The burial chamber held no swords, no mirrors, no jewels -- the usual grave goods of a high-ranking kofun burial were conspicuously absent. Instead, on a coffin stand rested a sarcophagus unlike any previously discovered in Japan: cloth hardened with layer upon layer of lacquer, painted black on the outside and red within. Inside lay the almost perfectly preserved mummified remains of a man in his sixties, complete with hair and clothing. His body had been wrapped in brocade, and gold threads were scattered from his chest to his head, which rested on a pillow woven from glass beads. The sophistication of the burial -- the lacquer coffin technique, the glass-bead pillow, the gold-threaded brocade -- pointed to someone of extraordinary status during the Asuka period, roughly the 7th century. On April 29, 1934, the Osaka Asahi Shimbun broke the news, and crowds descended on Mount Abu.

The discovery immediately became a bureaucratic disaster. Kyoto University's Faculty of Science had led the excavation through its Earthquake Observatory, but the scientists lacked archaeological training and handled the fragile site roughly. The Kyoto University Archeology Laboratory -- initially consulted but then barred from entering the excavation -- protested to the Ministry of Education. The Osaka Prefectural Government, watching the remains deteriorate in real time, filed its own complaints with the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Imperial Household Agency. The speculation that this might be the tomb of Fujiwara no Kamatari -- the 7th-century statesman who engineered the Taika Reform and founded the Fujiwara clan that would dominate Japanese politics for centuries -- only raised the stakes. The central government's ruling was decisive and extraordinary: the buried individual was unquestionably of the highest rank, possibly connected to the imperial line. Further investigation was declared lese majesty. The tomb was to be completely backfilled.

Before the order came down, the earthquake observatory had managed to take radiographic images and samples from the burial. But institutional rivalry trumped scientific inquiry. Rather than share this data with the archaeology department that could have analyzed it properly, the observatory filed everything away in its basement, where it sat unexamined. The circular tumulus itself -- originally 82 meters in diameter, ringed by a dry moat and rows of cylindrical haniwa clay figures -- was covered over and returned to anonymity. It was not until decades later that the accumulated evidence was reconsidered. The lacquer coffin construction, the glass-bead pillow, the gold-threaded garments, and the sheer scale of the tumulus all supported the Fujiwara no Kamatari hypothesis. In 1983, the site was designated a National Historic Site of Japan, and in 1989 the area was developed into a historic park.

Fujiwara no Kamatari, if indeed he rests beneath Mount Abu, was no ordinary nobleman. He was the architect of the Taika Reform of 645, a sweeping restructuring of Japanese government that centralized power under the emperor and dismantled the old clan-based political system. For this he was rewarded with the surname Fujiwara on his deathbed -- a name that would become synonymous with political power in Japan for the next five centuries. That a man of such consequence might lie in an unmarked hill between the cities of Takatsuki and Ibaraki, on the border of Osaka Prefecture's suburban sprawl, is a reminder that even the most powerful legacies can vanish beneath ordinary ground. The kofun sits quietly on Mount Abu today, its contents reburied, its questions officially unanswered -- a tomb that was found, then deliberately forgotten.