On the map, Komoyamazuka looks like a green thumbprint pressed into the urban sprawl of Sakai, and that is not far off the truth. It is one of the keyhole-shaped burial mounds in the great tomb cluster that gives the city its place on the World Heritage list, an old mound, likely from the fifth century, wearing a moat and a crown of trees. Nobody is quite sure who lies inside many of these mounds, since archaeologists have rarely been allowed to dig, and the names we use are often a mix of old tradition and later guesswork.
Sakai has always been a place of stubborn pride. In the late Middle Ages it was a free merchant city, run by a council of wealthy traders and protected by a moat of its own, and it was the port through which Portuguese goods, firearms and Christianity reached the Japanese interior. The city made its name through trade and craft, and the knives you see in kitchens around the world, with their sharp, hand-forged edges, still come in large part from here. If you have a free hour, visiting a knife shop is a lesson in quiet engineering. Sen no Rikyu, the tea master who shaped the whole idea of the tea ceremony, was also born in Sakai, which seems fitting for a city that valued refinement as much as profit.
The ride that begins here heads to Daigo-ji, east of Kyoto. The temple dates to the ninth century and holds a five-storey pagoda that is among the oldest standing buildings in the Kyoto area, finished in the middle of the tenth century. The warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi held a lavish cherry-blossom party on its slopes in 1598, a few months before he died, and the flowering trees still draw crowds each April. To get there you cross the whole urban corridor between Osaka and Kyoto, and it is not a ride to savour. Take the expressways, accept the tolls, and save your energy for the quieter hills beyond Fushimi.
Sakai is a big place, so you will find fuel, food and a bed with no trouble at all. The one thing to watch is the traffic: it is thick on weekday mornings, and parking for motorcycles is less generous than in other parts of Japan, so check that your hotel can host a bike before you arrive.