Stuff 	[Aug. 9th, 2007|12:29 pm]
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[	Tags	|	history, japan, travel	]
[	mood 	|	accomplished	]
[	music 	|	Vangelis - Heaven and Hell	]

Look at a map of East Asia and you'll see a loooong string of islands stretching down from Japan to Taiwan. The very last of these, within sight of Taiwan but still Japanese territory, is Yonaguni-jima, size 5 miles, population <2000. Its name means "hard to reach", and it took two plane changes to get to. As my flight landed, it scared off a herd of wild mini-horses grazing near the runway.

When I arrived at my hotel, around noon, I was directed to a person who spoke no English at all. He directed me to someone who spoke a little more English, who directed me to someone who almost, but not quite, spoke English. She explained that the dive boat had left for the day, and wouldn't I please take advantage of some of Yonaguni's land-based tourist attractions? There turned out to be two of these: Japan's Westernmost Point, and the World's Largest Moth. I chose to see the world's largest moth. It was pretty big.

At dinner, I met Daisuke and Chikara, the two other divers staying at the hotel. They were both from Tokyo. Daisuke was a doctor, Chikara (whose name, he proudly told me, meant "power" in Japanese) was a publisher. They wanted to know if I was there for the kaitei iseki. After some dictionary-checking and hand gestures I discovered, to my excitement, that kaitei iseki meant "underwater ruins". I told them I was.

Daisuke and Chikara turned out to be linked in some way to the lost continent of Mu. Maybe they were researching it, or had read a book about it; it was hard for me to understand. They thought that the kaitei iseki might hold some sort of clues. They were excited to meet a foreigner who had heard of the ruins, even as a vague rumor. They said that although many Japanese people had heard about them, for some reason the foreign media had never picked up the story. However, although all of the information on the ruins was in Japanese, there was one book that had a ten page English supplement, and I could find it at a restaurant there in Yonaguni. I resolved to track the book down.

The next day, we met Rui. Rui was our diving guide. He looked about twenty-five, and spoke English quite well, although sort of oddly. "I liking sea turtles," Rui said, as he was briefing us for our dive. "Some people saying, not to touch sea turtles. But I thinking, good to touch sea turtles. Touching them. Loving them. Like you would a woman." I can't blame him for being a little strange, as he'd been stuck on that little island for three years. But he was one heck of a good diver.

"Today," Rui told us, "Ruins no dive. Wind so strong. F**king current dangerous. Today we dive coral reef. See so many fishes. Maybe turtle. Tomorrow, wind not so strong. F**king current okay. Tomorrow we dive ruins."

So we dove in the coral reef. We saw lots of fishes and a turtle. Rui tried to touch the turtle, but it got away from him. The next day, we gathered on Rui's boat again.

"Today," Rui told us, "again wind still so strong. F**king current still dangerous. We not dive ruins. We dive rock arch. Maybe see barracuda. Tomorrow, wind okay. Tomorrow, we dive ruins."

So we dove the rock arch. We didn't see any barracuda.

That night, Daisuke and Chikara talked to me. They'd been here a bit longer than I had, and every day the wind had been too strong, or the current too dangerous. They were going to fly back the next day, and they were worried they wouldn't get to see the ruins at all. They were going to get a glass-bottom boat to go out there. Did I want to come? It seemed like a bit of a waste to have spent so much time and money getting scuba-certified if I could just get a glass-bottom boat, but yes I did.

So we went on a glass-bottom boat which Daisuke and Chikara had somehow procured. We went all the way around the island to a point just offshore from a steep cliff, where Daisuke and Chikara said the kaitei iseki were supposed to be. Then we looked out the glass bottom. But the ocean was deep, and the sea was choppy, and we couldn't really see anything. There were certain dark blotches that looked like geometric forms, or very odd rocks, but that was all. Disappointed, we went back to the harbor. Daisuke and Chikara left to catch their flight out, and I hung around and moped a bit...

...and then I saw Rui. He was waving from his boat. "Scott! Right now, wind okay! F**king current okay! But soon, big typhoon come. Dive impossible. Right now, go to ruins!"

