Inunaki Village

The legendary Inunaki Village, Japan – If you go there, you might never come out again.

The Inunaki Village

The Inunaki Village is supposedly situated somewhere around the Inunaki ridge, Fukuoka Prefecture, some one hundred miles north of Nagasaki in Japan. It’s a fictional village, and it has its name from Inu-Dog and Naki-lamenting, crying. The meaning in English would be howling dog, which connects to a well-known legend about a dog and its owner. But first I’d like to tell you the most famous story referring to the Inunaki Village and the Inunaki Tunnel.

The Inunaki Tunnel

Sometime in the early 1970s, a young couple was driving up the slopes of the Inunaki ridge. They were heading for Hisayama on the other side of the mountain, and to get there from Miyawaka they had to pass a narrow road up the hill. Just before the Inunaki tunnel, a clunking sound was heard from the car. As they came out on the far side, the engine died, and they found themselves stranded. They noticed a passage on the right side of the road. So they left their car and headed up the forest to seek help. After a short while, they came across a handwritten sign reading “The constitution of Japan does not apply beyond this point.”. The trail was getting more difficult, and overgrown as they continued, but a few hundred meters further in they suddenly entered a small village.

It was a town like they had never seen before. It seemed abandoned, the houses were all dark and dilapidated, and nobody could be seen from where they stood at the entrance. They couldn’t hear any sounds of people or animals. Even the wind had calmed. It was dead silent.

The horrors of the Inunaki pass

They slowly ventured in on the main road passing the shadows of the hovels. No one was to be seen or heard. The atmosphere was eerie. When they figured their curious hearts had had enough, and they decided to walk back again, something moved inside one of the houses. And suddenly a man stood on the porch of a big grey building not more than 30 meters away.

– Howdy there… Welcome to Inunaki village, he shouted.

And with just a few steps, incredibly long and fast, he suddenly appeared right in front of them.

– We love visitors here, he said… We just don’t like it when they leave us again.

And with a swift motion, he cut down the young boy from his neck straight down to the side of his belly with a sickle. The young man just looked at him astonished, before he collapsed to the ground.

The girl tried to back away but the old man seized her in a firm grip. He seemed to have some internal force that made his hands and arms stronger than anything she had ever felt before. With an almost inaudible groan, he lifted her straight up with one hand, and threw her down on the graveled street with such brutality, that she felt her ribs break.

When the sickle came down on her she turned her head towards the closest house. With horror, she saw what they hadn’t noticed before… Behind and between the small buildings there were dead people, and decaying corpses all around. The reason for the silence and the darkness was that everybody was dead… Killed by the mad, old man with the sickle.

– He killed all of them, she thought as the curved knife extinguished her life force in one single motion. The crazy old man murdered them all…

Nobody heard from them again. The white sedan still waits there, now covered with rust, and punctured tires, parked on the side of the road, right where the small pathway leads into the forest.

The Inunaki Village – The dog legend.

huge concrete dam in japan — The Inunaki dam

Now, let me get back to the legend about the dog, the very legend that could have given Inunaki its name:

A man killed his dog because it wouldn’t stop barking. Shortly after that, the man and his whole family were killed. The dog had just been warning his master about the approaching danger.

… And here’s another legend: When the Inunaki dam was constructed, the unscrupulous agents from the local Energy company, simply barricaded the houses of people who didn’t want to sell and didn’t want to move out. When the dam was ready, they were left to drown right there, in their own homes. And now their poor souls haunt the area.

This is one terrible legend, but there are many others…

The story of the young couple who was murdered in Inunaki village is famous all over Japan, and even outside of Japan. And it seems the supposed paranormal phenomena reach far beyond Inunaki.

In fact, the whole area around Miyawaka is regarded as very haunted. Nature is incredibly dense, with forests, hills, and difficult terrain making it an unforgiving area to venture into. The paths are narrow and can be tough to follow. The absence of houses and people gives the whole area a spooky character. And the many myths and stories about strange sightings and scary encounters within the dark woodland, attract all kinds of paranormal investigators, ambitious YouTubers, and teens just doing dare games.

