Talk:Kofun

Added China/Korea

Added section that mentions kofuns existing in China and Korea. Intranetusa 02:27, 16 May 2007 (UTC) Corrected minor spelling/grammar errors.Ivan 996 20:35, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Global disappearance?

Does this apply to Korea and China as well...

Keyhole-shaped kofun disappeared in the late 6th century AD, probably due to the drastic reformation in the Yamato court, where Nihon Shoki records the introduction of Buddhism during this era.

...or only to Japan? Patronanejo (talk) 02:10, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Highly unlikely cognate

I have found nothing that so much as passingly refers to the possibility--absurdly remote though it is--that kofun is a distant cognate of coffin. I am in no way fixed on pursuing evidence of a link; I am interested in any information regarding investigation of the etymological similarity--or any conclusions thereof. Patronanejo (talk) 02:18, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

@Patronanejo there is a clear etymology of both so this is almost impossible. Immanuelle ❤️💚💙 (talk to the cutest Wikipedian) 06:27, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

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Non-Japanese kofun?

The intro says that kofun exist outside of Japan as well, but then the entire article is about Japanese kofun and, while tumulus tombs do exist in other countries, if you search for the word "kofun" in any scholarly database, you are going to get Japanese kofun. I really really doubt anyone is calling tumulus outside of Japan "kofun" (in English. Kofun in Japanese can, but generally doesn't, mean simply "ancient tomb" so it might happen, but we need to base our decisions off what things are called in English). I really question the inclusion of non-Japanese information in this article, since we already have Tumulus which covers a wide variety of countries, and none of them other than Japanese tombs are called kofun.

One exception would be a reference to the Korean keyhole-shaped tombs which some scholars suspect were influenced by Japanese culture, but even those are not called kofun in English. See: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/756453

Also, someone should confirm what that first citation actually says, because it says it's citing an entry titled "zenpō-kōen-fun", not kofun in general, so I wonder if it truly does support the claim of that first line (I don't have access to it otherwise I'd do it). The ja article is using the standard kofun entry of that same encyclopedia to say the word kofun in Japanese is not used for a lot of other types of similar tombs. Erynamrod (talk) 16:47, 3 December 2025 (UTC)