So I jumped on the boat, where Rui had already brought all my diving gear, and we went right back to the point we had just came from, offshore from the steep cliff. Rui was briefing me about depth and current direction and residual nitrogen levels and stuff, and I was completely not listening because I was too excited. Finally the briefing was over, we put our scuba gear on, and we jumped in.

It was deep, about sixty feet. Rui and I fell through the water to the bottom of a plain surrounded by rocks and small hills. (I'm using the term "rocks" and "hills" here, although the underwater landscape is kind of different from the abovewater landscape and they were really more rocky-hilly-things). Rui swam in the direction of two of the rocks, pretty similar to all the other rocks, and I followed him. He pointed to the gap between the two.

In between the two rocks there was a gate.

We swam through the gate. On the other side was a stairway, leading up and behind the rocks. We followed the stairway. The stairway continued up some generally rocky terrain that I didn't get a good feeling for because my sense of direction goes haywire underwater wearing that scuba mask. Eventually we came out on a broad, flat rocky surface. Rui pointed behind me, and I looked.

I was sitting on the lower levels of a huge pyramid.

Not a classical Egyptian pyramid. Sort of like the step pyramids of central America, or the Mesopotamian ziggurats. But it really wasn't even a good step pyramid. Instead of a simple pointy up-down affair, there were lots of different terraces, some big, some small, some at angles to each other, and it never made it to a very good sharp top at all. Maybe you've seen those "don't do drugs" posters where they have a picture of a normal spider's web, and then the web of a spider on LSD. All chaotic and screwy. If one of those drugged spiders had built a pyramid, it would have looked like this.

The pyramid hadn't been built of stone bricks. It had been carved directly out of the side of a hill. Really only most of the hill had been finished; the a small part still just looked like a normal hill. The hill sort of faded into the pyramid so that it was difficult to tell where one of them ended and the other began. The whole structure was covered with coral, which didn't make it any clearer. There was a wide band around the pyramid with much less rocky debris than the ocean around it, like it might have once been a road. There was another bit with a lot of rocks somewhat more piled up than usual that looked like it might have once been a wall.

There were three staircases leading up the pyramid, each at an odd angle. One of them went from the bottom to the top. The others led nowhere, and anyone trying to walk on them would have eventually fallen twenty or thirty feet, probably to his or her death. The stairs of the staircases were of wildly varying size. Some of them were so small that you could only barely be sure they were there. Others were the size of a person; these had little steps on the side to get people to the top of the big step.

Leaning up against one of the larger terraces of the pyramids were two big rectangular blocks of stone, about twice as tall as a person. They didn't seem to have any reason for being there. Many small holes had been drilled partway through the bottom parts of the blocks. There were also several lines drawn straight across the entire terraces from side to side.

The top terrace of the pyramid was very wide and mostly flat. On one end was a basin, maybe intended as a pool. On another was a big flat stone supported by some smaller stones. Facing the stones was a more intricately carved bit protruding from the pyramid that looked like it was supposed to represent something. It wasn't really clear what. I would have guessed a five-pointed star, but Rui later said it looked like a swimming turtle, and I could kind of see that too.

There was no context whatsoever. It was just there. There was the pyramid, then the road-y bit, then the wall-y bit, and then just a lot of rocks and hills ocean and fish. One of the nearby hills looked like somewhat might have just started carving it into a pyramid, but stopped before it could really get anywhere. Everything was covered with coral and it was hard to tell.

I was swimming away from the main pyramid to the rock that looked like a beginning-stage pyramid when my air began to run low and Rui gave the signal to surface. When we surfaced, it had become pretty windy and Rui insisted that we spend the afternoon dive looking for barracuda.

I finally found the book the Daisuke and Chikara had mentioned. Only ten pages or so were in English, a special supplement the author had arranged to spread the information to foreigners. But the ten pages were pretty informative.

The kaitei iseki had first been discovered by the guy who used to own Rui's diving shop, back in the 1980s. He'd had a difficult time convincing anyone to take him seriously, but finally he got a Masaki Kimura, Professor of Archaeology at Ryukyu University to come out and take a look. Professor Kimura pronounced them authentic and launched a several-year program of studying the site (Professor Kimura was also the author of the book I was reading).

