The Submerged Buddhist Temple of Tanjo-ji in Chiba Prefecture, Japan

The Submerged Buddhist Temple of Tanjo-ji in Chiba Prefecture, Japan

The Tanjo-ji is a temple belonging to Nichiren Buddhism at the town of Kominato in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. Nichiren was born in 1222 at a fishing village near the town, and became a Buddhist priest who developed the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism, a branch school of Mahayana Buddhism. When his mother gave birth to Nichiren, according to legends, water for bathing the newborn baby welled up in a garden, lotus flowers came out on the seashore, and plenty of sea breams jumped over the sea. The sea in front of the Tanjo-ji is now named ‘Sea Bream Inlet’, a Japanese natural monument registered by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, where we still could see schools of jumping sea breams or opaleyes. Just before or after his death in 1282, the original temple of Tanjo-ji was built on the site of Nichiren’s birthplace or of his mother’s house, but the temple is said to have flooded and submerged by tsunamis with earthquakes and to have moved to where it is at present. Indeed, a historical document says that the 1605 Nankai Earthquake and following tsunamis damaged and destroyed the area around the bay of Kominato. In the commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the birth of Nichiren, the Kamogawa City Council and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, which is a member institution of the UNESCO UNITWIN Network for Underwater Archaeology, started the underwater survey for the submerged site in the spring of 2019. Because sites of the submerged temple or fishing villages are supposed to be on the bottom of very shallow seas near the coast, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology has developed a remotely steerable unmanned surface vehicle with a side scan sonar and an underwater camera for its survey.

Akifumi Iwabuchi

Hayato Kondo

Takatsugu Tashiro

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

November 2021

Iwabuchi, Akifumi, Hayato Kondo, and Takatsugu Tashiro. 2021. “The Submerged Buddhist Temple of Tanjo-ji in
Chiba Prefecture, Japan.” Edited by Brian Fahy, Hans Van Tilburg, Bill Jeffery, T. Kurt Knoerl, and Riley Smith. In
Proceedings of Fourth Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage: Keelung,Taiwan, and
Virtual, November 1-5, 2021. The Museum of Underwater Archaeology URL: https://apconf-much.org/proceedings/exhibits/show/apconf-muchproceedings/item/671

Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage