These stories first appeared in the Japan Times, Dec. 14, 2008
Jomon
This story spans 10,000 years, yet presents few recognizable individuals. Here’s one:
“The earliest known Jomon man,” writes J. Edward Kidder Jr. in “The Cambridge History of Japan,” “was uncovered in 1949 below a shell layer in the Hirasaka shell mound in Yokohama City. He stood rather tall for a Jomon person: about 163 cm... X-rays of his bones show growth interruptions, interpreted as near-fatal spells of extreme malnutrition during childhood. The joints testify to early aging. Virtually unused wisdom teeth are partial evidence of a life expectancy of about 30 years.”
He lived sometime between 7500 and 5000 BC. Japan’s population at the time was probably around 22,000.
Jomon culture was not new even then. Its defining innovation, pottery, was already thousands of years old. It is the oldest pottery in the world, most authorities agree. A sister art was the crafting of clay *dogu* (figurines), some 20,000 of which have been reconstructed, shard by shard. A great many depict pregnant women, and they radiate a primitive, sometimes almost grotesque beauty whose impact on first viewing is positively startling.
Jomon life was certainly short, arguably nasty---but not brutish. The Jomon people’s pottery, their figurines and what little remains of their bones all tell the same tale---in dim outline, to be sure---of primeval terror soothed by primeval joy; of savagery softened by kindliness; of an unremitting consciousness of death that somehow becomes life-affirming.
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Rising seas are prologue to Jomon’s emergence, as to Japan’s. About 20,000 years ago, stirred by global warming, they submerged parts of northeast Asia and made islands of the continent’s rim---“creating,” in Kidder’s words, “an environment in which a distinct insular culture began to take shape.”
“Insular” is the feature that first sets Jomon apart---starkly---from its roots in the vast Siberian tundra. Nomad hunters pursuing big game found themselves trapped on islands in the making, where the giant beasts---mammoths, bison, rhinoceroses, north Asian horses, Naumann elephants---died out as the climate warmed and foraging territory shrank. Smaller animals took their place---boar, raccoon-dogs, hares, badgers. Succeeding millennia saw a slowly diminishing reliance on hunting and the corresponding rise of fishing and, more particularly, gathering.
Gathering stimulates, and is stimulated by, pottery. Pottery is a revolutionary technology. It permits storage, and the boiling of otherwise inedible plants. It fosters settlement. “Jomon people,” writes archaeologist Richard Pearson in the International Jomon Culture Conference Newsletter, “achieved residential stability by a very early date, in comparison with other parts of the world. Villages of up to 50 people containing pit house dwellings and storage pits date as early as 9000 BC.”
Nature, or the spirits, were kind to them. “It appears,” says Pearson, “that the [Jomon] had a wide variety of plant foods available to them in comparison with the peoples of Europe and the Near East who lived in colder and drier conditions.” Their very success as hunters, fishers and gatherers---archaeologists count some 600 types of Jomon food, including a “Jomon bread” made from eight different kinds of wild bean skins---helps explain their failure (or disinclination) to develop agriculture beyond very occasional, very tentative experiments.
“Jomon’s existence in Japan for almost 10,000 years,” note Kiyoshi Yamaura and Hiroshi Ushiro in the Smithsonian publication “Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People,” “makes it one of the longest-running single traditions in the world, whose hunting-and-gathering economy was so well adapted to the environmental conditions that few economic disruptions seem to have occurred.”
Generally classed as neolithic on account of its polished stone tools and its pottery, Jomon somehow resisted the typical neolithic evolution from gathering to cultivating. World civilizations had risen, fallen and risen again before Japanese earth was first broken, circa 300 BC, by the iron spade. Resistance endured longest on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, where the Ainu, linked by ethnologists to Jomon with disputed degrees of consanguinity, maintained a hunting-gathering culture well into the 19th century.
Japan’s first farmers were Jomon’s eventual supplanters---mainland immigrants known today as the Yayoi. They too were neolithic, at least at first, but of a more progressive, more austere stamp. They brought with them another innovation apparently unknown to Jomon: war.
