Japan had no written language until regular contact with China began in the 6th century.  Over the next several hundred years, Japan adopted many aspects of Chinese culture, and one of these aspects was writing.  At first, though, all of this writing was actually done in Chinese, not Japanese.  Why?  Because Chinese isn’t written with an alphabet.

Kanji began many thousands of years ago as pictograms.  So the word “bird,” for example, was a picture of a bird.  But what if you want to write “hawk,” or “duck,” or “heron”?  And then what about different varieties of hawk, duck, and heron?  Trying to have a different pictogram for every bird quickly becomes ridiculous.  And what about abstract ideas?  Pictograms are too cumbersome, and so most kanji were instead created by combining other kanji.

One type of combination deals purely with meaning.  For example, 明, a character that means “bright,” is composed of 日 and 月, the characters for “sun” and “moon.”  This category is small, though.

The majority of kanji were created such that one part indicates pronunciation and another indicates meaning.  Take 松, the character for “pine tree.”  The left half comes from 木, meaning “tree,” and the right half is 公, which means “public.”  A pine, therefore, is a tree whose name is pronounced like the word for “public” – in ancient Chinese, that is.

However, it’s generally not the case that kanji equal words.  Rather, most kanji correspond to morphemes, the units of meaning that make up words.  For example, the English word “geology” is composed of two morphemes, geo-, meaning “Earth,” and -logy, meaning “study.”  So if we used kanji to write English, that would be a two-character word.  (As it happens, “geology” is written with three kanji – 地質学 – which mean “ground-qualities-study.”)

Oh, and when I say that 松 was made by combining 木 and 公, note that the creation process happened millennia ago; you don’t make up new characters every time you write a sentence.  Sometimes artists and authors will invent new kanji, but it’s not something that is normally done.

Well for one, the clues to pronunciation are immediately rendered useless.  “Pine” and “public” may be pronounced the same in Chinese, but they sure aren’t the same in English.  And what do you do if one language has a morpheme that the other doesn’t?  And how do you write names?  “Kevin” means “kind and gentle,” but if you decide to use those characters to write “Kevin,” then you’re assigning them two separate pronunciations.  And in that case, how does anyone know that they’re reading the name and not the sentence fragment?

All of these problems meant that when Chinese writing was introduced to Japan, it could only be used for writing Chinese.  This was better than having no writing, but understandably, people wanted to find a way to write in their native Japanese.  Eventually they did, although it took centuries and left the Japanese language permanently changed in the process.

But I’ll talk about that another time.

Tonight on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, there was an interview with an American who worked as a reporter in Japan for 12 years.  He covered crime for the Yomiuri Shimbun, writing in Japanese. He left Japan after an article he wrote lead to a yakuza mob boss threatening to kill him and his family.

The interview was fascinating, but what’s more, the timing was great.

Just a few days ago, in my last post, I wrote about pronouncing Japanese.  And with the word “yakuza,” this interview provides clear examples of correct and incorrect pronunciation.   In short, it’s /ya ku za/, not /ya ku za/.  (To be precise, it’s /ya ku za/, with no stress accents at all, but accenting the first syllable sounds close enough and is easier for Anglophones.)

I’m inclined to cut the interviewer some slack – anyone confronted with a word from a language they don’t speak is likely to mangle it by using their own language’s rules of pronunciation – but on the other hand he got to hear the correct pronunciation over and over.  And it’s not like we’re talking about Chinese tones or Xhosa clicks or something, you just have to accent the first syllable instead of the second.  He did get it right a few times, or was at least getting closer, but then he reverted to saying yaKUza again for the rest of the interview.  Oh well.

I use at least a few Japanese words in nearly every post I write, so while I’m on my “Guide to Japan” kick, it would make sense to write about the language itself.  I’ll give it a go.

In this post, I’ll cover phonology.

Vowels

Note that when I say “vowels,” I’m talking about sounds, not letters.  English has five vowels in its alphabet, but it uses many more actual vowel sounds.

Japanese has only five vowel sounds: a like in father, i like in see, u like in you, e like in say, and o like in no.  However, unlike the English vowels in “say” and “no,” none of the Japanese vowels are diphthongs.

Furthermore, Japanese vowels are all short.  What does that mean?  Consider long and short vowels in English.  The vowel in “met” is short and the vowel in “mate” is long.  They’re also simply different vowels, but the point is, if you try saying the two words, you can hear the difference in length.  So the Japanese e is pronounced with the same sound as mate (minus the diphthong part), but with the short length of met.

