Japan once had a historical period known as the Kofun period, circa 300–538 AD, which is marked by the popularity of burial mounds throughout the country. Many of them have been lost in time, abandoned and buried deep in history. At some later point, in western Japan—around today’s Hyogo, Osaka, and Nara in the Middle Ages—ancient sarcophagi were unearthed from oblivion, either from natural causes or from looting, and reused as new gravestones or as roadside objects of worship, with images of the Buddha engraved onto them. While this tradition…