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The oldest recognizable Jomon site is at Hanawadai in Ibaragi Prefecture. It dates back to what is classed, somewhat misleadingly, as “Earliest Jomon” (ca. 7500-5000 BC; the label was already in place when new discoveries compelled recognition of a “Sub-earliest” or “Incipient” Jomon period, which lasted some 5000 years). The Hanawadai site consists of five house pits about 10 meters apart. None contained fireplaces; warming and cooking fires were prepared outdoors. “The little band of occupants,” writes Kidder, “could hardly have numbered more than 10 or 15.”
The ensuing millennia wrought change, but the pace was glacial. There was no Jomon revolution. Neither agriculture nor metal came to disturb the peace or enlarge the horizons. An Earliest Jomon man returning to life 4000 years later---roughly the time span separating us from the building of the Egyptian pyramids---would have found things pretty much as he had left them.
Some progress he would have noticed. Fireplaces had moved indoors. The pit dwellings that had housed Jomon man from the beginning were sturdier and more sheltering. Villages were larger, trade networks broader. Fish hooks and harpoons were now suitable for deep sea fishing in dugout canoes six meters long. Bows were firmer, poisoned hunting arrows more deadly. Food was better and more varied, and life was somewhat easier. “Softer foods and improved tools,” writes Kidder of around 3000 BC, “spared teeth from the inordinate wear experienced by their ancestors.”
Nevertheless, and despite a 10-fold-plus rise in population (to 250,000) over those 4000 years, individual life expectancy remained unaltered: 15 years at birth, 30 in the unlikely event you survived childhood. The odds were not good. A site in Aomori Prefecture yielded burial jars for more than 880 infants---six times the number of adults. Fertility and death walked hand in hand.
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The name “Jomon” means “cord-marked,” and describes a decorative flourish that adorned their earliest pottery---and their latest, representing an artistic continuity of 10,000 years.
That common trait aside, Jomon pottery presents a dazzling variety of shapes, surface treatment and artistic motifs. “It roams into lavish conceptions of form and decoration probably unsurpassed in any time or place,” enthused Scottish archaeologist Neil Munro in “Prehistoric Japan” (1908).
You have to remind yourself, as you admire it, that the technology involved was almost inconceivably primitive. Each article was shaped by hand and hardened in outdoor bonfires. The potter’s wheel and the kiln were undreamed of. In use in Mesopotamia as early as 3500 BC, they took thousands of years to reach Japan. Their use is one of the features that sets Yayoi apart from Jomon.
How the leap came to be made from pots, jars, lamps and burial urns to human figures is anyone’s guess. Containers are common to Neolithic cultures; ceramic sculpture is not, and Jomon’s, affirms Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum in Hokkaido, is likely the oldest of its kind in the world.
The earliest pieces are some 12,000 years old, comparable in antiquity to the Cro-Magnon cave art of France and Spain. Cro-Magnon artists painted Ice Age animals---hunters’ prey---on cave walls. The Jomon sculpted women, most of them visibly pregnant.
Japan’s oldest known *dogu* figurine, 5.8 cm tall, consists of a lump of clay representing a head mounted neckless on a lump of clay representing a torso, with only the swelling breasts to put the object in perspective and suggest a significance. It was unearthed at a Sub-earliest Jomon site in Mie Prefecture. Thousands of years pass with much production but little progress, and then, more or less suddenly, there is a change. By 3500 BC we discern a heightened awareness of the face and its peculiar nuances. Eyes, nose and mouth, the latter generally open---conveying what?---are apparently no longer beside the point. There is an urgency reflected in some of these faces; their owners seem almost to be trying to tell us something, and to be distressed at our inability to understand.
Centuries pass; the faces grow more lifelike but less human. One looks strikingly like a cat. Another is oddly reminiscent of a Buddhist bodhisattva, her head rising to a dome-like protuberance, her palms joined as though in prayer. She is crouching---one of a number in that posture; the posture of childbirth, scholars believe.
