Mahoroba is an ancient Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 word describing a far-off land full of bliss and peace

Peace

Peace is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict. Commonly understood as the absence of hostility, peace also suggests the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, the...

. It is roughly comparable to the western concepts of arcadia

Arcadia (utopia)

Arcadia refers to a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The term is derived from the Greek province of the same name which dates to antiquity; the province's mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an...

, a place surrounded by mountains full of harmony and quiet.

Mahoroba is now written only in hiragana

Hiragana

is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...

 as まほろば. The origins of the word are not clear; it is described in a poem in the ancient Kojiki

Kojiki

is the oldest extant chronicle in Japan, dating from the early 8th century and composed by Ō no Yasumaro at the request of Empress Gemmei. The Kojiki is a collection of myths concerning the origin of the four home islands of Japan, and the Kami...

 (古事記) as being the perfect place in Yamato

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

:
|----- bgcolor="#DDDDDD"
! colspan="3"| Poem from the Kojiki
|-
! align="center" | Japanese
! align="center" | Romanized version
|-
| align="center" | 大和は

国のまほろば

たたなずく

あおかき山ごもれる

やまとしうるわし。
| align="center" |
Yamato wa

Kuni no mahoroba

Tatanazuku

Aokaki-yama gomoreru

Yamato shi uruwashi.
|}>
Note that the Kojiki itself did not use hiragana; the above is a modernized version.