The Akiyoshi plateau or Akiyoshidai (秋吉台), is a 93 square kilometre area of karst topography in Yamaguchi Prefecture at the extreme western end of Honshū island, Japan. Much of the area was protected as a Quasi National Park in 1955, and a portion is a Special Natural Monument.
Akiyoshidai is served by a natural history museum, visitor centre, resthouse, youth hostel and park headquarters building, and is traversed by a scenic roadway and several walking trails. Events include a fireworks festival in July, a Karst Walk in November, and an annual burning off of dry grasses in February called Yamayaki.
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Uplifted reef limestones of Paleozoic Carboniferous to Permian age were thickened by overfolding during the Akiyoshi orogenic movement some 250 million years ago. Subsequent erosion since Pliocene, 5 million years ago has created an undulating karst landscape dimpled with many dolines and countless limestone pinnacles up to 2m in height. Beneath the surface lie hundreds of caves, a few of them quite significant. Fossils of Pleistocene age from the caves include the Japanese rhinoceros, Stegodont elephant and Young tiger, and numerous animals from the last interglacial period.
Towards the southern end of Akiyoshidai is the cave Akiyoshi-do, named by Emperor Showa (Hirohito) in 1925 when he was Crown Prince. This spacious cave is up to 50 meters wide and has 8.7 kilometers of passages, making it the second-longest in Japan. About 1 kilometer of the lower cource of the cave is accessible to tourists along a walkway and bridge system, entering at the cave's lowest point from where an underground river flows out and exiting via an artificial elevator and/or a tunnnel. This portion of the cave is well decorated with a variety of large and colorful speleothems.
Akiyoshi Plateau and Akiyoshi Cave information pamphlet
Akiyoshidai (秋吉台), meaning Akiyoshi Plateau, in Yamaguchi Prefecture is a Quasi-National Park of Japan. It is a part of the largest karst topography in Japan.
Akiyoshi is made of limestone, which is believed to have developed from coral reefs back in the Paleozoic era. Trees said to have appeared in the area for the first time 500,000 years ago. Many fossils from ancient Japanese rhinoceros, tigers, and elephants have been escavated from the plateau, giving scientists some idea of what sorts of creatures first inhabited the region.
Because the area is made of limestone, Akiyoshi Cave, the largest cave in Japan, formed over a span of 300,000 years. Today the cave is estimated to be 420,000 cubic meters.
Akiyoshidai is largely covered with grass. Its grassland is the second largest in Japan and is kept by burning off dead grass in February. You can see thousands of limestones all around Akiyoshidai, as is characteristic of karst.
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