Search Results
8/1/2025, 5:18:34 PM
>>49795892
It being a figure from imperial history or related to such would tie it to lore about Minakamiyama. It's a mountain in Nagano which some claim to be a man-made pyramid. The locals also have lore about how the cave where Amaterasu Oomikami hid herself was actually in there. During the WWII, there were plans to evacuate the imperial court to a shelter built under the mountain. The mountain however turned out to be too unstable, so the plan was abandoned and another mountain was chosen.
ZUN lived his childhood in Hakuba, Nagano, and there are a ton of references to places and things around Nagano in Touhou lore. For example, the sphinx that inspired Nareko is near Suwa in Nagano. It was placed near a road where people used to dump trash to stop such. There's an old class of Japanese deities called to dousojin which guarded roads. Her design also incorporates iconography common to these deities.
But getting back to our potential pyramid under Youkai Mountain, Minakamiyama has some incredible strange folklore surrounding it, not limited to people believing it's a pyramid or unorthodox religious beliefs. It experienced a really strange cluster of like 40 000 small earthquakes in the 70s. People claim to see UFOs there. The current kanji for the mountain suggest a meaning of "mountain of all gods", but there is an old way to writing it which is "mountain above water".
It's also an old sacred site, there's shrines and kofun around it. The shugendo mountain ascetics consider it a holy place. There's a shrine at the very top of the mountain too that is said to enshrine Izanami and Izanagi, the first woman and man from Japanese mythology.
I could of course be wrong, but the pyramid under youkai mountain being some passed into fantasy version of Minakamiyama would fit well into ZUN's patterns and habits.
Minakamiyama isn't the only mountain that Japanese think is artificial though. There's a whole scene of people believing in this thing. In the early 20th century, there were also some Japanese people who tried to prove that the ancestors of Japanese were Egyptians. This was in line with other pseudoarcheological trends like British Israelism that were in the vogue at the time.
It being a figure from imperial history or related to such would tie it to lore about Minakamiyama. It's a mountain in Nagano which some claim to be a man-made pyramid. The locals also have lore about how the cave where Amaterasu Oomikami hid herself was actually in there. During the WWII, there were plans to evacuate the imperial court to a shelter built under the mountain. The mountain however turned out to be too unstable, so the plan was abandoned and another mountain was chosen.
ZUN lived his childhood in Hakuba, Nagano, and there are a ton of references to places and things around Nagano in Touhou lore. For example, the sphinx that inspired Nareko is near Suwa in Nagano. It was placed near a road where people used to dump trash to stop such. There's an old class of Japanese deities called to dousojin which guarded roads. Her design also incorporates iconography common to these deities.
But getting back to our potential pyramid under Youkai Mountain, Minakamiyama has some incredible strange folklore surrounding it, not limited to people believing it's a pyramid or unorthodox religious beliefs. It experienced a really strange cluster of like 40 000 small earthquakes in the 70s. People claim to see UFOs there. The current kanji for the mountain suggest a meaning of "mountain of all gods", but there is an old way to writing it which is "mountain above water".
It's also an old sacred site, there's shrines and kofun around it. The shugendo mountain ascetics consider it a holy place. There's a shrine at the very top of the mountain too that is said to enshrine Izanami and Izanagi, the first woman and man from Japanese mythology.
I could of course be wrong, but the pyramid under youkai mountain being some passed into fantasy version of Minakamiyama would fit well into ZUN's patterns and habits.
Minakamiyama isn't the only mountain that Japanese think is artificial though. There's a whole scene of people believing in this thing. In the early 20th century, there were also some Japanese people who tried to prove that the ancestors of Japanese were Egyptians. This was in line with other pseudoarcheological trends like British Israelism that were in the vogue at the time.
Page 1