Mystery shrouds the ancient Oshoro circle

It is one of about 30 Late Jomon stone circles scattered through northern Japan. In terms of size it ranks about midway between the smallest enclosures and the largest one at Oyu, Akita Prefecture, bounded by thousands of stones.

No bones have been found to make an airtight case of the cemetery theory, but relatively few Jomon bones have been found anywhere, the acid in the soil claiming them long before the archaeologist's trowel can.

The first archaeologists at work in Japan were American and European. Their heyday was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japanese curiosity regarding the remote past was satisfied by nationalistic myths accepted — on pain of harsh punishment as the Japanese government in the 1930s and '40s claimed control over thought — as fact.

World War II ended, and, as though to make up for lost time, Japan plunged into archaeology. It became a passion, and remains one to this day. Historian William Wayne Farris, in "Sacred Texts and Buried Treasure," counts (as of 1998) some 4,000 archaeologists active in Japan — 20 times the number in Great Britain.

A prewar pioneer in Japan was the Scottish archaeologist Neil Munro, whose "Prehistoric Japan" was published in 1908. He thought at first the stone circles might be astronomical observatories akin to Stonehenge in southwest England.

Not so, asserts Otaru Museum's Ishikawa.

The question remains open, but calendrical significance has yet to be established. "In my opinion," says Ishikawa, "the only thing Stonehenge and the Oshoro Stone Circle have in common is that they're both made of stone."