Underwater Pyramids

~After the August festival, I have a week of vacation. The question is, what to do, what to do? So far, there are two things that I'd like to do during my vacation: first, I'd like to climb to the top of Mount Fuji and see the sun rise, and second, I want to get in some scuba diving.

Japan is not exactly the first place that comes to mind in the world's top diving destinations. Thanks to ocean currents, the surrounding waters are quite cold. They're also populated by a variety of dangerous marine lifeforms.

However, there are a few good places to go diving. The first one I've found is Sado, the nearby island that I visited a couple of months ago. The second place, which would be even better, is Okinawa, a chain of small islands south of the four main Japanese islands. Okinawa is mostly known for "hosting" tens of thousands of American marines, and the island inhabitants who do everything they can to get rid of them. But off the coast of one island in the Okinawa chain, there is a dive site that ranks among the most incredible and interesting on the entire planet. I refer, of course, to the legendary underwater pyramid of Okinawa.

What's that? You mean to tell me that you've never even heard that there's a gigantic stone pyramid submerged in the ocean near Japan? To be honest, I'm not surprised; strangely, very few people have heard of this fascinating discovery. In this post, I aim to rectify that and enlighten you regarding the pyramid, regardless of whether or not I actually go diving there.

There are eight recorded 'anomalous' underwater sites around Okinawa, making it one of the more interesting places in the world for underwater archaeology. Off of Yonaguni Island, the farthest-south island in the Okinawa chain, lies the pyramid. An enigmatic structure first discovered by local divers in 1985, it measures ~131 x 394 feet, located in water ranging from 60 to 100 feet deep.


There are natural formations in the world that seem to be artificial, but there is a strong case that this structure and the other sites around Okinawa are man-made. Since 1997, systematic research on this site and others has been carried out by the University of the Ryukus under the direction of geology Professor Masaaki Kimura. It shows definite presence of human alteration, including the presence of drilled holes, carved lines, and even a road encircling the structure.

Conservative estimates (don't let that term scare you, Dan!) of the site's age run from 6,000 to 10,000 years old. By comparison, most Egyptian pyramids were constructed during the Old Kingdom, around 3,500 years ago, and the oldest reliably-dated stone structures are located in Malta, and are around 5,000 years old.

So why haven't people in America heard of this? After the university research of the site began in 1997, the pyramid became HUGE news in Japan, and provided regular front-page headlines for upwards of a year before interest died off. BBC News and The London Times ran cover stories. Strangely, the only report of this discovery in the United States was a single obscure report on CNN. I guess massive archaeological discoveries that could potentially rewrite the history of human civilization just can't compete with the latest celebrity gossip and ongoing Presidential efforts to veto stem-cell research.

I'd really like to dive this site for myself. If anyone is up for a (presumably) once-in-a-lifetime adventure to see ancient megalithic structures on the other side of the planet, please drop me a line. My vacation starts in the second week of August! ~Oyasumi.