Mihara · JP

Kobayakawa Family Tomb Site (Kobayakawa-ke Bosei)

Set on a quiet hillside in the Nuta valley east of Mihara, the Kobayakawa Family Tomb Site preserves the graves of a clan that shaped the medieval history of western Hiroshima. Twenty stone hōkyōintō—pagoda-shaped funerary monuments—stand in two neat rows of ten on a long earthen mound, marking the successive lords of the Kobayakawa, a cadet branch of the great Mōri house, from their founding ancestor to the legendary strategist Kobayakawa Takakage. The cemetery lies within the precincts of Beizan-ji, the clan's family temple, and the whole ensemble is exceptional for its order and condition: a rare, remarkably intact row of Kamakura-to-Momoyama-period pagoda graves that few sites in Japan can match. Together with a national treasure-class stupa and Takakage's own tomb, it turns a peaceful rural temple into a genuine open-air museum of samurai lineage.