AT A GLANCE
Why go?
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.↗↗↗
A graveyard of samurai lords
The Kobayakawa rose as local lords of Nuta-shō (the Nuta estate) in southern Aki province and, as a closely allied branch, became one of the two pillars of Mōri power in the Chūgoku region. Beizan-ji was established as their family temple in 1235 when Kobayakawa Shigehira built a hall here, and over the generations the cemetery gathered the tombs of their leaders—the records trace the line from the founding Sanehira down to the seventeenth-generation head, Takakage (1533–1597), the third son of Mōri Motonari who was adopted into the house and became one of the most celebrated daimyō of the age of civil war.
