Mausoleum of Emperor Nintoku

photo by Sakai Yayoi · CC0

photo by kisaragi · CC BY-SA 3.0

486 metres of mound and three moats, and from the ground you cannot see its shape.

The outer circuit is 2.8 kilometres, and the whole way round you have only woodland and water beside you: from the ground you cannot make out the keyhole outline. You can see it from above from the twenty-first floor of Sakai City Hall, at eighty metres, where the viewing gallery is free and stays open until nine in the evening. Nobody goes inside.

The largest burial mound in Japan: 486 metres long, 249 in diameter across the round part, 35.8 metres high, with the trapezoidal part 307 wide. It is enclosed by three concentric moats, and around it there are more than ten smaller mounds. On 6 July 2019, at the forty-third session of the committee, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the kofun (the burial mounds of the rulers) of Mozu and Furuichi.

ℹ️ You cannot go in: it can only be seen from outside, and the place of worship is the haisho on the south side. To understand its shape it is worth going up to MI-TE Sakai, the viewing gallery on the 21st floor of the city hall: 9:00–21:00, free, open every day except during the building's scheduled blackouts, five minutes on foot from Sakai-higashi Station on the Nankai Kōya.

🚉 Mozu · 7 min walk

Sources: city.sakai.lg.jp · city.fujiidera.lg.jp · sakai-tcb.or.jp

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