From the road you would never know it was a tomb. Nakayamazuka is a keyhole-shaped burial mound in the Furuichi cluster of the great Mozu-Furuichi tomb group in southern Osaka Prefecture, a landscape of ancient mounds built between about the fourth and sixth centuries AD, when the Yamato rulers were consolidating power in Japan. UNESCO listed forty-nine of the tombs in 2019. Each is a hill of earth, once faced with stones and lined with clay figures called haniwa, surrounded by a moat, and many have a shape that can only be recognised from above: a round mound joined to a trapezoid, like the head and body of a keyhole.
The oddity of the place is that the mounds now sit in the middle of ordinary suburbs. Houses, rice fields, schools, and railway lines press up against the moats, and a mound you took for a wooded park turns out to be the grave of someone who ruled the land fifteen hundred years ago. Most are managed by the Imperial Household Agency, which restricts access, so you view them from the path around the moat and from viewing points rather than climbing up. Early morning gives you quiet paths and herons standing on the water.
The riding here is urban. Osaka's southern suburbs are a dense web of one-way streets and narrow roads, so expect slow progress, many traffic lights, and cyclists and scooters weaving everywhere. To the east the Kongo and Katsuragi hills rise, and the roads that climb them are far better for riding, with forests, bends and mountain temples, while to the south lies the Kii Peninsula, where the ride list leads to the pilgrimage mountains of Kumano and Fudarakusan-ji. Spring brings cherry blossoms and a mild wind, and summer is hot and humid with a wet season in June.
Fuel is no problem in this part of Japan, since the towns of Habikino, Fujiidera and Kashihara have stations on the main roads, and convenience stores sell coffee and rice balls. Many local shrines, such as Domyoji Tenmangu, offer a quiet place to rest.
These are graves, so keep to the paths, keep the engine quiet near the moat and walk the last stretch.