side of the channel, is why under this nice vertical cliff, I don’t find any stones at all lying on this 3-metre wide path. And I don’t accept that they all rolled from the [north] side into this embankment [on the south side] conveniently leaving the path immediately beside it free. To me that’s against logic and nature.

WOLF: We’re just guessing. So imagine that this flat area around the terraces was not removed all in one go. What I mean is little small tiny pebbles, cobbles, whatever, over a long time have fallen down and they have somehow been transported and rode supported by gravity, here into this part [indicates embankment area on south side of channel] being sheltered from further transport, first of all, by these large boulders.

GH: Again I find it difficult to grasp you here. If I stand beside these steps [indicates the two big steps in the main terrace], they tower above my head. This means a layer of rock at least two and a half meters thick, all the way around here [indicates patio area] has been removed completely to leave behind just the steps.

WOLF: Yes.

GH: I mean this patio is, what, 30 or 35 meters in length?

WOLF: Round about.

GH: And we have a layer of rock 2½ meters thick; that’s a hell of a lot of rock.

WOLF: We’re not talking about two or three years.

GH: We’re talking of a long period of time. So you’re explaining this by saying that small pieces were broken off little by little and taken away by the tides?

WOLF: Yes, right in general.

GH: Yeah. I find the more elegant explanation is it was tidied up by human beings. -

WOLF: Fine.

GH: - after they finished their job.

WOLF: But where should they put it then? Somewhere here around?

GH: Wherever they wished.

WOLF: Come on.

GH: If human beings do take material away from sites, they take it right away get it away this is known human activity very normal they don’t leave the rubble lying around on the site, this is normal.

WOLF: This is clearly what Kimura says.

GH: It’s Kimura’s argument, and I find it persuasive.

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The Face and the Stone Stage


On our sixth and final dive at Yonaguni in March 2001 I took Wolf to a place called Tatigami Iwa eight kilometers east of the Palace and about two and a half kilometers east of the main cluster of monuments around Iseki Point.

Tatigami Iwa means “Standing Kami Stone” and refers to a rock pinnacle 40 meters high, weirdly gnarled and eroded, left behind thousands of years ago when the rest of a former cliff of which it was once part was washed away. Understandably revered as a deity in local tradition it now stands lashed by the Pacific Ocean a hundred meters from shore like a ghost sentry for this haunted island. But it is what is underneath it, in the underwater landscape nearby, that really interests me and that led me to chose it as the site for our sixth dive. For here, at a depth of around 18 meters, a huge carving of a human face is to be seen - with two eyes, a nose and a mouth hacked, either by natural forces or by human agency, into the corner of an outcrop of dark rock that juts up prominently from a distinctive ‘blocky’ plain.

I showed Wolf how the “face formation” (click image left) manifests a combination of peculiarities. For it is not just a “face” -- or something that looks like one (which nature provides numerous accidental examples of) -- but a grim and scary face, which seems designed to overawe, carved with care and attention to the lines and flow of the base rock. Moreover, far from appearing haphazardly with no context, as one would expect with an accidentally-formed natural “face”, it seems framed within a deliberate ceremonial setting. Thus a horizontal platform just under two meters high and five meters wide - called by local divers the “Stone Stage” -- opens out from the side of the face at the level of the mouth and runs along to the back of the head where a narrow passageway penetrates the whole structure from west to east.

The “Face”, therefore, has to be viewed together with its “Stone Stage” as a single rock-hewn edifice and I note, as does Sundaresh in his report (17) cited earlier, that the flat area out of which the Stage and Face rise (click image right) is easily large enough to have accommodated thousands of people before sea-levels rose to cover it. Also noteworthy, however, is the fact that Face/Stage edifice is not alone in this big area but is part of a neighborhood of anomalous rock-hewn and often rectilinear structures clustered around the base of Tatigami Iwa.

Natural? Or man-made? Or a bit of both? My vote is weird and wonderful nature, enhanced by man, thousands of years ago.

But what did Wolf think?

WOLF: First of all we have to mention that this is a totally different sort of sandstone from what we find at Iseki Point. It’s very thick - a series of very thick and massive banks which consist, contrary to the Iseki Point material, of quite soft sandstone which is very, very sensitive to erosion and erodes generally in more rounded forms than the Iseki Point sandstone or mudstone. Secondly erosion of rock, all around the world, often produces forms that look accidentally like human faces So I cannot say very much to the Face. To become clear of that fact, again, you would have to remove all the organisms around because that would give you a free view on the rock and the way it was carved.

GH: Did you notice, looking into the eyes, the eye sockets of the face, that both of them had a central prominence?

