Qualla: Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1960, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley presented a gift of live bluegill sunfish to Crown Prince Akihito during a visit to the United States. The prince, a devoted ichthyologist, brought them home to Japan, where they were eventually released into lakes as game fish. The bluegills thrived. They devoured everything. Decades later, Lake Biwa -- a body of water older than most mountain ranges, four million years in the making, home to over a thousand documented species including sixty found nowhere else on Earth -- counts the bluegill and the black bass among the most serious threats to its ancient ecosystem. It is a peculiar modern footnote to a lake that has shaped Japanese civilization since before recorded history, a body of water so central to the culture that a fourteenth-century monk explained its very name as a gift from the gods.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: The Goddess and Her Instrument

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moja, CC BY-SA 3.0. The lake earned its name during the Edo period, and the most enduring explanation is poetic: its elongated shape resembles the biwa, a four-stringed Japanese lute. The two even share the same kanji characters. A fourteenth-century monk named Koso, a scholar at the great Tendai mo...

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Image: Moja | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: Four Million Years of Deep Time

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakkai at Japanese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lake Biwa is one of the oldest lakes on Earth. Formed by tectonic activity at least four million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene epoch, it belongs to a small club of ancient lakes -- alongside Baikal, Tanganyika, and a handful of others -- where uninterrupted existence has all...

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Image: Bakkai at Japanese Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: The Canal That Saved Kyoto

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beh, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Japan's capital moved from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1868, Kyoto's economy collapsed. The ancient city needed reinvention. The answer came from Lake Biwa. The Lake Biwa Canal, constructed in the late 1890s and expanded during the Taisho era, channeled the lake's waters westward thro...

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Image: Beh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: Invaders in the Water

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0. The ancient ecosystem is under modern assault. Black bass were introduced to Lake Biwa in 1925 as a sport fishing attraction, and the bluegills that arrived via Prince Akihito's Chicago gift joined them decades later. Both species are voracious predators that have devastated nati...

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Image: KENPEI | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Biwa: Japan's Ancient Inland Sea: Beaches, Marathons, and the View from Above

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gpwitteveen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The lake stretches across the heart of Shiga Prefecture, its surface area making it the dominant geographic feature of the region. Popular beaches line the northwestern shore, particularly at Shiga and Omi-Maiko. The Mizunomori Water Botanical Garden and the Lake Biwa Museum in K...

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Image: Gpwitteveen | CC BY-SA 4.0