Consonants

Consonants are nearly the same as in English (and again, I’m talking about sounds, not letters).  The most notable exception is that Japanese has neither r nor l, but instead features a sound that’s a bit like a cross between r, l, and the American English flap (the sound Americans substitute for t and d in words like “water” and “buddy”). Another difference is that there is no true f in Japanese.  What about words like Fuji?  Well when h is followed by u, the h changes to a sound made by pushing air through pursed lips, as if blowing out a candle, and the effect is similar to f.

Those are the big differences.  There are smaller ones, but I’ll skip them for the sake of brevity.

As far as combining sounds, a consonant must be followed by a vowel.  This can make for some rather cumbersome English loanwords.  “Strike,” for example, becomes sutoraiku.  The exceptions to this rule are that n can appear without a vowel, that <consonant+y+vowel> is allowed, and that some consonants can be “long,” which I’ll explain later.

Stress

English has stress patterns that are part of each word’s pronunciation.  Take the two words written “record.”  With the noun, the first syllable is stressed, and with the verb, it’s the second syllable.

Japanese doesn’t have stress accenting; each syllable receives the same emphasis.  English speakers trying to pronounce Japanese tend to have difficulty with this.  My advice is, if you can’t manage equal-stress syllables, then the next best thing is to accent the first syllable.  And whatever you do, don’t accent the second to last syllable.  So for example, pronouncing the popular manga and anime series Naruto as /na ru to/ sounds really goofy, but /na ru to/ is fine.  Or for a less nerdy example, Kenji Johjima, a catcher for the Seattle Mariners baseball team (2006-2009), initially had his name mangled by announcers as /jo ji ma/, but eventually this was corrected to /jo ji ma/.

Pitch

Japanese doesn’t have stress accents, but it does have pitch accents, which are patterns of high and low pitch. These are not the same thing as the tone system used in Chinese.  The Wikipedia page has an excellent audio example.  Unfortunately for people learning Japanese as a second language, pitch accents vary by regional dialect and aren’t displayed in most dictionaries.  When I studied Japanese at the University of Washington, the instructors didn’t even attempt to teach pitch accents.

Moras

Japanese words are divided into sub-syllable segments called moras.  A consonant-vowel pair is one mora, a vowel with no consonant is a mora, and n with no vowel is a mora.  So for example, sushi has two moras: su and shi.  Akai (“red”) has three: a.ka.i.  Nenjū (“year-round”) has four moras: ne.n.ju.u.

An English speaker asked to clap the beats in a word will match the beats to syllables, but in Japanese, each mora gets a beat.  And unlike the English syllable-beats, Japanese mora-beats are all the same length.

Moras are important in Japanese metered poetry.  In the original Japanese, the 5-7-5 pattern of a haiku poem is counted by mora, not syllable.

Doubled Sounds

I said that the word nenjū has four moras.  Why is it four and not three?  The reason is that the line over the u indicates a “long” vowel.  An alternate way to write the word would be nenjuu.

Properly speaking, all Japanese vowels are short, but the same vowel can come twice in a row.  The effect of such doubling is that the vowel is pronounced for two beats instead of one.  And in fact there are words where the same vowel appears for three moras in a row, as with yūutsu/yuuutsu (“melancholy”).

Consonants can also be doubled, though not tripled.  With sounds that can be pronounced continuously, such as s, sh, and n, the consonant is simply lengthened.  For an idea of what this sounds like, try saying “this seat” (at a normal pace, not slowly).  The s in “this” runs into the s in “seat,” creating one long s.  The long s in the Japanese word kissaten (“cafe”) sounds just like this.

Consonants produced by stopping and releasing air, such as p, t, and k, are doubled by holding the stop for a beat.  You can make a doubled k in English by quickly saying “back kick.”

In terms of moras, a word with doubled consonants breaks down like this:  ki.s.sa.te.n.

Finally, as for usage, a doubled consonant never begins a word, and – with n being the exception once again – voiced consonants can’t be doubled.  (Voiced consonants are those in which the vocal cords vibrate.  Touch your vocal cords and say “ssssssss” and then “zzzzzzzzzzz.”  Z is voiced and s is not.  Other voiced/voiceless pairs include b/p, d/t, and g/k.)