He'd dated the corals growing on the pyramid and found the oldest to be about 10,000 years old, which he took to be the date it had been submerged. He'd also found some evidence of carbon from fires and dated that too, getting a similar result. According to geologists, a bit before 10,000 years ago was the Ice Age and the sea level was much lower. Pretty much the entire area that's now the Ryukyu island seabed, include the location of the pyramid, would have been above water.

The book then went into the opinions of several geologists who had been to the site. They said that under certain conditions, hills in the shapes of terraced pyramids with staircases could form naturally, and that these conditions were present in Yonaguni. They pointed out that Yonaguni had lots of weird rocks, some of which looked a bit like the pyramid. The...eccentricities...of the structure, like the staircases to nowhere, would make much more sense if it was a natural object. The "gate" could be rocks fallen into the shape of a gate. The staircase could have been the same process that formed the pyramid, only in miniature. These geologists were all highly credentialled and sounded pretty convincing.

Then the supplement got into Professor Kimura's refutation of these geologists. First he cited different geologists, who said no, this definitely wouldn't happen naturally. Then he talked about the results of his archaeological studies. First, of course, there was the big turtle statue, which he said was supposed to be guarding the big flat stone, which was supposed to be a grave. Then there was another statue he had found nearby, this one a human face resembling the moai of Easter Island. Then there was a stone with inscriptions on it. There were post-holes (holes you use to stick wooden posts in) at various spots where people might stick wooden posts. The lines I had seen on the middle terrace were less than one degree off from being perfectly east-west, which was the sort of thing primitive cultures liked to do to show off their knowledge of astronomy. There was some carbon that suggested people had built fires on the site. That sort of thing. He sounded pretty convincing too.

There was a picture of the stone that looked very familiar, so I went down to Rui's dive shop, and sure enough the stone was sitting in a glass case there. The guy who owned the shop before Rui had found it. It wasn't writing. Just a plus mark and a dot. But it was obviously not natural, which was the important thing. The stone had two holes in it, and Rui thought maybe someone had once hung it from a string for some reason.

I made it out of there the next morning, just before the typhoon that Rui warned me about arrived. I think mine was the last flight out. I wouldn't be surprised if the island's airport, which was sort of a shack and had a plaque with a picture of a cow in front of it, blew away later. Maybe I was the last person to ever leave Yonaguni. That is a sobering thought.

I still don't know what to make of the kaitei iseki. The pyramid sure looked like a lot like a pyramid. But the geologists have good points, and a lot of things that look very unnatural can be made by natural forces, like the Giant's Causeway or the Face on Mars or that sort of thing. I would hate to go out and say they're wrong when I know so little geology and when the alternative is so unlikely. Maybe once I get some pictures up theophilosophy or someone else in the field can try to explain the geology behind it to me.

But in the end, I think I believe Professor Kimura. Maybe it's just a personal choice. When I see something really amazing, something that would be impossibly mind-boggling, I want to believe that it's true. I know people who feel the opposite way, who want to automatically assume that it's false and be nice and skeptical about the whole thing, and we need people like that, but I am not one of them. The inscriptions, and the turtle statue, and the east-west lines are all pretty convincing even without the pyramid.

And I don't think it's so impossible that someone was building pyramids ten thousand years ago. We know there were humans in that area; there've been prehistoric Japanese and Chinese tools dated back to 10,000 BC. We know the area was above water back then. And although as far as we know the Egyptians and Sumerians were the first to go on big monument-building sprees back in the 3000s BC, there's no real reason why someone else couldn't have had the same idea earlier. It would take some explaining, do weird things to the chronologies, but it's not impossible. It's not even that unlikely. Nothing at Yonaguni gave me the sense that these were typical movie-style Atlanteans with crystal-powered airships. They were just some people who put a lot of work into building really big things out of stone, and then got submerged by water.

But still. Ten thousand years ago. That's older than everything. That doubles the length of human history. I feel privileged to have been able to been there, to have touched it.

I'm still working on scanning and uploading photos, but here is one just to prove I'm not making the whole thing up. That's me in the picture; Rui took it with my cheap underwater camera so it's not very clear, but it's the best I've got: