The Orientation of Kofun Tombs According to Saito Tadashi

Saito Tadashi was a Japanese archaeologist and professor at Taisho University. He was born in 1908 in Hokkaido. After high schools, he started his studies at the Department of Japanese History of Tokyo University. Of 1932 it is his bachelor dissertation on Japanese ancient mortuary practices. From 1933 to 1940, he undertook surveys and excavations in the Korean Peninsula. After returning to Japan, Saito Tadashi worked in the Ministry of Education and Culture for more than a quarter century (1940–1966), conducting cultural heritage surveying of archaeological sites. In particular, he surveyed the orientation of many keyhole kofun. Japanese kofun are ancient burial mounds mainly constructed between the middle of the third century to the early seventh century CE. The term “kofun”, which means “ancient tomb”, is also used to indicate a period in the history of Japan, from about 300 AD to 538 AD, which is the year of the official introduction of Buddhism in the archipelago. The larger kofun have a very distinctive shape and are usually defined as keyhole-shaped mounds. The Japanese term is zempō-kōen fun, which means “square in the front and round in the rear”, according to the geometric layout of the two mounds composing the kofun. About kofun and their orientation, a large literature in Japanese exists. Of this literature we will stress the studies by Saito Tadashi. Regarding the orientation, let us note that the front of the kofun is the square part of it, as the name zempō-kōen fun is indicating, and that the direction of orientation is the direction which is facing the front of the kofun. Then, the orientation of the largest Japanese kofun, the Daisenryo kofun, is south-southwest. And in fact, there we find the Torii Gate. Considering the results of the studies by Saito Tadashi in 1950s, who looked at the orientation of 394 tombs of the Early and Middle Kofun periods (3rd to 5th centuries), we can see that many of them are facing the south and west directions. We will stress also the fact that there are two periods regarding the kofun burial chambers. In the first period we find vertical pits from the top of the mound to the burial chambers. In the second period, we find horizontal passage corridors. Therefore, the claim of a supposed orientation of kofun facing the arc of rising/shining sun, - that is, the orientation of their passage corridors to rising/shining sun (whatever it means) - is wrong because it is based on a supposed ubiquitous presence of a passage corridor which is not true. As we can find in literature, the orientation is given by the front side of the zempō-kōen fun, “square front, round rear”.