The modern inhabitants of the Khasi Hills in India still make use of megalithic monuments.  They set up a group of an odd number of menhirs, 3, 5, 7, 9, or 11, and in front of these two structures of dolmen form.  These are raised in honour of some important member of the tribe who has died, and whose spirit is thought to have done some good to the tribe.  If the benefits continue it is usual to increase the number of menhirs.

The earliest burials in Japan are marked by simple mounds of earth.  It was not until the beginning of the iron age that megalithic tombs came into use.  The true dolmen is not found in Japan, and all the known graves are corridor-tombs covered with a mound.  They are of four types.  First, we have a simple corridor with no separate chamber; secondly, a corridor broadening out at one side near the end; thirdly, a true chamber with a corridor of access; and fourthly, a type in which the corridor is preceded by an antechamber.  All four types occur in rough unworked stone, roofed with huge slabs, but a few examples of the third type are made of well-cut and dressed blocks.  The mounds are usually conical, though some are of a complex form shortly to be described.  Some of these contain stone sarcophagi.  The bodies were never cremated, but the bones are so damaged that it is impossible to say what the most usual position was.  Objects of bronze and iron together with pottery and ornaments were found in the tombs.

The more important tombs are of a more complicated type.  They seem to have contained the remains of emperors and their families.  They consist each of a circular mound, to which is added on one side another mound of trapezoidal form.  The megalithic tomb-chamber or the sarcophagus which sometimes replaces it lies in the circular part of the mound.  The total axial length of the basis of the whole mound is in a typical case—­that of Nara (Yamato)—­674 feet, the diameter of the round end being 420 feet.  The mounds have in most cases terraced sides, and are surrounded by a moat.  In early times it seems to have been the custom to slay or bury alive the servants of the emperor on his mound, but this was given up about the beginning of the Christian era.

These imperial double mounds seem to begin about two centuries before the Christian era, and to continue for five or six centuries after it.  Many of them can be definitely assigned to their owners, and others are attributed by tradition.  Thus a rather small mound at the foot of Mount Unebi (Yamato) is considered to be the burial place of the Emperor Jimmu, the founder of the Imperial dynasty, and annual ceremonies are performed before it.

The Japanese Emperors are still buried in terraced mounds, and in the group of huge stone blocks which have been placed on the mound of the Emperor Komei, who died in 1866, we may be tempted to see a survival of the ancient megalithic chamber.