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The Yayoi period, roughly 300 BCE to 250 CE, brought wet-rice farming, bronze and iron from the Asian mainland, and the first walled settlements with clear differences in wealth between households. Chinese chronicles describe a queen named Himiko ruling a country called Yamatai somewhere in the archipelago in the third century.
The shift from Jomon to Yayoi society is where the deeper change happened, from foraging to farming. The Kofun period is what came out the other side, once farming surpluses could support rulers powerful enough to be buried under hills.
c. 250 to 400: Early phase. The first large keyhole tombs appear in the Nara basin, Hashihaka among them. Grave goods are ritual items, especially bronze mirrors imported from China.
c. 400 to 500: Middle phase. The tombs move west to the Osaka plain and reach their maximum size, including Daisen Kofun. Grave goods turn military: iron armor, swords, and horse gear, reflecting close contact with the Korean peninsula.
c. 500 to 538: Late phase. Huge tombs stop being built. Burial shifts to clusters of smaller chambered tombs for a wider elite, and the political energy moves toward a centralized court.
The period ends by convention in 538, the traditional date for Buddhism's arrival from the Korean kingdom of Baekje. Temples replaced tombs as the way rulers spent surplus, which is about as clean a break as ancient history offers.
Daisen Kofun in Sakai, south of Osaka, is the largest tomb in Japan. The mound is 486 meters long and about 35 meters high, ringed by three moats that bring the whole enclosure to roughly 840 meters. By area covered it is larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza or the mausoleum of China's first emperor.
The Imperial Household Agency administers it as the resting place of Emperor Nintoku and does not permit excavation, so the attribution rests on tradition rather than evidence. Archaeologists generally date the mound to the early fifth century, later than Nintoku's traditional reign.
In 2019 UNESCO inscribed the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group, 49 tombs in two clusters, as a World Heritage Site. The Mozu cluster sits in Sakai, and the Furuichi cluster straddles Habikino and Fujiidera.
The tombs themselves are closed, and from ground level Daisen Kofun reads as a tree-covered embankment behind water. Height is what makes it legible.
Getting there: Mozu Station on the JR Hanwa Line. From Tennoji, take a rapid train to Sakaishi then a local train to Mozu, about 11 minutes and ¥240, covered by the Japan Rail Pass
Sakai City Hall observation lobby: 21st floor, free, open 9:00 to 19:00, about a kilometer from the tomb and the best free view
Sakai City Museum: ¥200, 9:30 to 17:15 with last entry at 16:30, closed Mondays, holding excavated artifacts and a good haniwa collection
Daisen Park: free, and you can walk right up to several of the smaller satellite tombs
Haniwa are unglazed terracotta cylinders and figures set into the surface of a kofun, usually in rows along the terraces. The earliest are plain tubes, probably used to hold the soil in place on the slopes. Later ones take the shape of houses, boats, shields, horses in full harness, falconers, armored warriors, shrine maidens and dancers with their arms raised.
Because they show clothing, hairstyles, armor and buildings that have otherwise rotted away, haniwa are the best visual record of the period. A warrior haniwa tells you what fifth-century Japanese armor looked like down to the lacing.
They are hollow, fired at low temperature, and made in sections, which is why so many survive in fragments and why museums have so many of them.
Early tombs held bronze mirrors, jasper bracelets and comma-shaped magatama beads, the ritual kit of a chief who ruled partly through religious authority. By the fifth century the contents change: iron cuirasses and helmets, long swords, arrowheads, and gilt-bronze horse trappings.
That shift matters. Horses were not native to Japan, and the sudden appearance of full riding equipment points to heavy traffic with the Korean peninsula. Along with it came Sueki pottery, hard gray stoneware thrown on a wheel and fired in sloped kilns at high heat, a Korean technology that arrived in the mid-fifth century and pushed aside the older low-fired earthenware.
The most important object from any kofun was pulled out of a mound in Gyoda, Saitama Prefecture, in 1968 and only read properly a decade later when it was X-rayed.
The Inariyama sword carries 115 characters inlaid in gold on both sides of the blade. The text gives a date corresponding to 471, names the man who commissioned it, lists eight generations of his ancestors, and says he served a great king named Wakatakeru at a place called Shiki. Wakatakeru is identifiable with the ruler Chinese records call Bu and the chronicles call Emperor Yuryaku.
That single blade confirms that the Yamato court's authority reached the Kanto plain by the late fifth century, that Chinese characters were already being used to write in Japan, and that genealogy mattered enough to inscribe on a weapon. It is a designated National Treasure and is displayed at the prefectural museum in Sakitama Kofun Park, where entry to the park is free and the museum costs ¥200 for adults and ¥100 for students.
Ishibutai Kofun, Asuka, Nara. The mound was stripped away centuries ago, leaving the burial chamber exposed: 30 granite blocks weighing around 2,300 tons in total, with a ceiling stone of about 77 tons. You can walk inside. Admission rose to ¥500 for adults and ¥200 for students on April 1, 2026. It is usually linked to Soga no Umako, who died in 626. The Ishibutai stone chamber is the one kofun most people can actually enter.
Sakitama Kofun Park, Gyoda, Saitama. Nine large mounds in one field, including Maruhakayama, the largest round kofun in Japan. You can climb Inariyama, where the sword was found.
Yoshimi Hyakketsu, Saitama. Over 200 chambers cut into a tuff hillside in the late Kofun period, a local burial ground rather than an elite one. Open 8:30 to 17:00, ¥300 for adults and ¥200 for children.
Asuka village, Nara. Best covered by bicycle, with tombs, carved stones and the Takamatsuzuka mural tomb spread across a few kilometers of farmland. The Nara countryside by bike is how locals do it.
Miyazaki and Gunma hold large tomb clusters well outside the traditional center, a reminder that the keyhole shape spread across most of the archipelago.
Three things carried forward. The Yamato line that built the biggest tombs became the imperial house, which still occupies the throne and still controls access to these sites. Chinese writing, arriving with continental craftsmen and scribes, became the script Japan used for the next 1,500 years. And the ritual practices tied to mound burial fed into what later became Shinto, including the mirror, sword and jewel that make up the imperial regalia, all of them standard kofun grave goods.
Buddhism, arriving at the end of the period, redirected elite spending toward temples and cremation. The tomb-building stopped within a few generations, but the political structure the tombs advertised is what the Asuka and Nara courts were built on.
The literate court culture that followed produced the chronicles and, eventually, works like the Tale of Genji. The warrior class that later produced stories like the 47 ronin traces its equipment, if not its institutions, back to the armor and horse gear in these mounds.
Sakai works as a half-day from Osaka. Take the Hanwa Line to Mozu, start at the city hall observatory for the overhead view, then walk Daisen Park and the museum. Add Asuka as a full day from Nara or Osaka, ideally on a rented bicycle.
Kanto has its own cluster. Sakitama Kofun Park and Yoshimi Hyakketsu are both about 90 minutes from central Tokyo and pair into one day by car.
If you are building a broader route, a Kansai loop through Osaka and Nara already passes both tomb regions. Pottery workshops make a reasonable counterpart, since the Sueki technology introduced here is the ancestor of a lot of Japanese ceramics, and a hands-on ceramics session in Tokyo gives you the wheel technique that arrived in the fifth century.
For context on how the ancient capital region turned into the country's political heart, the same trip can take in Tokyo's older districts at the other end of the timeline, or a day of traditional experiences that connects the crafts to their origins.
