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Yoshino Kumano NP, Wakayama
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The sea cave at Senjojiki’s edge is the Kinki region’s only known breeding roost for long-fingered bats; more than 30,000 have been recorded there. Pregnant females arrive in June, and young bats begin flying in late July.
A 1793 scroll painted after an onsen trip shows the Shirahama coast. Wakayama Prefectural Museum curators identify its cloud-shaped rocky shelf as Senjojiki—and spot 2 people sitting there.
Senjojiki’s roughly 16-million-year-old seabed preserves current-made ripples and fossilized burrows. Seen edge-on, some burrows turn vertically through the rock—a 3-D glimpse of how ancient seabed animals moved.
The inland edge of Senjojiki was underwater about 120,000 years ago. It is now part of a raised coastal terrace: uplift lifted the old wave-cut seabed, while Pacific surf shaped its broad, stepped shelves.
Senjojiki means “a thousand tatami mats.” The rock shelf covers about 4 hectares, and the name evokes its enormous, flat spread—not a literal count of mats.
