Jōmon Tunnel (常紋トンネル)

A tunnel five hundred and seven meters long, bored through the remote mountains along Hokkaido's Sekihoku Main Line. From the final years of the Meiji era into the Taishō period, it was carved out by the blood and bone of migrant laborers known as tako — men trapped in conditions little better than bondage. More than a hundred lives were lost to starvation and violence, and most of the dead were given neither treatment nor burial rites, simply vanishing into the soil of the forest and the tunneled earth.

Locals who ventured into the mountains to gather wild plants would find the bones of human hands and feet rising from the ground. So carelessly had the dead been buried. Even after the line opened, trains would halt without reason inside the tunnel, again and again, and those connected with the national railway would murmur to one another: something is in there.

In 1959, a Jizō statue was carved and enshrined for the repose of the dead. When the vacant ground behind it was excavated, the remains of roughly fifty individuals emerged, one after another. Even now, every June, the smoke of memorial incense drifts up through the mountain air.

The legend of the human pillars had long been dismissed as rumor. But in 1970, during expansion work on a passing alcove, a human skeleton bearing damage to the skull was discovered sixty centimeters behind the brick wall, buried among river pebbles. The legend was no legend. Old track maintenance workers have testified quietly that those who defied their supervisors were plastered into the walls as a warning to others.

Subsequent investigation recovered ten more sets of remains, which were interred at a communal cemetery in Rubeshibe. A memorial stone stands on a rise overlooking Kinka Signal Station, and the trains of the Sekihoku Main Line still pass directly beneath it. In the few seconds spent hurtling through that darkness, no one has any means of knowing what remains on the other side of the wall.