Following my Introduction to Japan and overview of The Geography of Japan, this is a brief look at the country’s flora and fauna.  I won’t attempt to be at all comprehensive, I just want to provide a sense of place.

A Bamboo Grove in the Outskirts of Kyoto

Common trees include native species of pine, spruce, beech, oak, and maple, as well as hinoki and sugi.  These last two trees are endemic to Japan, meaning Japan is the only place they grow natively, although both are now cultivated in gardens around the world.

Hinoki is related to cypress, while sugi – which belongs to its own genus, Cryptomeria – has cedar-like wood and a sequoia-like appearance.  Hinoki and sugi both produce wood that is excellent for construction, being strong, fragrant, and resistant to rot and insects.  Unfortunately, both trees also produce abundant hay-fever-inducing pollen.

Sugi Line the Path to Togakushi Shrine

Animals inhabiting these woods include foxes, wild boar, and deer.  There are some brown bears on Hokkaidō, the northern island, and small numbers of Asiatic black bears in the mountains of the other three main islands.  Wolves once inhabited Japan, but they died out about 100 years ago.  More unusual animals include the tanuki, the Japanese serow, and the Japanese macaque.

Tanuki are also known as raccoon dogs, but they’re unrelated to raccoons.

A Pair of Tanuki (image from Wikipedia)

Japanese folktales portray tanuki as shape-changers who like to eat huge meals and drink enormous quantities of sake and then pay with money that turns to leaves after the tricksters have made their escape.

The Japanese serow has no colorful stories associated with it, but it’s endemic to Japan.

A Japanese Serow (image from Wikipedia)

It’s cute, too.

The Japanese macaque is also unique to the islands.

Snow Monkeys in a Hotspring at Jigokudani, Nagano (image from Wikipedia)

They’re sometimes called snow monkeys, as their range extends farther north than any other monkey, but they also live in regions where snow is rare.

All manner of birds live in Japan.  Crows dominate the cities and often drive away other birds, but waterfowl hold their own along the rivers, in the city or out.

A Heron Takes Flight at a Temple in Kyoto

In Japan, as in the rest of East Asia, red-crowned cranes symbolize longevity and are a favorite subject of art, but they are now – ironically, sadly – endangered.

Red-Crowned Cranes (image from Wikipedia)

The paving of so many of Japan’s streams and rivers probably hasn’t done any favors for wildlife.

A Paved Stream in the Town of Dazaifu

With many streams like this one (Or most?  All?), not only have the banks been reinforced, but in fact the riverbed has also been paved.  The pretense for this canalizing, which was carried out all over the country, was to prevent erosion and flooding, but the primary goal was really to create jobs and reward the construction industry for political support.  It’s not entirely bad, though.  Along the sides of streams like this, concrete blocks have been dropped and then covered with soil (the blocks help keep the soil from washing away), and riverside grasses are able to return.

Grassy plains and wetlands once accounted for most of Japan’s non-forested flatland, but most such areas have long been filled with houses or farms.  On the bright side, the average rice paddy is utterly teeming with life.  I harvested rice twice while living in Kobe, and both times, as the plot was cleared, frogs and insects fled the newly exposed ground in waves.

Rice is the biggest crop in Japan, but it is by no means the only one.  But I’ll leave the topic of Japan’s fruit and vegetables for another post. I’ll finish this entry with the country’s native flowers.

Ume (“oo-may”) – Prunus mume, aka Chinese plum, aka Japanese apricot – is beloved in China as a symbol of resilience, because it flowers in early February.  (Note: all of the following flower pictures are from Wikipedia.)

When Chinese culture entered Japan, ume blossoms (generally translated to “plum blossoms”) became the most popular flower, at least in poetry.  But after a few centuries, that place of honor was permanently taken by the flowering cherry.

Flowering cherries bloom gloriously for about one week and then their petals scatter.  In Japan, they are therefore a symbol of transience.

Japan doesn’t have a national flower, and if it did, the cherry blossom would have to be it, but the imperial crest is a golden chrysanthemum.

Other native flowers include peony, iris, andromeda, azalea, bluebeard, Kobushi magnolia, many species of camellia, hydrangea, lotus, and wisteria.

That’s all for now.

Picking up where I left off with The Geography of Japan, this post is about the country’s regions.

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Administratively, Japan is divided into 47 regions, called prefectures, but traditionally speaking, Japan has nine regions.

