This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommend it.

The mountains of Japan's Yamagata Prefecture and considered sacred by the Buddhists in the region.

These holy sites are sparsely populated, their forests interrupted only occasionally by isolated Buddhist temples.

Many of the men serving in the temples come seeking solitude and an escape from the modern world.

They were probably a bit startled then when a group of scientists and historians showed up in 1960 and asked to see their mummies.

The year before, several researchers investigating rumours of local mummies had discovered six mummified Buddhist monks in five temples in Yamagata Prefecture.

Soon after the discovery, several Japanese universities formed the

Investigating Committee for Mummies to study them.

The mummies were each kept on display in a place of honour in the temples,

and were maintained by temple monks. Unlike the Egyptian mummies that are most familiar to the Western world,

these Japanese mummies were not wrapped in cloth.

Instead, they were dressed in monks' robes,

their dried, leathery skin visible on their faces and hands.

Mummies were not unheard of in Japan.

In fact, four leaders of the Fujiwara tribe had been mummified in the 12th century and

was still kept in a great golden temple hall in northeastern Japan.

But mummification is a tricky business, especially in a climate as humid as Japan's.

The researchers hope to examine the temple mummies to uncover the details of this specific mummification process.

To prevent bacteria, insects and fungi from decomposing the mummy, the mummifier usually begins by extracting the internal organs to remove the most

tempting food sources for the critters of decay. So when the researchers began examining the Yamagata

mummies, they were startled to find that the monk's internal organs were still intact and

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