Nekoyadai Ruins

Negoyadai: An Early Jomon Village Built Around Its Dead

In the early 1980s, crews preparing a terrace above the Sugata River in Utsunomiya for a new municipal cemetery found floor plans far older than anything they had come to build. Excavations between 1982 and 1988 traced a ring of timber buildings around an open central ground, and within that ground lay 339 pits that had once held the dead. The settlement is roughly 5,500 years old, from the Early Jomon period. The discovery carried enough weight that the city reduced the scale of its planned cemetery and preserved the ground. In 1988 the place was designated a National Historic Site under the name Negoyadai.

The site occupies the Kamikake district, on the right-bank terrace of the Sugata River. Its remains spread about 300 meters east to west and 150 meters north to south, a scale that places it among the larger Jomon settlements known in eastern Japan.

A Ring of Graves and Halls

What sets Negoyadai apart is the way its plan is organized. The 339 grave pits cluster in groups of five to ten near the middle, each pit about a meter across and 50 to 60 centimeters deep. Around this burial ground stood a ring of structures: twenty-seven pit dwellings, eighteen post-built buildings, eleven square buildings, and sixteen long rectangular halls.

Those rectangular halls are the feature archaeologists keep returning to. They run from 14 to 24 meters in length and share a consistency of design that is rare for the period. The largest, Building No. 1, measured 23 meters long and 9.8 meters wide. Among reconstructed Jomon buildings in Japan, it is second in length only to the great hall at the Sannai-Maruyama site in Aomori, which reaches 32 meters.

One post-built structure stands apart from the rest. Eight unusually thick posts were set in an oval, a layout that does not match an ordinary dwelling. Placed near the center of the settlement, it has been read as a kind of wood circle, a setting for gatherings or rites rather than for daily life.

Why It Was Designated

Two things separate Negoyadai from a typical Jomon village. The first is that ritual objects outnumber the everyday tools and food debris that usually fill a living site. The second is the burials themselves. Graves that yield offerings are uncommon in the Jomon period, which makes what came out of these pits valuable to researchers trying to reconstruct how people of the time treated their dead.

From seven of the grave pits came a set of stone ornaments and tools: four C-shaped slit earrings (ketsu-type ornaments), two round beads, five small beads, thirteen tubular beads, five stone spatulas, and three stone arrowheads. The way they lay told a story of its own. The slit earrings appeared in matched pairs, and the beads were grouped in combinations, the pattern you would expect if bodies had been buried still wearing their ornaments. The earrings and beads were cut from carefully chosen stone with real skill, and some pieces preserve traces of how such ornaments were made. This group of finds was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1990.

The scarcity of ordinary refuse, the abundance of ritual objects, and the deliberate ring of large buildings around the graves point in one direction. Researchers think Negoyadai was not simply a place to live, but a shared ground where groups linked by kinship or locality carried out funerals and ceremonies, possibly drawing people from several surrounding villages.

What You See Today

The ground is now open to visitors as Utsunomiya Iseki no Hiroba, an archaeological park that opened in 1991. Several buildings have been reconstructed on their original footprints, including one of the long rectangular halls, so the scale that impressed the excavators is something you can walk up to and stand beside. The reconstructions make the ring around the central ground easy to read on foot.

An on-site museum displays objects recovered during the digs and explains how the settlement was reconstructed from postholes and pit outlines. For anyone curious about how archaeologists move from a field of stains in the soil to a standing village, it is a useful stop before or after walking the grounds.

There is a seasonal reason to time a visit for late spring. About 10,000 Nikko day lilies grow on the western slope of the park, and from the middle to the end of May they come into bloom. The city holds a day lily festival while the flowers are at their best, and the yellow slope set against the reconstructed buildings is the image many visitors carry home.

Getting There and Nearby

The park lies on the western edge of Utsunomiya. By car it is about 15 minutes from the Utsunomiya interchange on the Tohoku Expressway and about 5 minutes from the Kanuma interchange. By bus, take a Kanto Bus from JR Utsunomiya Station bound for Nirenoki Shako or the Driver's License Center, get off at Seizan Koen Iriguchi after about 20 minutes, and walk roughly 10 minutes. Parking is free, though limited to around ten spaces, and admission is free as well.

On the same plateau stands Shogunzuka Kofun, a burial mound dated to the early 7th century and large enough to have earned a name, though whose grave it marks remains unknown. The pairing lets a single visit span thousands of years, from an Early Jomon ceremonial ground to a tomb of the Kofun period.