Toro Ruins

Toro Ruins preserves the remains of a Yayoi-period rice-farming settlement dating from roughly the 1st to 3rd century CE, one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of ancient wet-rice agriculture in Japan. The site was uncovered in 1943 when a wartime factory excavation exposed wooden foundations and rice paddy field boundaries beneath the modern city, and postwar excavations through the late 1940s and 1950s established it as a landmark site for understanding Yayoi-period village life, prompting some of the earliest large-scale interdisciplinary archaeological surveys conducted in Japan. What is preserved and reconstructed on site includes several pit dwellings with thatched roofs rebuilt over their original excavated foundations, raised-floor storehouses used to keep harvested rice above ground and away from moisture and rodents, and a network of ancient rice paddies whose field boundaries and irrigation channels were mapped from the original wooden stakes and dikes found intact in the waterlogged soil. The adjoining Shizuoka City Toro Museum, opened in the 1950s and later rebuilt, displays excavated wooden farming tools, pottery, and one of the best-preserved sets of Yayoi-period agricultural implements found in Japan, thanks to the anaerobic, waterlogged conditions of the original site that prevented wood from decaying. The museum's exhibits are organized chronologically, from the discovery of the site through successive excavation campaigns to a full reconstruction of daily Yayoi village life. Outside, several rice paddies are still cultivated seasonally using techniques modeled on the ancient fields, and the surrounding park allows visitors to walk among the reconstructed dwellings and storehouses at close range.