One figure, unearthed in Nagano Prefecture and dating to the Middle Jomon period (ca. 3500-2400 BC), is famous as the “Jomon Venus.” Her swollen belly and ample hips are in odd contrast to her rather perfunctory breasts. She is fertility personified; her heart-shaped face, with its empty eyes and half-open mouth, seem unequal to expressing the mystery of it all. She stands 27 cm tall, making her rather large (the largest dogu of all is 45 cm tall and seems to be wearing flared trousers). Venus’ hair is most elaborately coiffed, a fitting home for the lacquered combs found in profusion at Jomon sites everywhere.
Roughly contemporary with Venus, dug up in Tokyo, is a stunning creation. A mother (her head, alas, lost) sits cradling an infant, her breasts hovering protectively over the child. The mood is deeply tender. This is rare. Fertility is the theme common to all Jomon art---and yet, writes Kunihiko Fujinuma in “Jomon no Dogu (Jomon Clay Figurines),” “although there are many dogu of women with swollen bellies, of mother and child together only two have been found.”
Latest of all, towards Jomon’s close beginning around 1000 BC, the faces grow increasingly strange, as if realistic portraiture, so laboriously achieved, has at last been cast aside as something outgrown. Eyes are large circles. They are more like goggles than eyes.
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What does it all mean?
Hypotheses abound---and will have to suffice, in the absence of certainties. Physical remains make us want to, goad us to try to, but hardly render us able to penetrate even the surface thoughts of a people so remote from us. “We must never forget,” writes Takura Izumi in “Jomon Doki Shutsugen (The Advent of Jomon Pottery),” “that modern man,” accustomed to manipulating nature through agriculture and the other civilized arts, “cannot possibly grasp the intimate feelings of people who lived by hunting and gathering.”
The potters and artists of Jomon were probably women. Men’s work was hunting and fishing. Women did everything else, including the most important thing of all, bringing forth new life.
Did the dogu, even the more realistic ones, depict living women? Do their tattoo-like markings, their hair styles, their facial expressions and body proportions, help us visualize Japan’s pre-civilized inhabitants as they really were? Or were they idealized beings, spirits? Either way, they were evidently objects of reverence.
A late 19th-century conjecture had it their purpose was to cure illness or injury; the figure would have been made in the likeness of the sufferer and broken, driving the evil spirit away. Broken they certainly are, as modern archaeologists find them---but is the breakage the work of time or of Jomon shamans? Some experts say one, some the other.
The notion foundered on other grounds. For example, there are almost no male dogu. Did only women get sick? Only pregnant women?
And if the figurines were curative, why did their production die out with Jomon? Why are there no Yayoi dogu?
Could it be that, radiant with meaning to hunter-gatherers living in groups too loosely organized to be called governed societies, the dogu were irrelevant to Yayoi cultivators ruled by chieftains or (as a contemporary Chinese chronicle styled them) “kings”?
“The Jomon world swarmed with spirits,” writes Fujinuma. He does not use the word “gods.” Spirits lack the identity or authority of gods. They are anarchic, amorphous, indefinable, perhaps even homeless. “Possibly,” Fujinuma speculates, “a spirit would be pleased to lodge in a form that resembled itself”---and in so doing confer upon her devotees the one gift they craved, the gift on which life depended, the one thing that mattered---not production, not happiness, not comfort, not victory in battle, not longevity, but fertility---fertility in all its forms, human, animal and vegetal. An agricultural society can *labor* for fertility. Gatherers have no recourse but to pray for it. The female figurines of Jomon may best be seen as tangible prayers.
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And they were effective. Japan was, by and large, kind to the Jomon. It fed them for 10,000 years without imposing on them the rigors of agriculture and government.
In return, there is a kindly strain in the Jomon that reflects the relative benignity of their environment. The potential savagery of the human heart in primitive conditions is limitless. Izumi records an ancient belief in southern China that a mother who ate the flesh of her firstborn would be especially fecund thereafter---and in fact, he writes, pottery has been found showing traces of human infant bones mixed with fish bones. No comparable horror seems to have infected the Jomon.
Another scourge the Jomon apparently escaped, or shunned, is war. “Of the more than 5000 skeletons excavated from Jomon sites,” writes historian William Wayne Farris in “Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures,” “only about 10 give evidence of violent death.” The corresponding figures for Yayoi, he says, are 1000 skeletons and over 100 violent deaths.