Still, most hauntings are concentrated around the Inunaki Pass, and the tunnels passing under it…

Because there are two tunnels under the hill to connect the two sides of the mountain. One is old and short, less than a hundred meters. It’s tied to the surrounding valleys through a narrow road with a lot of hairpin curves. The other tunnel is newer, wider, straighter, and much longer.

The new tunnel, built in 1975, is heavily trafficked and doesn’t seem to be very disturbing. The ghosts are probably scared away by all the trucks and other heavy vehicles.

But the old tunnel is a different story.

It’s so scary, in fact, that in 2019, the Japanese horror-movie, Howling Village, with the tunnel as a main ingredient, scared the wits out of half of Japan, and a big part of the rest of the world.

Together with the film, a horror game called Inunaki Tunnel was released in November 2019.

Legends about the Inunaki Tunnel:

We’ve already mentioned three urban legends about the tunnel and the village, but there are many, many more. The common feature is that they all originate from modern times. Here are a few:

While working on the Inunaki tunnel project, an accident made the tunnel roof collapse killing more than a hundred workers.
At night time, you can hear screams and children crying from within the tunnel. Sometimes the voices call and implore you to follow them into the tunnel.
There are testimonies about finger- and handprints on the windshields after passing through the Inunaki tunnel.

The Inunaki Village came to be during the early Edo period. Persecuted and mistreated peasants choose to live in exile and cut all bonds with society.
The Village was ravaged by disease, and the authorities simply cut it off and prohibited anyone from entering or leaving the village, counting on everybody dying off in there before they could open it up again.
The isolated status of the town promoted inbreeding to a point where even simple human behavior and decency were abandoned.
The man with the sickle was a peasant who one day for no reason started attacking his fellow citizens. After having killed everybody in the village, he still waits for new arrivals.
Another legend tells about all the people of the village being prepared to kill anyone who enters their sanctuary. Tales about cannibalism are connected to this legend.
Inunaki Village once was a Leprosy colony.
The bridge just south of the dam is known as a suicide spot.
Anyone who goes into Inunaki Village never comes out alive.

… And there are others, as well as variants of these ones.

Just remember that none of these narratives are confirmed… They are all stories, told and spread in modern times.

So, are they true… The legends and the stories?

Local residents around the tunnel try to hinder gangs from driving up the abandoned road.

What do the locals say?

First of all, let’s check what the locals have to say about all this.

Lately, the locals have had quite a bit to say about the Inunaki tunnel. Since the film, Howling Village was released, the Inunaki tunnel has gained even stronger attraction to the public. Before the film, there were quite a lot of people coming to investigate the supposedly haunted spot. But after 2020, despite the Pandemic, the site has become something of an overcrowded throng.

The site is now full of litter, graffiti, and all kinds of leftovers from partying and drinking. Both outside and inside the tunnel. People living in the area have become scared to even approach the tunnel, not because of the hauntings and paranormal activity, but because there are gangs of youngsters, often drunk, driving the narrow roads, and gathering around the tunnel openings.

Or as one resident of the area said to the local newspaper…

– Every day, young people hang out in the woods, close to the tunnel. They are throwing away their trash where they stand, drinking, and making a nuisance, one man says to the Nishinippon Shimbun newspaper. We are scared to even go there as it stands.

unfakely.com — The Castle of Inunaki Gobekkan ruins. From mid-1800.

From February, when the film Howling Village premiered, to May 2020 the police made 182 interventions… Compared to 0 the three months before that.

The whole area is thought of as a paranormal hot spot, but not by the locals. They just want to be left in peace, with or without ghosts. The idea of haunted tunnels and villages does not come from them.

What do the experts say?

You can check for yourself. On YouTube, there are numerous videos of people who went there, filmed, heard some strange noises from inside the tunnel, and then with an apologetic expression explain why nothing special turned up in the footage.