WOLF: No. No, sorry I haven’t looked.

GH: You didn’t see.

WOLF: I saw the face and I thought, "Yeah, hmm, what to do with this?"

GH: Yes.

WOLF: But you see, I’m used I’m not used to go straight to the things but to -

GH: Yeah, to stand back, yeah, I noticed that.

WOLF: - take a distance and look, hmm, how can this be formed? But it was my first view on that. I don’t have an answer on that at the moment.

GH: Something else about it too, for me, is the sense that I keep finding these problems - if we look back over our drawings over the last couple of days - well here from our first dive we have within a short area, parallel curved walls, a ramp, a tunnel, two megaliths. We come round in front of the monument, a clear pathway, and as far as I’m concerned still with the mystery of the missing material - if indeed, as we also agreed earlier, all of this mass of material that we see in the embankment came from the south side - because as you said, it doesn’t look like it belonged on the north side.

WOLF: On this view, yes.

GH: It’s the proximity of all these peculiar things, each of which requires a rather detailed geological explanation and, in some cases, requires hypotheticals such as a cliff which once hung over that area and dropped these two megaliths down there. I find - and this is how I felt always almost from the third or fourth visit that I made to Yonaguni - is that this, this fantastic combination of peculiarities in a very compact area - because as you saw today the peculiarities continue as we go further along the coast to the Face and the Stone Stage -

WOLF: That’s right, I was deeply impressed when I saw that.

GH: The thing that’s striking is that all of these peculiarities occur along the south and east coasts of Yonaguni, and none of them are found along the north coast - at least if they’ve been found, divers aren’t talking about them, and divers usually do talk about places like this. So, you know, we find them along the south side but not along the north side. We find them compacted into a relatively tight area, and each one requires a rather different, and to my mind, rather complicated geological explanation, you know, disposing of a mass of rock that is two and a half meters thick and 35 meters in length [and 15 meters wide] is simply banishing it. And attributing that to wave action, to me that’s just going a little bit too far -

WOLF: I see what you’re getting at.

GH: - -on the strength and the variability of geological forces in a small area, and it catches in my throat. I find that I can’t, I just can’t buy it.

WOLF: Okay. I would ask you to have a look into new or even older geological and geographical literature. You’ll find all these things precisely described in newly published literature and -

GH: Nowhere in the world - never mind the literature, books are books - but nowhere in the world, not a single place in the world will I find all these things together because one thing’s for sure, look at the publicity that this structure has attracted.

WOLF: Because you raised it.

GH: Actually, not me it was -

WOLF: Together with others.

GH: -many other people Worldwide it has attracted an enormous amount of publicity. I think it’s a fair bet that if something comparable had been found, anywhere else on this planet of ours with it’s 70% cover by water, if something similar had been found, we would have heard about it by now. And it’s the uniqueness of this structure and the series of structures along the south and east coasts of Yonaguni, that really leads me towards the involvement of man. Now I believe that the people who were involved in this, were a megalithic culture, they understood rock, and they worked just as currents and erosive forces do, that is they worked with the natural strike of the rock; where there is a fault, it’s a good place, let’s take advantage of it. Any great sculptor still looks for the natural forms in rock and, indeed, this is an art form in Japan up to this day. So, you know, these are all the factors that lead me to the conclusion that I’m looking at rock that has been overworked by people.

WOLF: And I would say, on the contrary, that it is a natural miracle. And just to finish that, my definite point of view is that all that we have seen in the last days could have been made by nature alone without the help of man. That does not mean that people did not have any influence on it. I didn’t say that I would never say that. But I say it can have been shaped by nature alone.

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Other Miracles


There are several other intriguing sites around Yonaguni that I was not able to show Wolf in the time available to us in March 2001 -- though I do not think any of them would have changed his mind.

One of these, which takes a form that some recognize as a huge rock-hewn sea-turtle (click image left), stands at a depth of 12 meters on the shoulder of the main monument at Iseki Point approximately 150 meters east of the terraces.

A second, badly damaged when Yonaguni was struck by an unusually severe series of typhoons in August and September 2001,(18) is found half a kilometer due east of the terraces in about 15
meters of water. Consisting of a one-ton boulder mounted on a 10-centimetre-high flat platform (click image right) at the apex of an enormous rocky slab almost three meters high, it has all the characteristics of a classic iwakura shrine, part natural rock, part man-made. As I noted in Chapter 25, if this shrine were to be moved to the slopes of Mount Miwa it would blend in seamlessly with what is already there.