Yayoi
Terrified of death, having inflicted it on many, the Chinese ruler Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC) sent his court sage, Xu Fu, across the eastern seas in quest of the elixir of eternal life. Xu Fu’s 60 ships, carrying (says one version) 3000 virgin boys and girls, left port in 210 BC, never to return.
Could they have ended up in Japan? Probably not, but it makes a good story, and the story has persisted. It has the newcomers introducing into Japan the elements of its early civilization---rice farming, metal, wealth for the few, poverty for the many, and social control under an institution we know today as “government.” Jomon withered. Its long day was done.
However fanciful, the tale encapsulates at least this historical fact: the culture that the 20th century named Yayoi (after a site on the University of Tokyo campus where Yayoi pottery was first found) was not native but arose from a mainland migration.
The Yayoi Period (roughly 300 BC – A.D. 300) tips Japan at last from prehistory into history. Human beings are no longer nature’s passive supplicants but its active manipulators. In terms of art, “Yayoi man,” says H. Paul Varley in “Japanese Culture: A Short History,” “used a potter’s wheel and, by means of an advanced firing technique, produced vessels of a much greater delicacy than those of Jomon... The untamed spirit reflected in the shape and ornamentation of some Jomon pottery and in the *dogu* figurines was either lost or suppressed by the craftsmen of Yayoi.”
The more refined spirit of Yayoi infuses an adornment better suited to a metal culture: bronze mirrors decorated by Chinese-style mythological beasts, inscribed with Chinese poetry, and symbolizing what mattered most to those high enough up the new social scale to possess them---linkage to the vastly superior Chinese civilization across the sea. Yayoi graves are full of them.
The discovery in 1947 of the Yayoi site at Toro, Shizuoka Prefecture, sparked a Japanese archaeology boom that has yet to die out. Toro flourished in the 3rd century A.D., and shows how far behind Yayoi left Jomon. The site comprises “over 50 paddies occupying 70,000 sq m,” writes J. Edward Kidder in “The Cambridge History of Japan,” “with sluice-gated irrigation ditches and wells... The rice yield was too large for customary storage methods.”
The new type of raised storehouse that evolved to accommodate the surplus became the model for the earliest Shinto shrines.
Dimly we see in Yayoi, as we do not in Jomon, the outlines of a Japan we know. Facially, the Mongoloid cast, distinct from the more or less Caucasian features of the Jomon, becomes progressively more pronounced. Worship, says Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum, turns from amorphous fertility spirits to the elements uppermost in the minds of cultivators---water, soil, the sun. The sun in particular appealed to the religious instincts of the early Japanese. Soon it would be personified as the sun goddess Amaterasu, mythical begetter of Japan’s royal line.
The Yayoi were, at least intermittently, warriors. “Disturbance and warfare,” “assassination and murder” were prevalent enough to strike Japan’s first known foreign observer, the 3rd-century Chinese court historian Chen Shou. His “History of the Three Kingdoms” (280 A.D.) includes a 61-line description of the Yayoi “barbarians” he called “Wa,” meaning “dwarf.” The Wa were “divided into 100 countries,” wrote Chen. “Each year envoys from the Wa bring tribute.”
The one Yayoi ruler whose name survives is the shaman-queen Himiko, who in 238 sent an embassy to the Chinese emperor to plead for help against a hostile neighbor.
Japan had lost its innocence. “War,” observes Ishikawa, “has two prerequisites---leaders, and surpluses.” Jomon had neither. Yayoi had both.
Stone Circle
In 1861 at Oshoro, southwestern Hokkaido, a party of herring fishermen, migrants from Honshu, were laying the foundation for a fishing port when they saw taking shape beneath their shovels a mysterious spectacle---a broad circular arrangement of rocks, strikingly symmetrical, evidently manmade. What could it be? An Ainu fortress?
They would have been astonished to learn, as in fact they never did, that the Oshoro Stone Circle is a relic from a time before even war---let alone fortresses---is likely to have existed in Japan.