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Dark blue:  Hokkaidō (“North Sea Circuit”).  Hokkaidō only became part of Japan in the late 19th century and was originally the home of the Ainu people, hunter-gatherers ethnically distinct from the Japanese.  Hokkaidō has fewer people and somewhat wider vistas than the rest of Japan, and it has some European-style farms and pastures. The island’s biggest city is Sapporo, birthplace of Sapporo Beer.

Gray: Tōhoku (“The Northeast”). Tōhoku has the image of being a remote mountain backwater.  These days it’s also known for ski resorts.

Pink: Kantō (“East of the Barrier”).  The Kantō Plain is filled with the Tokyo metropolitan area, now the cultural and economic heart of Japan.

Reddish: Chūbu (“Central Region”). Chūbu contains Japan’s tallest mountains, the very highest being Mt. Fuji.  The region is really made up of four isolated centers of culture and population.  On the Pacific coast is Nagoya, home of Toyota, and deep in the mountains is Nagano, host of the 1998 Winter Olympics.  The Japan Sea coast has Kanazawa south of the peninsula and Niigata north of the peninsula.

Green: Kansai (“West of the Barrier”), also called Kinki (“Neighborhood of the Capital”).  Kansai is home to Kyoto, the old capital and still the center of traditional Japanese culture.  Kansai is also home to Osaka, which was the economic center of Japan until Tokyo usurped that role in the last century or so.

Yellow: Chūgoku (“Middle Country”). The name comes from when provinces were classified as being a short, medium, or long distance from Kyoto.  “Chūgoku” is also the name for China (“The Middle Kingdom”), so to avoid confusion, the region of Japan is also called San’in-San’yō, meaning “Shady Mountain-Sunny Mountain,” referring to the region’s north and south sides, respectively.

Purple: Shikoku (“Four Lands”). The island’s four modern prefectures correspond to its four old provinces.  Shikoku is a bit isolated and its mountainous interior is only sparsely inhabited.

Light blue: Kyūshū (“Nine Provinces”). Before the late 19th century, Kyūshū was Japan’s gateway to the outside world. Contact with China and Korea usually passed through the north end of the island and contact with the Ryūkyū Kingdom came through the south.  During the late 16th century, Nagasaki, in western Kyūshū, flourished as a Dutch trading port, and then during the 200 years when Europeans were barred from entering Japan, the Dutch were allowed to continue trading at an artificial island in Nagasaki Bay.  And yet, despite Kyūshū’s role as conduit to the rest of the world, in the old days court officials from Kyoto regarded assignment to a post in Kyūshū as practically exile.

Orange-ish:  The Ryūkyū Islands.  The northern half of the chain is administratively part of Kyūshū and the southern half makes up Okinawa Prefecture.  The islands below the red line were formerly the Ryūkyū Kingdom, whose culture was distinct from Japan and whose languages form the only other branch of the Japonic language family.  The Ryūkyū Kingdom became a tributary state to China’s Ming dynasty, and then from 1609 also paid tribute to Japan’s Satsuma province.  Japan annexed Ryūkyū in 1879 and mandated that school be conducted in Japanese. As a result, the Ryūkyū languages are disappearing.

Next up is flora and fauna.

Following my basic introduction to Japan, this is an overview of Japan’s geography.

Location

Japan is located in East Asia, off the coasts of China, Korea, and Russia.

[topographic map from Wikipedia]

The northern end of Japan is at roughly the same latitude as the cities Milan, Montreal, and Portland, Oregon.  The southern end of the main islands of Japan is at roughly the same latitude as Shanghai, the mouth of the Nile river, and Austin, Texas.  The string of small islands that makes an arc from the bottom of the main islands to Taiwan is also part of Japan, and its southern end is at about the same latitude as Cuba.

Terrain

Mountains account for 73% of Japan’s land, and most of the country’s people are crammed into what little flat land there is.  In this fantastic satellite image from NASA (via Wikipedia), the concrete-gray population centers are clearly visible.

The biggest urban area, at the elbow of the main island, is the Tokyo region.

Forests cover most of the land that isn’t either urban, rocky mountain, or agricultural.  In the satellite image, only the south is green, but that’s because the picture was taken in April, when spring was well underway in the southern half of the country, but when plants in the north were still waking up.

