Yonaguni Jima – A mysterious Japanese underwater city

  • SPOT
  • Near the Ryukyu islands, 120km east of Taiwan, lies underwater mystery that has puzzled scientists for almost three decades. The taken pictures look amazing and many questions arise immediately.

    Japanese Atlantis?

    Discovered coincidentally in 1986, a Japanese version of an Atlantis can be found in the ocean.

    Explanations vary from a sunken city, or as Schoch, a Boston University professor claims, just a ‘natural, not man-made underwater structure’.

    But emeritus professor Kimura from the University of the Ryukyus is exploring Yonaguni since 20 years ago and each time he comes back from a diving exploration tour, he finds more evidence to back up his belief, that this must be influenced by an ancient human culture. So far he has categorized the city-like structure and found temples, pathways, steps, walls, ruins of a castle and even a large stadium. He is sure, that this is not naturally formed but man-made and according to stalactites he could find, the city must be over 5000 years old.

    Though Ouchi, another Japanese professor of seismology at Kobe University is an advocate of Kimuras hypothesis. So far the Japanese government has not recognised the underwater findings as important cultural property, so researchers and tourists alike are free to explore it.

    On the other hand, Boston university professor claims that the structures symmetries do not match and that angles are not right-angled enough and strongly indicate being naturally made.

    Many questions remain unanswered

    But even just by checking out pictures, it is difficult to believe, that these structures just happened accidentally, not formed by human. Who built it? Why is it underwater? What happened there? Who used to live there? Will it remain a mystery forever? These are the questions that will not resolve for another couple of decades and will remain a riddle. But the world will continue looking to Japan to hear about the next updates and further discoveries!