"Asuka-Fujiwara" was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2026. We list all 19 component sites with their locations and highlights at a glance, and suggest a classic walk from Asuka Station, half-day routes for three areas, a walk into Oku-Asuka, and one- and two-day routes that cover them all.
Asuka is not only the village in Nara. Around Habikino and Taishi in Osaka Prefecture there is another Asuka, known in ancient times as Chikatsu Asuka, "Near Asuka". The Asuka in Yamato was Tōtsu Asuka, "Far Asuka". Near and far from where?
The Twelve Cap Ranks, the Seventeen-Article Constitution, the embassies to Sui China: Prince Shōtoku, familiar from every Japanese textbook, is said to have been born at Tachibana-dera in Asuka. We follow his life as the Nihon Shoki tells it, and look at how the name "Shōtoku Taishi" came about.
Empress Jitō's poem about Mount Kagu begins "Spring has passed, and summer seems to have come." It is loved as a poem about early-summer scenery, but there is also a reading that sees the empress's own ambition in it.
As the empress who completed the ritsuryō state (a state governed by law codes), she is usually spoken of in the same breath as her husband, Emperor Tenmu. But she was also Emperor Tenchi's daughter. This column considers whether the sense of carrying on her father's legacy may have been the stronger one.
In ancient Japan the throne often passed from elder brother to younger. One attempt to draw a line from father to son failed. The one who made it stick the second time was Empress Jitō.
Kashihara, where Emperor Jinmu was enthroned, is now placed at the foot of Mt Unebi in Kashihara City. But the same tradition also survives in another Kashihara, in Gose City.
From Makimuku at the foot of Mt Miwa, by way of Iware, to Asuka: the seat of royal power moved south across a distance of about ten kilometres.