Five Mysteries of Aomori: From the ‘Center of Japan’ Stone to Misawa Air Base

From the roughly 15,000-year-old Odai Yamamoto site to an international trading port once said to have rivaled Kyoto and Hakata, the video begins its journey through Aomori as a land with an ancient history and many places that resist complete explanation.

The first clue is the ‘Center of Japan’ stone monument, reportedly found upstream on the Aka River in Tohoku Town on June 21, 1949. The narrator layers together a legend that Sakanoue no Tamuramaro carved it with an arrowhead and the story of the Tsubo no Ishibumi, a celebrated poetic place name found in the *Shin Kokin Wakashu*. During the Edo period, another monument in Miyagi was regarded as the genuine one and even visited by Matsuo Basho, but its carved inscription was later said to date from the wrong period. Strangely, near the Aomori discovery site are a settlement named Ishibumi and a place named Tsubo. If ‘Japan’ in the Heian period meant the northeastern region called Hinomoto, the words could have meant ‘the center of Hinomoto’—the theory extends that far.

The story moves to Tosaminato, said to have prospered through continental and northern trade from the 13th through the 15th centuries. A famous story that the port sank overnight in a great 1340 tsunami is rejected because its source was judged a forged document and no tsunami traces were found. Chinese ceramics and the remains of a planned city, however, are presented as evidence that the prosperity itself was real. The video then turns to the Ando clan, aligned with the Southern Court, which was driven from the port by the Nanbu clan, aligned with the Northern Court and Muromachi shogunate, in 1432 and 1442. It suggests the victors may have rewritten the record, adding a story of ‘hidden nenbutsu’ rituals secretly preserved in the domain. The vanished port thereby becomes a tale of secrecy.

Next comes Shingo, where a legend says Christ escaped to Japan and died at age 106. The video says researcher Kiku Yamane declared Mayogatai the Garden of Eden, while Katsutoki Sakai identified nearby megaliths as one of Japan's pyramids. It adds testimony that an orientation stone points precisely north, south, east, and west and that compasses spin nearby. At Lake Usori on Mount Osore, an isolated population of dace adapted to strongly acidic water with a pH of 3.5 appears. The video overlays Ezekiel 47, in which water unable to sustain life becomes full of fish, and advances as far as its own interpretation that Christ created the first dace.

As a modern blank space, the video places Misawa Air Base, jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and Japan Air Self-Defense Force. Could the Anenuma communications site be part of the Echelon interception network? Is there a secret underground facility? Are the black triangles seen at night secret weapons or UFOs? Local rumors follow one another. The video even introduces a theory of a secret underground flight route toward Shingo. At the end it looks back over the monument, port, unusual natural environment, and base, concluding that gaps in the record left by power and war may have created the space into which Aomori's legends entered.