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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 Yonaguni
“underworld”.
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.
Go
Back
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.
Go
Back
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.
Go
Back
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
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