The Haunted Story of Kaze-fuki Tunnel

Deep in the hills of Kakegawa, Shizuoka Prefecture, three old brick-and-stone tunnels sit abandoned along a former mountain road once known as the Kakegawa-Odai route. Together they're known as the Kazefuki (or Fukibuki) Tunnels, and locals say the oldest of them still holds onto something from the era before it was sealed off.

The Real History

The Kazefuki tunnels were built to connect farming communities in the hills above Kakegawa to the markets of the Tōkaidō corridor below. Before the Meiji era, this was a poor farming district where residents grew what little rice and vegetables the land allowed, supplementing their income by burning charcoal and selling firewood. When tea cultivation took hold in the area in the later Meiji period (from roughly the 1880s onward), it improved local livelihoods — but farmers still had to carry their harvest over a steep, three-sided mountain barrier to reach the roads toward Kakegawa, on paths barely passable by horse and cart.

The first tunnel through this barrier was completed in 1902 (Meiji 35), built through the efforts of a local resident, Aono Ukichi, with financial backing from Okada Ryōichirō, chairman of the regional Hōtokusha mutual-aid organization — a Meiji-era self-help/agricultural cooperative movement. The tunnel system was expanded and rebuilt in stages: a second tunnel was added around 1929 (Shōwa 4), and the tunnels were renovated again in 1931 and 1957. For most of the twentieth century, this route (now numbered Shizuoka Prefectural Road 249) served as the main link between the farming hamlets above Kakegawa and the town below. It was finally superseded when a new road and modern tunnel opened in 1999 (Heisei 11), after which the old Kazefuki tunnels were closed and left to the forest. No single mass-casualty disaster during construction is documented in available records, though the tunnels' century of use as a difficult mountain route through poor, isolated farmland is well established.

The Haunting

Local ghost-story sites describe the old Kazefuki tunnel as one of Shizuoka's better-known “shinrei spots” (haunted locations), where the reported phenomenon is comparatively restrained: visitors describe strong, unexplained gusts of wind inside the tunnel even on still days, along with an unshakable sense of being watched or accompanied by an unseen presence, most often attributed to the figure of a woman. Some tellings connect the wind itself to the tunnel's name — “kaze” means wind — suggesting the haunting and the place name have become intertwined in local memory over time. Unlike many Japanese tunnel legends, there is no widely repeated account of a specific murder, suicide, or fatal accident anchoring the Kazefuki story; it reads more as an atmosphere built up around a genuinely isolated, decaying structure than a tale rooted in a single named tragedy.

Can You Visit?

The old Kazefuki tunnels have been closed to vehicle traffic since the new road opened in 1999 and now sit on an abandoned, overgrown roadway (haidō) reachable mainly on foot. As with any disused tunnel in Japan, structural deterioration, poor lighting, and unstable footing are real hazards, and visiting is at one's own risk rather than an officially sanctioned activity.