During the past 10 or so years, my photography work has taken me to many places around the world, particularly to arid regions in North and South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where I have photographed some unique and mysterious rock formations. Most of these places have been far removed from any human habitats, forcing me to sleep out in the open.
Spending quiet nights in the embrace of these mammoth rocks, I have occasionally been visited by feelings of reverence and euphoria, not unlike what I sometimes feel when on the precincts of a Shinto shrine.

I remember one particular night when I slept on top of a rock that the blistering sun had heated into a warm bed so that I could pass the cool evening in comfort. As I fell into that nebulous region straddling sleep and wakefulness, I found myself being carried into a state of ecstasy. My body became filled with the sky above and the ground below, fusing me with my surroundings. I later found out that many of these places are ancient, native holy grounds often rich in underground mineral resources.

Japan also has its fair share of sacred places rich in mineral resources. Paleozoic rocks containing abundant schists, for instance, are distributed over a belt-shaped area that runs from east to west across the mountainous, mid-region of the Kii Peninsula and extends westward over the Kii Channel, stretching from east to west across Shikoku Island and reaching Kyushu Island to the west. Strangely, the distribution of such minerals as gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc-iron-sulfide, mercury and others coincides with the distribution of many sacred places of the esoteric Shingon Buddhist sect, founded by Kobo Daishi in the early ninth century. They include Koyasan, a mountain on the Kii Peninsula where the highly revered priest established a monastic center for the practice of meditation, along with the 88 temples in Shikoku which constitute his 88 Temple Circuit, or Japan's most famous pilgrimage.

It seems that many of the religious places on mountains and hillsides where temples and shrines are located have a direct relationship with the presence of underground mineral resources. In some of these places, a rock is the principal object of worship, a phenomenon seen widely in India and Southeast Asia. While I am not sure of the larger meaning behind it, I know that the subterranean minerals in these places have long been sheltered against human exploitation because of the sacred standing of the sites under which they lie. These minerals may actually produces some kind of unknown energy that manifests itself positively on things on the surface.

There are sacred places of the American Hopi Indians where digging deep into the ground to unearth what is buried there has been strictly prohibited by tradition handed down for centuries. Where digging has taken place, a large amount of uranium has been found. Uranium has also been discovered in some of the sacred places of the Havasupai Indians and in Kakadu, holy land of the Australian Aborigines. Respective governments have been mining uranium in these places despite the strong resistance of the natives.

Besides causing damage to the local environment and to the health of the local residents, mining in such long-protected holy grounds has led to destruction and exposure of radiation worldwide. Hopi uranium was used in the first nuclear test at Los Alamos and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have the feeling that there is also uranium in Tibet, where a similar ban on mining has been observed.

Future prosperity, which is often strongly tied to nuclear power generation, has been achieved at a huge cost and future generations may pay the price while being forced to clean up the mess their predecessors left behind. Since we have yet to come up with a suitably safe way to dispose of the growing amount of high-level radioactive waste containing neptunium-237, with its half-life of 2.14 million years, we simply solidify the waste in glass and bury it in concrete-encased disposal sites underground.

While some nuclear plants must be retired after 40 years of operation, we cannot decide on how to demolish them and secure the safety of the sites after these facilities are scrapped. Who of us can say with any confidence that glass and concrete will endure the powerful forces of nature for 2.14 million years so that the radioactive waste will never bring about serious damage to the environment?

We might just as well designate the sites where nuclear waste is disposed and where nuclear power plants and facilities stand, into "sacred places" marked by hanging a straw rope around them and passing on to coming generations the warning that they must never approach these places assuming that they continue to inhabit an earth that is hospitable to human life.