Two holes cut into an 800-tonne boulder, a slab carved with circles and channels, a turtle with a face, statues with faces on both sides: in Asuka, stones whose purpose no one knows still lie scattered among the fields and hills. We tour them, sorted into mysteries solved, half-solved, and still completely open.
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?
Almost every achievement of Prince Shōtoku comes with the name of Soga no Umako beside it. What if the man really running the country was Umako, and the image of the prince was built from Umako's deeds? We introduce the evidence for this theory and the arguments against it.
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.
Nukata no Ōkimi had a daughter with Prince Ōama and is thought to have later gone over to Emperor Tenchi. In the poems the two exchanged at Gamōno, did her lingering feelings for Ōama show through? Here is the theory that reads them that way.
In the Kamakura period (1185–1333), lightning set Asuka-dera Temple ablaze. All that survived, the records say, were "the Buddha's head and hands." Yet X-ray surveys in 2012 and 2016 tell different stories about that same Buddha.
From the Asuka Daibutsu to the Yakushi Triad of Yakushi-ji Temple took about a hundred years. Over that century the faces of Buddhist statues changed dramatically, depending on who commissioned them and on contact with lands across the sea.
In 679 Emperor Tenmu made six princes swear at Yoshino never to fight one another. It is well known that the oath was not kept. But follow each of them in turn and you find that the story does not end with killing alone.