Climate

Japan is mostly in the temperate zone and thus experiences the four seasons distinctly.  Summers are hot, winters bring snow, autumn is colored by red maple leaves, and spring begins with cherry blossoms.  Except at the north island, there is also a month-long rainy season in early summer. Additionally, typhoons occur through summer and into early autumn.  Each storm typically starts in the south and sweeps up the length of the archipelago, weakening along the way.

Japan’s weather isn’t the same all over, however.  The country’s dividing mountains and span of latitudes create several climate zones.

• Pacific Coast: Hot, humid summers and mostly dry winters.
• Inland Sea: (The area between the main island and the smaller two of the four big islands.)  Has weather similar to the Pacific Coast, but it’s sheltered from storms and has more sunny days.
• Japan Sea Coast: Somewhat cooler summers and heavy snowfall in the winter, due to winds from Siberia.
• Central Highlands: (A small region in the mountains in the middle of Japan.)  Has a more continental climate, with a large contrast between daytime and nighttime temperatures.
• Hokkaidō:  (The northern island.)  Cooler and less humid than the rest of Japan and with less precipitation.
• Southern Islands: Subtropical.

I should have written this when I first started this blog, but better late than never, eh?  Here is a brief introduction to Japan.

[Picture taken from Wikipedia.]

In the Japanese language, “Japan” is called Nihon or Nippon.  These are just two ways of pronouncing 日本, which means “sun source,” hence “Land of the Rising Sun.”  Appropriately, the flag of Japan represents a sun.

Japan is a constitutional monarchy.  The emperor is the symbolic head of state and the prime minister is the head of government.  The legislature is a two-house parliament, known as the Diet.

The capital of Japan is Tokyo.   Tokyo’s population is about 12 million, but the Greater Tokyo Area (the region you get if you put the borders at where the city actually stops instead of where its official boundaries are) is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with 35 million people.  Tokyo also has the largest GDP of any city in the world.  New York is only US$60 billion behind, but the gap between New York and #3, LA, is about $500 billion.  Japan’s national economy, meanwhile, is the second largest in the world.

Japan has a population of 127 million people.  98.5% of those people are ethnically Japanese, 0.5% are Korean, 0.4% are Chinese, and the rest come from everywhere else.  Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, but the birthrate has dropped so much that the population has been contracting slightly for a few years now.

Finally, regarding religion, the CIA’s World Factbook says that about 84% of Japanese are Shinto, 71% are Buddhist, and 2% are Christian.  The numbers add up to more than 100 because most Japanese follow a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, rather than only one or the other.  However, it’s worth noting that for the majority of these people, the Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and practices they adhere to fall more in the realms of culture and tradition than deep religious devotion.

In separate posts, I’ll give overviews of Japan’s geography, history, and language.

Summer in Japan is a sweaty, sweaty affair.  It’s hot and oppressively humid, and many homes – like the apartment I lived in – don’t have air conditioning (nor do most classrooms).

And yet, I feel a certain nostalgia for the Japanese summer.  In particular, I remember the sound of summer quite fondly.  Take this commercial for watermelons.

A bit overdone and saccharine, but still evocative, and the little girl is a cutie.  This is what they’re saying, by the way:

Girl:  “Not yet?”
Father:  “Not yet.”
Girl:  “Not yet?”
Father:  “Not yet”
<tock>
Father:  “Now!”
Father:  “Summer is delicious, isn’t it?”
Girl:  “Summer is delicious, isn’t it?”

But the dialogue is beside the point. Well, it’s beside my point anyway.  The scene is established as taking place in summer before anyone speaks and before visual cues are provided.  How?  In the background, we can hear cicadas.

Every summer, Japan abounds with cicadas.  Lots and lots of astoundingly noisy cicadas.  More than 30 species inhabit the archipelago, and each has a unique call.  But the cicada that is most strongly associated with summer is the one you can hear in the commercial, the minmin-zemi.

Its call is distinctive and it’s most active during the hottest weather, so the minmin-zemi is the unchallenged icon of summer in Japan.  Still, it’s only one part of the chorus.

The tsukutsukubōshi also has a distinctive song.

Its name is onomatopoeic, as is minmin. Semi (“seh mee”) means cicada.

Meanwhile, many varieties have more monotonous calls, as with the kuma-zemi (“bear cicada”).

But while these three types of cicada blare away during the day, twilight belongs to the higurashi.

