When I First Saw the Monument, Goosebumps Went Down My Body

“When I first saw the Monument, goosebumps went down my body at how majestic and man-made it looked,” - Kahashiro Aratake, founder and owner of SouWes Dive Center in Okinawa.

In 1986, Kahashiro Aratake had already returned to his home island of Yonaguni, Okinawa, after attending high school in the prefectural capital of Nahe and college in Tokyo. He returned home to develop tourism here and began scuba diving.

Underwater around Yonaguni, there was a lot to see: beautiful landscapes, a variety of soft corals, and most importantly, hammerhead sharks. This was already enough for interesting diving. But a stone structure about 100 meters long, standing at a depth of 26 meters, with vertical walls and giant steps, shocked his imagination. A palace? No, a whole city! An ancient dock? A burial ground? Anything was conceivable.

News of the underwater discovery quickly spread throughout Japan and beyond. “Yonaguni Monument” (Yonaguni Monument) became a popular topic not only among divers, but also archaeologists and researchers in various fields of science. Mystery! Kahashiro defended his version of the man-made origin of the structure, dived there countless times, finding more and more new confirmations: correct shapes, right angles, logical arrangement of parts of the structure.

Research expeditions, both Japanese and international, were conducted, new and new theories of the Monument"s origin were put forward. The proponents of the man-made version, together with its discoverer, were declared adventurers and pseudoscientists. Over time, thanks to the Faram Research Foundation"s studies, the opinion that the Yonaguni Monument is a geoglyph (a glyph is a structure designed to send a message, a geoglyph is a glyph standing on the ground) was established.

There are many geoglyphs in the world, the closest to Yonaguni are the Fongbin geoglyphs off the coast of Taiwan.

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