Inunaki Pass and the Inunaki Village legend

The old Inunaki Tunnel, between Hisayama and Miyawaka in Fukuoka Prefecture, is known as a ghost spot and tied to an internet-era legend of a hidden village. Separately, a real murder took place at the tunnel in 1988.

The old Inunaki Tunnel runs between the town of Hisayama and the city of Miyawaka in Fukuoka Prefecture. It was the scene of a real crime. Japanese Wikipedia records that on 9 December 1988 Fukuoka police arrested five youths aged 16 to 19 on suspicion of murder and unlawful confinement. According to the investigation, on the evening of 6 December in Tagawa, two of them asked a 20-year-old factory worker on his way home to lend them his car. When he refused, the group took the car and the man, held him at a friend's house, then took him to the old tunnel in Hisayama, bound his hands and feet, poured petrol on him and burned him to death. The ringleader's life sentence became final in 1991.

The legend is a separate thing. English Wikipedia says the Inunaki Village legend was first mentioned online in 1999, when an unsigned letter reached Nippon TV. It told of a couple killed in the village and pressed the crew to go there. The letter's title was "The Village in Japan That Isn't Part of Japan".

Takashi Shimizu, interviewed by Rue Morgue about the film Howling Village, says young people kept visiting the site, and that when the internet era began the stories grew and gained embellishments. Ghost tales and legends followed: a village wiped from history lies past the tunnel, and anyone who steps into it is set upon by villagers and never gets back. That, Shimizu says, is how the Inunaki Village legend started.

The Nishinippon Shimbun reported in 2020 that young people visiting the old tunnel at night were causing repeated trouble with local residents, apparently prompted by a horror film about the site released that February. The paper says cars with out-of-prefecture plates stood out, rubbish was scattered nearby, and some visitors broke through fences put up to keep people out. It adds that the site was already known as a ghost spot, that a murder had happened there, and that visitors seem to come to stream videos or test their nerve.