I have vivid memories of summer evenings at my apartment in the mountains north of Kobe.  As the heat of the day softened, the breeze through my windows would carry the quiet sounds of neighbors preparing dinner or listening to the evening news.  And as the sun sank in the sky, the higurashis’ haunting cries would begin to echo in the warm air.

Automated, underground,  bicycle-parking cylinders!

In Tokyo, naturally. This made the rounds online about a year ago, but it’s really cool, so if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the great rundown at dannychoo.com.

Danny Choo, by the way, is a British expat living in Tokyo, and his website covers life in Japan and Japanese nerd subculture, with an emphasis on figures (as in action figures…sort of).  I have zero interest in figures, but I really enjoy Danny’s Week in Tokyo posts, which are always filled with great photos.

I spent the second day outside the city, to the southwest.  My primary destination and first stop for the day was Hōryū-ji, a temple founded in 607.

Hōryū-ji was built at the command of the imperial regent, Prince Shōtoku, who was instrumental in the spread of Buddhism in Japan.  Prince Shōtoku also ordered the adoption of the Chinese calendar and carried out significant governmental reforms.  But while he actively sought out and implemented the best aspects of Chinese culture, he also asserted Japan as being equal to China, putting an end to the previous subordinate relationship.  (He famously addressed a letter, “From the Son of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun to the Son of Heaven in the Land of the Setting Sun.”  The Chinese emperor was not pleased.)

A fire is said to have leveled Hōryū-ji in 670, but even so, the complex contains the longest-standing wooden buildings in the world.  And while they’re around a century younger than the temple itself, the gate guardians are the oldest in Japan.

From Hōryū-ji, I moved on to Yakushi-ji, a temple located just within Nara’s city limits, which is still a mile or two outside of the city proper.

Yakushi-ji was established in 680 and moved to its present location in 718.  Over the years, nearly all of its buildings have burned down and been rebuilt. The eastern pagoda, built in 730, is the sole remaining original construction.

This round hall, meanwhile, is a totally new addition.

It was built in 1991 to hold a portion of the cremated remains of the famous 7th century Chinese monk, Xuanzang (Jp: Genjō Sanzō).  Another portion exists in a museum in India.  That one was a gift from the Chinese government, but the remains at Yakushi-ji were taken by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

I wonder how much that bothers China.  On the one hand, the Party holds religion in contempt, but on the other hand, Journey to the West, the novel loosely based on Xuanzang’s travels, is a beloved classic.  I guess it’s likely that most people simply don’t know about the remains being kept in Japan.  I certainly had no idea.

I can’t remember exactly what I had, but I do remember being struck by how low the price was for such good food.  I’ve had better meals and I’ve had cheaper meals, but their ¥1,000 (~$10) lunch set was an outstanding bargain for the quality.

Here’s a map.  I should note that their dinner prices seemed much higher, so the restaurant is probably best for lunch.

Ganjin (Ch: Jianzhen) was invited to come to Japan to share his knowledge of Buddhism.  It took him six tries over the course of a dozen years before he finally made it across the ocean, and he had gone completely blind in the meantime.  When Ganjin at last made it to the capital, Nara, he served for five years as the abbot of Tōdai-ji (the temple with the giant statue of Buddha), before retiring to a plot of land granted by the emperor. Ganjin then used the land to build Tōshōdai-ji.  He died four years later.

There’s a beautiful mossy grove between the grave and the rest of the temple.

Even disregarding their cultural and historical value, Japan’s many temples and shrines are priceless just for all the green space they protect from encroaching concrete.

Not that there’s no countryside left in Japan.  The walk to the nearest train station was quite nice.

It was harvest time in the rice fields.

Houses pressed in at points…

…but then I came upon a particularly novel bit of protected greenery.

This island is a giant, key-shaped burial mound.  Scores of these were built as tombs for nobility from the 3rd century to the early 7th century.

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This one is officially designated as the tomb of Emperor Suinin, but I don’t know if there’s any evidence supporting that claim.  Japan’s Imperial Household Agency lists some 740 burial mounds as being imperial tombs, but excavations are forbidden and it’s widely thought that most of the designations – made in the 19th century – are spurious.  A few actually are supported by historical and archeological evidence though, so they aren’t all made up.

In any case, the mound is a literal island of greenery, and a sacrosanct one at that.  So rather than being all for the sake of one dead man, the enormous labor that must have been expended to build the tomb ended up producing something that will benefit a great many people for a long, long time.