The Fujiwara Palace was Japan's first permanent capital, built in 694 and abandoned thirty years later when the court moved to Nara. What remains are foundation stones in a flat field. In spring, that field fills with canola — a yellow so complete it seems implausible against the mountains that surround the Yamato plain. There are no fences, no ticket booths, no crowds on ordinary days. The site is simply there, open to anyone who walks in from the road. The foundation stones sit among the flowers like punctuation in a sentence whose language has been lost. You walk between them and try to reconstruct what stood here, and mostly you cannot. This is one of the advantages of Asuka over the more famous sites of Nara. It is not explained. It is not managed into legibility. The canola flowers in spring and the cosmos in autumn impose their own scale on the ruins, which turns out to be appropriate — the flowers do not diminish the history, they simply place it in a longer time than the one we usually inhabit.