Chuai is a name from the mists of early Japanese legend. The Chronicles describe him as the fourteenth emperor, husband of the formidable Empress Jingu, who is said to have led an army against the Korean peninsula while pregnant, and he died on the way in Kyushu. Historians doubt that he existed as described, but tradition places his tomb here, in the town of Fujiidera, in the heart of the Furuichi tomb group, and the Imperial Household Agency treats it as his resting place. The mound is a keyhole shape with a moat, and the trees on it are thick and old, as at the other great tombs of this region.
Fujiidera is the smallest sort of Japanese city, a dense grid of houses, shopping streets and railway lines, wedged between Habikino and Kashiwara. It takes its name from the temple of Fujii-dera, a Kannon temple on the old pilgrimage circuit of western Japan, whose gardens are famed for wisteria in spring, and the name itself means the temple of the wisteria well. You can walk from the temple to the tomb and see, in an easy afternoon, two very different kinds of Japanese sacred ground.
The Furuichi group is the sister of the Mozu group in Sakai, and together they form the World Heritage site of the mounded tombs of the ancient Japanese. The mounds here were built in the fourth to fifth centuries, a time of huge political change, and some of the largest are the tombs of rulers who seem to have commanded the whole plain. Walking around the moat on a quiet morning, you feel how unlikely these mounds are in such a busy region.
Your ride takes you to Todai-ji in Nara, across the Ikoma and Kongo hills, and it is a little more interesting than the urban start suggests. You leave the plain via one of the passes on the east side and climb into a different world of forest, shrine steps and slow bends before dropping into the Nara basin. The hall that shelters the Great Buddha is among the largest wooden buildings in the world, and the surrounding park is full of tame deer.
Fuel and food are plentiful on the Osaka side, and the stations get fewer only if you take the very smallest mountain lanes. Weekends in spring and autumn bring heavy traffic toward Nara, so try to be early. Use the time before the crowds to enjoy the calm of the tomb.