Two other anomalous sites are located within half a kilometer of Iseki Point, that I would also very much have liked Wolf to see. One is the extraordinary “Stadium”, a vast amphitheatre surrounding a stone plain at a depth of 30 meters. The other is a second area of very large steps - on a similar scale and of a similar appearance to those of the main terrace at Iseki Point - but much further out to sea, in deeper water, and at the bottom of a protected channel.

Nor does the list of signs and wonders end here, but I think the point has been sufficiently made. Some people with good minds -- amongst them Japanese scientists with PhD’s -- are adamant that what they see underwater at Yonaguni are rock-hewn structures that have been worked upon by humans and purposefully arranged. Others with equally good minds and equally good PhD’s are equally adamant that they see no rock-hewn structures underwater at Yonaguni at all -- only rocks.

Rocks? Or structures? Just interesting geology? Or discoveries that could fix the true origins of Japanese civilization as far back in the Age of the Gods as the Nihongi and the Kojiki themselves claim?

These are grave questions and they cannot be answered at Yonaguni on the basis of available evidence. Wolf is right about that. It is just possible that the remarkable structures and objects that I showed him there underwater are all freaks of nature, which by some amazing additional improbability all happen to be gathered together in one place.

I don’t think that is what they are. And I repeat that the balance of first-hand scientific opinion is, at time of writing, two-to-one against Wichmann in this matter (Kimura and Sundaresh provide two clear votes for the structures having been overworked by man, Wichmann provides one clear vote in favor of the structures being entirely natural; Professor Schoch votes both ways).

In the future other discoveries, and other diving scientists, could alter this balance of opinion dramatically in either direction. But we shall have to wait and see. Meanwhile, after a thorough exposure on-site to Wolf Wichmann’s relentless empiricism I concede that I am not yet in a position to prove that humans were involved in the creation of the Yonaguni structures - any more than Wolf can prove, as he admits, that they were not.

But I believe Wolf came to his conclusions about Yonaguni sincerely, not too hastily, and on the basis of his own vast experience as a marine geologist of how different kinds of rock behave underwater. Although I disagree with him, I therefore resolved as we left the island in March 2001 that I would not base any argument or any claim in “Underworld” on the copious evidence which suggests that the submerged structures of Yonaguni are indeed ancient rock-hewn human sites. In this chapter I have simply tried to marshal and present that evidence, and Wolf’s purposeful and eloquent counter views, as clearly and as objectively as possible, as a matter of public record.

But suppose for a moment - an exercise in speculation only -- that I and others are right about Yonaguni.

If so, then what Japan has lost to the rising seas is no small or insignificant matter but a defining episode in world prehistory going back more than 10,000 years. For if the Jomon did make the great structures that were submerged off the south and east coasts of Yonaguni at the end of the Ice Age then we are confronted by a previously unexpected and as yet completely unexplained dimension of that increasingly remarkable ancient culture. In terms of organization, effort, engineering and ambition, the sheer scale of the enterprise is beyond anything that the Jomon of 10,000 or 12,000 years ago (or any other human culture of that epoch) are thought to have been capable of. Yet it makes a strange kind of sense in context of the other incongruous characteristics of these strange “hunter-gatherers” - their permanent settlements, their stone circles, their cultivation of rice, and their navigational and maritime achievements in two different waves of settlement of the Americas (one as early as 15,000 years ago, one more like 5000 years ago).

Wolf and I had just one more day of diving to do after Yonaguni, just one more day for me to find him a major structure in Japanese waters that he could not come up with a natural explanation for. For that adventure, and test, I had chosen the great stone circles at Kerama.
 

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References

1.-   Points 1-8 cited verbatim from Kimura, Diving Survey Report for Submarine Ruins off Japan, page 178

2.-   Points 9-12, discussions with Prof Kimura cited in Heaven’s Mirror, pages 216-217

3.-   See his contribution to my 1998 television series Quest for the Lost Civilization

4.-   See Heaven’s Mirror, 215-216

5.-   See Heaven’s Mirror, 217

6.-   BBC2 Horizon, 4 Nov 1999

7.-   Schoch, Voices of the Rocks op.cit., 111-112

8.-   See Schoch, Voices of the Rocks, 112-113; Hancock and Faiia, Heaven’s Mirror, 217-221

9.-   Schoch, Voices of the Rocks, 112

10.- See discussion in Heaven’s Mirror

11.- Der Spiegel, 34/1999

12.- Der Spiegel, 34/1999

13.- www.grahamhancock.com, Articles

14.- Interviewed by Tim Copestake for Underworld television series
15.- TBS
16.- TBS
17.- Sundaresh report, see above
18.- The boulder was rolled to the side, half on and half off the platform