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Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Nagano
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A local innkeeper picked up a 30-cm, 5-kg fossil molar at Lake Nojiri in 1948, thinking it looked like a strange hot-water bottle. It proved to be a Naumann’s elephant tooth—and sparked excavations in 1962.
Writer Naka Kansuke spent 25 days on Biwa Island in Lake Nojiri in 1911. When he needed supplies, he reportedly signaled the shore with flags: white meant rice, and red meant miso.
At Tategahana, Ice Age people made tools not just from stone: excavators found wooden implements and scrapers, knives and flakes fashioned from Naumann’s elephant and Yabe’s giant-deer bones.
At Tategahana, a wooden spear-shaped tool was found with an elephant skull, and ribs lay with a bone cleaver. Researchers cite these pairings as circumstantial support for an Ice Age butchery-site hypothesis.
The 5th Lake Nojiri excavation, in 1973, recorded 1,107 participants—a remarkable crowd for a scientific dig. The project has involved citizens as well as specialists in investigating the lake’s Ice Age past.
By 2018, excavations had recovered 15,989 finds. Researchers used the Naumann’s elephant molars to estimate that the fossils represent at least 69 individual elephants.
In 1934, Lake Nojiri became part of a clever water loop: pumps lifted spring meltwater from the Sekikawa River into the lake for summer irrigation, then winter releases flowed back down to generate electricity.
When water is released from Lake Nojiri for power generation, the level can fall enough to expose the fossil-rich Tategahana lakebed. That drawdown has allowed archaeologists to excavate a site normally underwater.
Around 1922, Canadian missionary Daniel Norman began a summer colony in Kamiyama on Lake Nojiri’s southwest shore. He had left an increasingly popular Karuizawa, seeking a cool, wooded setting reminiscent of Canada.
On Biwa Island, floating in Lake Nojiri, Uga Shrine is traditionally said to have been founded in 730. Its present main sanctuary is said to date to 1655.
Lake Nojiri also has the old poetic name Fuyō-ko. Its many inlets and projecting capes create an intricate outline that was likened to a fuyō leaf.
Lake Nojiri is thought to have begun when deposits from Kurohime Volcano dammed an old valley. Later uplift along the lake’s western side helped shape the lake we see today.