Oshoro today is part of the city of Otaru, on its western fringe, 20 km from the city center and 60 km west of Sapporo.
The Late Jomon period (ca. 2400-1000 BC) was an age of northward migration. The north was warming, and severe rainfall was ravaging the established Jomon sites, primarily in the vicinity of today’s Tokyo and Nagoya.
Perhaps resettlement stimulated thought, for it coincided with a novel Jomon institution---the cemetery.
“By devoting a special area to burials,” writes J. Edward Kidder in “The Cambridge History of Japan,” “Late Jomon people were isolating the dead, allowing the gap to be bridged by mediums who eventually drew the rational world of the living further away from the spirit world of the dead.”
The Oshoro Stone Circle was probably a cemetery.
It was other things as well, but primarily that, says Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum.
It is one of about 30 Late Jomon stone circles scattered through northern Japan. In terms of size it ranks about midway between the smallest enclosures and the largest one at Oyu, Akita Prefecture, bounded by thousands of stones.
No bones have been found to make an airtight case of the cemetery theory, but relatively few Jomon bones have been found anywhere, the acid in the soil claiming them long before the archaeologist’s trowel can.
The first archaeologists at work in Japan were American and European. Their heyday was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japanese curiosity regarding the remote past was satisfied by myths accepted---on pain of harsh punishment as the Japanese government in the 1930s and ‘40s claimed control over thought---as fact.
World War Two ended, and, as though to make up for lost time, Japan plunged into archaeology. It became a passion, and remains one. Historian William Wayne Farris, in “Sacred Texts and Buried Treasure,” counts (as of 1998) some 4000 archaeologists active in Japan, 20 times the number in Great Britain.
A prewar pioneer in Japan was the Scottish archaeologist Neil Munro, whose “Prehistoric Japan” appeared in 1908. He thought at first the stone circles might be astronomical observatories on the order of Britain’s Stonehenge.
Not so, asserts Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum.
The question remains open, but calendrical significance has yet to be established. “In my opinion,” says Ishikawa, “the only thing Stonehenge and the Oshoro Stone Circle have in common is that they’re both made of stone.”
What you see at Oshoro today---it’s a wilder-looking spot than its physical proximity to the city would suggest, set among farmers’ fields and hills overlooking the sea---is an oval rather than a circular expanse, 33 meters north to south, 22 meters east to west, bordered by granite rocks, the tallest about hip-high. Some are rectangular, others rounded so smoothly you might think they had been sculpted, but no: “The rounded ones are called columnar joint stones,” explains Ishikawa---“very common in the area, though some geologists say many of the stones were quarried at Cape Shiripa, 8 km away.”
The site is a shadow of what it was at its height circa 1500 BC---a victim first of 19th-century Japanese pioneers reclaiming Hokkaido from the wilderness and eager to appropriate likely-looking stones as construction material; secondly, of well-intentioned but misguided “cleanup campaigns,” the first in 1908 preparatory to a royal visit by the Crown Prince, the future Emperor Taisho.
Why regard it as a cemetery? Partly, says Ishikawa, because of the large number of unidentifiable, and probably ritual, objects unearthed in the vicinity; partly because of the many tools found unbroken, suggesting grave goods; partly also because “graves are among the few things that would have justified the degree of effort involved. Constructing a stone circle is a major undertaking. You have to flatten the land, quarry the stones, transport them, lay them out... Only something of the highest importance could have taken people away from their daily hunting and gathering.”
Very likely also, he says, it was a market, a trading center for the exchange of tools, local foods, regional products, lacquer---and information, gossip. What would people have said to each other? In what language? Not Japanese, writes archaeologist Richard Pearson in the International Jomon Culture Conference Newsletter. Proto-Japanese, he says, begins with the succeeding Yayoi culture.
Ishikawa raises another possibility for the Stone Circle---it could have been a trash dump, which would explain the roughly 400,000 tool and pottery fragments so far unearthed there.
“Things may have been brought on purpose to such a site for ritual disposal,” he says. “To the Jomon, each object, animate and inanimate, housed a spirit. Throwing things away would have been done ceremonially.”