What Is The Yonaguni Monument? | Japan's Underwater Pyramid | Unveiled

What Is the Yonaguni Monument?

Kihachiro Aratake was diving off the coast of Yonaguni Island in Japan, looking for hammerhead sharks in the 1980s, when he made an unprecedented discovery. He found a vast underwater structure made of large, flat terraces and strange rock formations, only sixteen feet beneath the ocean’s surface at its tallest point. Until then, it had been undiscovered… now it’s one of the world’s most captivating mysteries.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what is the Yonaguni Monument?

At first glance, the Yonaguni Monument looks as though it must have been built by human hands. It has steps, columns, roads… even sculptures and drawings – or hieroglyphs – on the walls. Some even argue that it shows the remnants of an ancient stadium. Dating the site has been subject to debate… but according to one marine geologist and dive expedition leader, Masaaki Kimura, it was probably constructed between two thousand and five thousand years ago - to coincide with the last time that the land it’s on was above sea level - before it was sunk by an earthquake. Nicknamed the “Japanese Atlantis”, the Yonaguni Monument – which is 165 feet long and 65 feet wide – is now thought by many to be a remnant of an ancient culture, in some ways similar to Stonehenge. But, what exactly could this lost culture be?

Well, it may be a magnet for Atlantis theories, but Atlantis isn’t the only lost city or even lost continent out there in the world. The lost continents of Lemuria and Mu, for example, are said by some to exist beneath the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At one time, it was proposed that Lemuria was once a sweeping land bridge enabling animal species to migrate out from Africa… specifically explaining how lemurs (hence the name) could seemingly be found in both Madagascar and India despite such a large ocean between them.

Ideas on Lemuria are now very outdated, but they did once serve as a genuine scientific theory on migration. Mu, though, has an even more contentious past, with little to no scientific thinking on “where it should be” or “why it should be there”. Today, it’s widely billed as the product of nineteenth century pseudoscience… but in the eyes of some it’s another Atlantis candidate, and the Yonaguni Monument is evidence that Mu did once exist. For Mu hunters, Japan’s underwater pyramid could be a relic of an ancient civilization, and there could be more sites just like it all over the ocean. The idea of “lost continents” isn’t without precedent in this part of the world, at least, with Zealandia (home to the New Zealand archipelago) representing a significant chunk of the Earth’s crust almost entirely submerged by the Pacific over millions of years.

But is the Yonaguni Monument really evidence of an ancient and long-lost entire civilization somewhere off the coast of Southeast Asia? Though Masaaki Kimura brings some credibility to his side of the debate, there’s mounting opposition to his ideas; with various claims that the monument isn’t a monument at all. The relevant Japanese authorities, for example, appear to completely disagree with Kimura, seeing as the supposed pyramid is not a protected site and no preservation has been carried out. For them, and for many others, this underwater wonder is just a natural, if quirky, rock formation. As intriguing as it is, it wasn’t built by humans.

There is plenty of evidence to this end, as well. The Yonaguni Monument isn’t made of separate, carved bricks, for one thing; the terraces, sculptures, roads and so on, are all part of seemingly solid stretches of mud and sandstone, some dating back as far as twenty million years ago - way beyond Kimura’s predicted timeline. For the increasing numbers of Yonaguni sceptics, then, these strange structures and apparently geometric shapes are nothing more than an interesting geological feature, formed by the strong currents around Yonaguni Island. And the suggested “hieroglyphs” - the pictures on the walls - are just scratches. Quite how the sea has worked the monument into such an unusual shape is still very much up for debate, though.

What we do know is that water is definitely capable of morphing a landscape in all kinds of astonishing ways. Coastal erosion, for example, is one factor in why continents and landmasses irrevocably change size and shape over long periods of time… while incredible, natural landmarks like the Grand Canyon were also carved by water. Elsewhere, there’s the Bimini Road formation in the Bahamas, created by naturally forming limestone deposits… and one of the most famous and distinctive rock formations in the world, the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, is made up of hexagonal basalt columns. Legend says that when an Irish giant was challenged to fight a Scottish giant, he built the Causeway to cross the sea and do battle. But these columns aren’t actually wholly unique to this particular place on the map; rock features like them form all over the world and, incredibly, even on Mars, in this case as a result of lava flows. So, any number of natural processes could have contributed to the Yonaguni Monument, too.

But none of this is to say that unexplained man-made structures don’t sometimes appear underwater; they do. USOs, or Unidentified Submerged Objects, conjure a little less mystique than their airborne counterparts, perhaps, but they’re no less mysterious when they’re discovered. Some USO stories double up as alien myths – inspired by uncanny sightings of anomalous, dark masses moving underwater – but others turn out to be the uncovering of genuine historical artefacts. The Pantelleria Vecchia Bank Megalith, for example, is an enormous Stonehenge-style rock, found in the Sicily Channel in 2015. Though the stone itself is thought to be forty thousand years old, it’s believed to have been placed there roughly ten thousand years ago, the last time the Sicily Channel was above water… Atlit Yam is another especially notable underwater monument; a Neolithic stone circle and village off the coast of Israel, which is at least 8,300 years old. Both are evidence of ancient humans living in regions that have long since been submerged… and for one side of the Yonaguni Monument debate, it’s impossible to rule out that the same might’ve happened off the coast of Japan.

At present, the general scientific consensus is that it’s a natural rock formation, but what do you think? In either case, man made marvel or natural wonder, the Yonaguni Monument is an incredible thing!