The Story of How a Dead Man Saved the Living in Hokkaido (11 photos)

Meet Mount Asahi (Asahi-dake), the highest peak on Hokkaido Island at 2,291 meters. The crater of an active volcano. Bears. Fog. And Japan's strangest unsolved case, one that sends shivers down your spine even in summer.





July 1989. Two tourists from Tokyo got lost on the slopes of Asahi-dake. Rescuers were already preparing for the worst when a helicopter pilot spotted something incredible below: a huge SOS sign made from felled tree trunks. Each letter is 5 meters long. It's perfectly visible even from the sky.



The pilots rejoiced: "The most logical thing is that the guys were just playing it safe."





But when two exhausted, dehydrated tourists were found in a cave three kilometers from the sign and praised for their ingenuity, they simply didn't understand what was going on.

"We didn't build an SOS. We just sat and waited to die," they declared.



The police returned to the sign. And began digging deeper. Literally. They found a hole nearby. Inside were:

A backpack.

A voice recorder with cassette tapes.

A driver's license in the name of Kenji Iwamura, a 25-year-old man who disappeared here... in 1984.

Human remains, including a skull.



One of the tapes contained a recording made after 1987 (this was confirmed by aerial photographs, in which the sign was already visible). The man in the recording, at the end of his strength, is shouting abruptly:

SOS! Help! I'm on a cliff, I can't move! There's bamboo below—it's impossible to get through! Get me up from here! This is where I first saw a helicopter!



The sign was made of carefully chopped logs. No axe or saw was found nearby.



And most importantly: the bones found belonged to a physically weak, emaciated person. It would have taken a single, healthy athlete two days of hard work to construct such an SOS. But Iwamura (if it was him) fell off a cliff and broke his bones while still alive.



The paradox is that the sign worked. It saved two tourists in 1989. But it didn't save the man who built it.

Mount Asahi (Asahi-dake) is still open to tourists and remains the hallmark of Daisetsuzan National Park.



A cable car leads there, and the route to the summit is considered a beginner-level climb if you follow the correct trail.



But the catch remains. Two fateful twin rocks still exist on the mountain: Kinko-iwa (Safe Rock) and Nise-Kinko-iwa (False Safe Rock). In the fog, it's easy to confuse them. If you make a mistake, you'll end up in that bamboo thicket with no way out.



The SOS sign has long since disappeared. And the question remains hanging in the air: “Who created a saving sign for others, but did not wait for salvation himself?”