Donomae Ruins

The Dō-no-mae Site: Buried Timber on the Plain of Ancient Dewa

In the autumn of 1955, work in the rice fields near the hamlet of Hōrenji, in what is now Sakata City, turned up something unexpected. Buried in the wet ground lay a quantity of old worked wood: pillars, tie beams, and the small bracket blocks that carpenters call masu, mixed with broken pottery.

For years the timbers were read as the remains of a building that had fallen and rotted into the earth. Excavations that began in 1973 told a different story. The wood had not collapsed. It had been laid down on purpose, around a thousand years earlier, to serve as the footing for a structure raised above it.

This is the Dō-no-mae Site, registered as a National Historic Site in 1979. It occupies a low rise about 15 meters above sea level on the Shōnai Plain, the broad farming basin of northwest Yamagata. Today the ground is given over to rice. Beneath it lies the plan of a substantial group of buildings from the Heian period (794–1185), together with one of the more curious construction techniques recorded in early Japanese archaeology.

A Cluster of Ancient Sites on the Plain

The Mogami River cuts the Shōnai Plain into a northern and a southern half. In the north, two rivers flowing down from the Dewa Hills, the Hyūkawa and the Arasegawa, meet near the foot of the high ground. Their old floodplains left a low ridge of slightly raised land that reaches some three kilometers westward across the plain. Ancient people built along it.

At the western end stands the Kinowa-no-saku, found in 1931. A timber palisade once enclosed a square of ground roughly 720 meters on each side. When archaeologists examined the center, they found an orderly arrangement of buildings raised on foundation stones, and the site is now widely identified as the seat of the provincial government of Dewa during the Heian period. About three kilometers due east, on the edge of the hills, lies the Hachimori Site, another Heian-period complex laid out in the manner of a government office.

The Dō-no-mae Site sits between them, about a kilometer east of the Kinowa-no-saku. Whatever its precise role, it belonged to the same world: the administrative landscape of Dewa, a frontier province at the northern reach of the early Japanese state.

It did not stand alone.

Timber Laid Down to Hold Up a Hall

The find that made the site famous turned out to be a foundation. In low, damp ground, a building platform tends to settle and sink. The builders here met the problem by laying down a thick mat of timber, then capping it with layers of packed earth and gravel ballast. Archaeologists call this a raft foundation, and surviving examples are rare. At Dō-no-mae the waterlogged soil kept the wood from rotting, so the technique can be studied directly rather than inferred.

The timber in that raft was not freshly cut. It included pillars, tie beams, and bracket blocks salvaged from an older building. Because those pieces survived, researchers have been able to reconstruct, in part, what the earlier structure looked like. The platform itself was framed by a line of post-holes enclosing an area of about 13 by 13.5 meters, with a drainage ditch curving around it from north to west and on toward the south.

West of the platform, excavators traced two buildings set one above the other on almost the same spot, each four bays by two. Their dimensions are striking. The columns stood roughly 4.5 meters apart and measured close to 55 centimeters across; three of the original pillar bases were still in the ground. A separate building on the site used a slightly smaller span of about 4.2 meters, and kept two rows of pillar bases. North of the platform, three more post-holes mark the gable end of yet another large hall.

In its commentary on the site, the Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that column spacing on this scale is uncommon even among the great capital sites of ancient Japan. Heavy pillars, repeated rebuilding, the board fences and ditches that ringed the compound, and above all the rare raft foundation with its salvaged timber: together these give the site an unusual evidentiary weight. The post-hole buildings date to around the 10th century. The platform building and its ditches belong to the late Heian period and after, so the place was in use, and rebuilt, across a long span of time.

What the Name Remembers

The site's name, Dō-no-mae, means "in front of the hall." The word dō usually points to a Buddhist building, and the toponym has encouraged a long-standing local idea that a temple once stood here, perhaps even the provincial temple of Dewa. The official designation places the site among political and administrative remains rather than religious ones, in keeping with its ties to the Kinowa-no-saku. Both readings can be held at once: a place important enough to be remembered, in the name of the fields, long after its buildings were gone.

A visitor should know what to expect. There is no standing structure and no museum at the Dō-no-mae Site itself. It is a buried site, and the land above it is farmed. What rewards a visit is context rather than spectacle. Standing on the low rise, with the Dewa Hills to the east and the Kinowa-no-saku a short distance west, it becomes possible to read the plain as the ancient administrators once did: as a single connected landscape rather than a scatter of separate places.

Around the Site

The natural companion to a visit is the Kinowa-no-saku, about a kilometer west. Part of that site has been turned into a history park: the south gate and east gate of the government compound, and a stretch of the earthen rampart, have been reconstructed, and admission is free. Seeing the rebuilt gates first gives a vivid sense of the scale and seriousness of provincial administration, which in turn makes the quieter Dō-no-mae Site easier to imagine. The nearby Kinowa Shrine and the Hachimori Site round out the circuit of ancient remains on this part of the plain.

Sakata itself rewards a longer stay. The city grew into one of the most important ports on the Sea of Japan during the Edo period, when the Kitamae trading ships carried rice and other goods along the coast. The Sankyō Warehouses, a row of rice storehouses begun in 1893 and still backed by a screen of zelkova trees, and the residences of the Honma merchant family, recall that era of prosperity. The port sits at the mouth of the Mogami River, the same river that orders the plain on which Dō-no-mae stands.

The site lies in the Hōrenji district of Sakata, in the Shōnai region of Yamagata. The nearest railway station is Hontate, on the JR Uetsu Main Line, roughly a 15-minute drive away. A car is the practical way to reach the site and to link it with the others scattered across the plain.