Yonaguni Monument: The Japanese Atlantis
About 25 meters beneath the waters off Japan lies a stepped pyramid. We don’t know who built it, or when; but there it is, plain as day, available for anyone to go down and inspect. Even now at this very minute, the current washes past sharply squared stone blocks standing dark and forbidding, rising nearly high enough to break the surface. It is called the Yonaguni Monument.
The Japanese archipelago stretches for nearly 4,000 kilometers, from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to the island of Taiwain, off the coast of mainland China. At its extreme southwestern tip is the small island of Yonaguni, Japan’s most western point, just a scant 100 kilometers from Taiwan. It’s quite small, less than thirty square kilometers, with only 1700 residents, but it’s famous for something found in its waters: Hammerhead sharks.
Lots of hammerhead sharks. They’re so ubiquitous that divers come from all over the world to swim with them. And wherever you have a lot of divers, things under the water tend to be found. And that’s just what happened in 1986, when a representative from the Yonaguni tourism board was out exploring off the southernmost tip of the island, looking for a hammerhead diving spot to promote. What he came across was not what he set out to look for, though.
As you’re probably aware, Japan is in a region of great tectonic instability, the Pacific Ring of Fire. It lies just beside the convergence of the Pacific Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, and as a result, it’s home to ten percent of the world’s active volcanoes.