To understand what was buried here, you have to understand the system that built it. In the late Nara period, Japan's centralized government imposed the Ritsuryo system across the provinces, standardizing local administration with remarkable precision. Each province received a kokufu -- a capital complex housing the kokushi, the governor dispatched from the central court, along with offices for farming, finance, policing, and military affairs. A provincial school, garrison, and tax storehouses clustered around the periphery. It was bureaucracy made physical: a compound of wooden buildings where imperial authority met local reality. In 715 AD, each province was further subdivided into districts of two to twenty townships. Iga Province, small and mountain-ringed, received its own version of this administrative machinery, planted on the fluvial terrace of the Tsuge River at the confluence of three waterways, with the ancient Tokaido highway passing just to the south.

The excavated site tells a story of constant reinvention across roughly 250 years. The complex measured 200 meters east to west and 150 meters north to south, divided into 40-meter squares separated by narrow ditches. In its first phase, from the late eighth century to the early ninth, wooden buildings arranged in a U-shape formed a central courtyard -- a main hall flanked by two side buildings on each side, their pillars set directly into the earth. The second phase, lasting into the mid-tenth century, trimmed the side buildings to one per side but added a formal gate to the south. By the third phase, foundation stones replaced the old earthen post holes -- a sign of architectural advancement. The fourth and final phase, from the late tenth century into the eleventh, showed a complex in decline: only the main hall and one eastern side building remained. Then silence. The provincial capital was abandoned, and the buildings eventually dissolved into the landscape.

The confirmation came from Sue ware -- gray, high-fired pottery produced across ancient Japan. Excavators found numerous shards bearing ink inscriptions, the written residue of a bureaucratic operation that generated paperwork even on its dishware. These inscriptions confirmed the site as a kokufu and dated its occupation from the late Asuka period through the middle Heian period, roughly the end of the eighth century to the mid-eleventh century. The shards were the smoking gun that connected the old place names to an actual physical location. In 2009, the Japanese government designated the site a National Historic Site, giving formal protection to a place that had managed to protect itself through obscurity for nine hundred years.

Today, the Iga Kokuchō ruins are backfilled and have mostly returned to rice paddy. There is no towering castle keep or reconstructed gatehouse here -- just the quiet geometry of irrigated fields on a river terrace, five minutes on foot from Sanagu Station on the JR West Kansai Main Line. The site sits in the same basin that later gave rise to Iga's famous ninja clans, the warrior families who governed themselves through the Iga ikki confederation until Oda Nobunaga's invasion in 1581. But the kokufu predates that era by centuries, belonging to a time when this valley answered not to local warlords but to distant emperors, and governance arrived in the form of court-appointed officials who made their home in wooden halls above the river. The rice grows over all of it now, but the ground remembers.