Mount Nokogiri quarry

The quarried stone is called Bōshū stone (房州石): a tuffaceous sandstone to coarse tuff, rich in black scoria, pale pumice and rock fragments. At Mount Nokogiri it comes from the Takeoka Formation (Kazusa Group). The variety from near the summit of Nokogiri is reputed to be the best.

The quarries as a whole extend about 1.8 km east to west around the summit, over heights of several tens of metres (survey by Nishida and Tomita, 2013, cited by Takahashi et al., 2015). The site straddles the boundary between the city of Futtsu, to the north, and the town of Kyonan, to the south.

According to the notice of the Hiratsuka City Museum (2005), extraction is said to have been started in the Ansei era (1854–1860) by stonecutters from Izu, and to have stopped in 1985. At its peak, about 80 % of the population of Kanaya, at the foot of the mountain, is said to have worked in the stone industry. The end is attributed to the spread of concrete (city of Futtsu) or to tighter nature-protection rules (Japanese Wikipedia).

The walls bear two families of marks: pickaxe marks (manual work), then chainsaw marks, the chainsaw having been introduced in 1958. On the wall of the Iwabutai (“stone stage”), a line marks the shift from one to the other. At the end of the manual period, a stonecutter produced 8 to 10 blocks a day; with the chainsaw, 80 to 100, about ten times more.

From the end of the Edo period to the Shōwa era, the stone was used for the installations of the Yokosuka naval port and the port of Yokohama, for the fortifications of Tokyo Bay, for Yasukuni Shrine and for Waseda University; it was also shaped into braziers and lanterns. At the foot of the mountain, in Kanaya, walls and storehouses of Bōshū stone survive.

The whole mountain lies within the grounds of Nihon-ji temple, whose foundation is traditionally attributed to 725. There stand the great stone Buddha (Daibutsu, 31.05 m, rebuilt in 1969), a relief Kannon carved into a quarry wall, and the Jigoku Nozoki (“view of hell”) lookout. The quarry remains have become a tourist site.

On 16 July 2021, the Agency for Cultural Affairs selected Mount Nokogiri as a candidate region for the Japan Heritage label. On 1 September 2026, the press reported that the review of its certification had begun, with a decision expected around December 2026: at the date of this entry, the label has not been granted.