Kamo Ruins

The Kamo Site: A Buried Yayoi Town Above the Ina River

On the edge of the Itami terrace in southern Kawanishi, about 40 meters above the floodplain of the Ina River, lie the buried remains of one of the largest Yayoi settlements in the Kinki region. The Kamo Site (Kamo Iseki) once spread roughly 800 meters east to west and 400 meters north to south, covering close to 20 hectares at its height around 2,000 years ago. Researchers estimate that several hundred people lived here when the village was at its peak in the middle Yayoi period.

Today there is nothing to climb over or walk through. The excavated areas have been filled back in to protect them, and modern houses cover much of the old terrace. What survives is the shape of the land itself, the artifacts kept nearby, and a record of more than 190 separate digs that, piece by piece, recovered the plan of an entire ancient community.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the central part of the settlement a National Historic Site on 31 July 2000, and the protected area has been expanded several times since, most recently in March 2025.

How the Site Came to Light

The first clue appeared in 1911, when a large bronze bell was dug up at the foot of the slope on the eastern side of the terrace. Known as the Sakane dotaku, it stands 1.14 meters tall, placing it among the ten largest examples of these ritual bells found anywhere in Japan. Bells like this were originally meant to be struck and heard at seasonal rites; over generations they grew taller, thinner, and more elaborate, shifting from objects to be sounded into objects to be displayed. A replica is kept at the city museum on the site.

In 1915 the scholar Kasai Shinya recorded a heavy scatter of Yayoi pottery and stone tools near Kamo Shrine, and the place became known among collectors. A local enthusiast, Miyagawa Yuitsu, began gathering finds to keep them from leaving the district, and in 1936 he opened the small Miyagawa Stone Tool Hall to show them.

Formal archaeology began in 1952, when Kansai University and Kwansei Gakuin University ran the first excavations over three seasons. From the mid-1970s, rapid housing development triggered a long series of rescue digs by the Kawanishi city authorities. Those campaigns, more than 190 in total, slowly assembled the layout of the village, its houses, its cemetery, and the ditches that ringed it.

Why the Settlement Matters

The terrace had been used since Paleolithic times and saw activity through to the Heian period, but it was during the middle Yayoi that Kamo became something unusual. The village formed at the start of that phase, grew quickly through its middle and later stages, and then shrank sharply in the late Yayoi.

Excavation has identified six raised-floor buildings, around 40 pit dwellings, 22 square moated tombs, 12 jar-coffin burials, and 38 wooden-coffin and pit burials, along with the ditches that defined the village edge. That range of features lets archaeologists read the whole structure of the community: where people lived, where they buried their dead, and how the two were kept apart.

The core lay in the eastern half of the site. Several ditches curved around its western flank in an arc, forming a plan close to a circle about 300 meters across, while a separate ditch ran along the eastern slope. This slope ditch is the rare detail. Most Yayoi moated villages enclose flat ground; cutting a defensive ditch into a hillside is uncommon, and it marks Kamo as a settlement built with protection in mind.

In scale the village sat just below Nara's great Karako-Kagi site and roughly level with Ikegami-Sone in Osaka. Its people worked sanukite, a hard volcanic stone, into tools, and the settlement appears to have coordinated smaller villages around it as the leading community on the northern shore of Osaka Bay. For anyone studying how large Yayoi towns were organized in the Kinki region, Kamo is one of the clearest cases available.

What to Look For

The single most telling discovery came in 1992, north of Kamo Shrine: a large raised-floor building set inside a square enclosure marked by a board fence. The fence stood about three meters out from the line of the building's posts, deliberately setting the structure apart from ordinary houses. Dated to the later middle Yayoi, it was most likely the residence of the community's leading family or a building used for ritual. The combination of a big timber hall and a fenced precinct gives a concrete sense of how authority and ceremony were made visible in a village of this size.

One of the square moated tombs also stands out. Located within the central living area rather than the western cemetery, it is unusually large and holds six burial chambers, which has led researchers to read it as a tomb of special standing.

Because the ground itself has been reburied, the way to see all of this is through the reconstructions, models, and finds gathered at the city museum, and by standing on the terrace edge to take in the same wide view over the river plain that drew people here two millennia ago.

Around the Site

The natural starting point is the Kawanishi City Museum of Archaeology, which opened in 1993 inside the historic site. Its display rooms hold roughly 300 finds arranged by period, including the replica Sakane bell, and a hands-on corner offers magatama bead carving on weekends and holidays for a small fee. Admission is free.

A short walk away, Kamo Shrine sits near the heart of the old village. The shrine is recorded in the tenth-century Engishiki and enshrines Wake-ikazuchi-no-mikoto, the same deity worshipped at Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto. A stone marker and an explanatory board for the archaeological site stand within its grounds. The original Miyagawa Stone Tool Hall is still nearby, though it is now open by prior arrangement on weekdays.

Kawanishi rewards a longer visit. Tada Shrine, founded by the Settsu Genji clan, and the temple of Manganji both lie within the city and pair naturally with a morning at Kamo. The whole area is reached easily from central Osaka or Kobe.

The museum is about a 20-minute walk southwest of either JR Kawanishi-Ikeda Station or Hankyu Kawanishi-Noseguchi Station. By bus, take a Hankyu bus toward Itami and get off at Minami-Hanayashiki, two minutes from the museum on foot. Around 20 parking spaces are available for drivers.