In February 2020 the Fukuoka Broadcasting Corporation sent a small group of journalists, who with the authorization of the Miyawaka City Council approached the Old Inunaki tunnel from the Miyawaka side. On that side, the northeast, the tunnel is sealed all the way to the tunnel roof and you cannot enter. Much like any other visitor, the group heard strange noises from the inside of the tunnel. They also registered a drop in the temperature from 12° centigrade to 9 when closing in on the tunnel opening. That would depend on the stable soil temperature. A difference in air temperature from outside a cave to inside is not extraordinary in any way. They didn’t really find anything.
Other than that, I’ve not been able to find any serious paranormal investigation. One reason is probably the closed-off area, with frequent police controls, CCTV cameras, fences, and gates, and a road that is in decay after years of negligence.

dirty and filthy — The unpleasant inside of the tunnel.

Inunaki tunnel from Hisayama side — Entrance from southwest/Hisayama side.

The incoherence in the stories.

The howling as in the word Naki, and the legend about the man who shot his dog. This tale has an infinite number of variations. The attackers are a black dragon, mercenaries, a snake, other dogs, a neighbor, etc. And so is it with all of the legends around the Inunaki tunnel and the Inunaki village. They vary quite a lot depending on who you hear them from. The car, the abandoned sedan, can be found before the tunnel, after the tunnel, or before you arrive at the village. The path to get there is sometimes a road, while other times it’s not even a pathway…

The true and confirmed facts about Inunaki village.

There once was a real Village called Inunaki at the Valley of Inunaki… Or really Inunaki Danimura or Inunakiya. It was established during the Edo Period, and it lived well from producing ceramic products and manufacturing steel. Later, coal mining was established and a Castle called Inunaki-gobekkan was founded in 1865, the ruin still stands today. The town was abandoned when the Inunaki dam was created in 1970, and the population moved to the neighboring Wakita area. This village has nothing to do with the ghost town described above.

Inunaki Danimura before the construction of the dam.

The true and confirmed facts about Inunaki Tunnel.

The old tunnel was built during and after WW2, possibly with POWs as a part of the labor force. It was completed in 1949 and then replaced with a new tunnel in 1975. This latter made driving from one side of the mountain to the other, much easier, and faster. As the old road wasn’t used anymore, and it soon became a very dangerous passage with all the curves, high mountain sides, and lack of maintenance, it was blocked with solid steel gates from both directions.

On 6th December 1988, a criminal gang murdered the factory worker, Koichi Umeyama near the tunnel. The gang had asked Umeyama for his car. When he refused, they pulled him out of his car, dragged him to the tunnel, and killed him. They then set his body on fire. The cruelty and lack of even the basic sign of humanity shown by the murderers is well documented and was, at the time, told to a terrified, and appalled public. All perpetrators were arrested shortly after, and at the trial in 1991, they were all sent to life imprisonment.

The Old Inunaki tunnel is not long from one side to the other. It’s completely sealed off from the Miyawaka/northeast side. From the Hisayama/southwest side the entrance is closed only to a certain height, and it’s possible to slide over the concrete blocks and get in. You will still have to access the tunnel from the east side since both roads leading up to the Inunaki tunnel are closed.

So, if there’s not really anything spooky at all about the tunnel, where is all the fuss coming from?

It seems that the Inunaki Village story originated from an anonymous letter to Nippon TV in 1999. The writer of the letter tells about a small path, easy to overlook, in the neighborhood of the old Inunaki tunnel. He then goes on to describe the sign with the text “The Japanese constitution is not in effect past this point.”, the young couple that was murdered, and the violent villagers.

The Inunaki Ridge and the tunnel first became famous for its paranormal activity after the tragic death of Koichi Umeyama in 1988.

The stories about ghosts, howling dogs, and lawless villages aren’t older than that. A little more than 30 years. Of course, hauntings do not necessarily increase with the passing of time. I suppose a place can become haunted in modern times too, even right now.

But the substance to claim this spot is more paranormal than any other is just too weak. At least, in this case, the proof, and documentation is practically nonexistent… Nothing, nada.

Or as one representative for the Miyawaka city expresses herself:

– Students from Kyushu University come here to do vegetation surveys every year. Boy Scouts are also frequent guests. All over Chikuho, nature lovers come to climb the mountain stream, and of course, to fish. The Yamame trout is abundant, as is natural wasabi in the river beds.

The Inunaki River and surrounding area are just another example of the beautiful countryside and remote naturalistic sceneries that still can be found in one of the most densely populated countries in the world… Japan.

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