AMONG MODERN WORLD POWERS, THE MOST DISTINCTIVE IN their culture and environment are the Japanese people. The origins of their language are among the most disputed questions of linguistics: for not a single other one of the world’s major languages are the affinities to other languages still in doubt. Who are the Japanese, when and whence did they come to Japan, and how did they evolve their unique speech? These questions are central to the self-image of the Japanese, and to how they are viewed by other peoples. Japan’s rising dominance and its sometimes touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than ever to strip away persistent myths and to find answers.
My minimal coverage of Japan in previous editions of Guns, Germs, and Steel constituted the most important geographic lacuna of my book. New information about Japanese genetics and language origins, accumulating since the book’s first publication, now encourages me to test how Japan fits into my overall framework.
The search for answers is difficult because the evidence is so conflicting. On the one hand, the Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in their appearance and genes to other East Asians, especially to Koreans. As the Japanese are fond of stressing, they are culturally and biologically rather homogeneous: there is little difference among people from different parts of Japan, except for a very different people called the Ainu on Japan’s nothernmost island of Hokkaido. All these facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan recently from the East Asian mainland and displaced the Ainu, who represent the original inhabitants. But, if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show obvious close affinities to some East Asian mainland language, just as the English language is closely related to other Germanic languages because Anglo-Saxons from the continent took over England as recently as the 6th century A.D. How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan’s presumably ancient language and all that other evidence for recent origins?
Four conflicting theories, each of them popular in some countries and unpopular in others, have been proposed. Most popular in Japan is the view that the Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 B.C. Also widespread in Japan is the theory that the Japanese are descended from horse-riding Central Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the 4th century A.D. but who were emphatically not Koreans. A theory favored by many Western archaeologists and Koreans, and unpopular in some circles in Japan, is that the Japanese are descendants of immigrants from Korea who arrived with rice paddy agriculture around 400 B.C. Finally, peoples named in these other three theories could have mixed to form the modern Japanese.
When similar questions arise about the origins of other peoples, they can be discussed dispassionately. That is not true of questions about Japanese origins. It was a remarkable achievement that Japan, unlike so many other non-European countries, preserved its political independence and culture while emerging from isolation and creating an industrialized society in the late 19th century. Now, the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influence. They want to believe that their language and culture are so unique as to have required uniquely complex developmental processes, unlike those operating elsewhere in the world. To acknowledge that the Japanese language is related to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.
Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of Japanese history based on the earliest Japanese chronicles of A.D. 712 and 720. Those chronicles describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 B.C. To fill the gap between 660 B.C. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other, equally fictitious emperors.
Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally told the Japanese people that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archaeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this account. Although they have more freedom of interpretation today, constraints remain. Japan’s most important archaeological monuments—the 158 gigantic kofun tombs constructed between A.D. 300 and 686, and thought to contain the remains of ancestral emperors and their families—are still the property of the Imperial Household Agency. Excavation of the tombs is forbidden because it would constitute desecration—and it might also shed undesired light on where Japan’s imperial family really came from (e.g., perhaps Korea?).
Whereas archaeological deposits in the United States were left by peoples (Native Americans) unrelated to most modern Americans, deposits in Japan, no matter how ancient, are believed to have been left by ancestors of the modern Japanese themselves. Hence archaeology in Japan is supported by astronomically large budgets and draws public attention to a degree inconceivable anywhere else in the world. Each year, Japanese archaeologists excavate over 10,000 digs and employ up to 50,000 field workers. Twenty times more Neolithic sites have thereby been discovered in Japan than in the whole of China. Accounts of excavations appear almost daily on TV and on the front page of Japan’s largest newspapers. Determined to prove that the ancestors of the modern Japanese came to Japan in the remote past, archaeologists reporting on the excavations emphasize how different Japan’s ancient inhabitants were from contemporary peoples elsewhere, but how similar they were to the Japanese today. For instance, an archaeologist lecturing about a site 2,000 years old would draw attention to the garbage pits into which the site’s inhabitants threw their raw garbage, illustrating that Japanese at those distant times already practiced the cleanliness on which their supposed descendants pride themselves today.
What makes it especially difficult to discuss Japanese archaeology dispassionately is that Japanese interpretations of their past affect their present behavior. Among East Asian peoples, who brought culture to whom, who is culturally superior and who is a barbarian, and who has historic claims to whose land? For instance, there is much archaeological evidence for exchanges of people and material objects between Japan and Korea in the period A.D. 300–700. The Japanese interpret this to mean that Japan conquered Korea then and brought Korean slaves and artisans to Japan; the Korean interpretation is instead that Korea conquered Japan, and that the founders of the Japanese imperial family were Korean.
Hence when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as “the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.” For the next 35 years, Japanese occupation forces tried to eradicate Korean culture and to replace Korean with the Japanese language in schools. Korean families that have lived in Japan for several generations still find it difficult to acquire Japanese citizenship. “Nose tombs” in Japan still contain the noses cut off of 20,000 Koreans and brought to Japan as trophies of a 16th-century Japanese invasion of that country. Not surprisingly, loathing of the Japanese is widespread in Korea, and contempt for Koreans is widespread in Japan.
As just one example of how seemingly arcane archaeological disputes can arouse passion, consider the best-known archaeological relic of pre-chronicle Japan: the Eta-Funayama sword of the 5th century A.D., designated a national treasure and held in the Tokyo National Museum. Inlaid in silver on the iron sword is an inscription in Chinese characters, one of the oldest surviving samples of writing in Japan, referring to a Great King and an official serving him and a Korean scribe named Ch-oan. Several of the Chinese characters are incomplete, rusted, or missing and must be guessed at. Japanese scholars traditionally took the missing characters to mean that the king was the Japanese emperor Mizuha-wake of the Beautiful Teeth named in the 8th-century Japanese chronicles. In 1966, however, the Korean historian Kim Sokhyong shockedJapanese scholars with the suggestion that the missing name was actually King Kaero of Korea, and that the named official was one of his Korean vassals who were then occupying parts of Japan. What really was “the legitimate arrangement of antiquity”?
Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across Tsushima Strait, and viewing each other through poisoned lenses of false myths and real past atrocities. It bodes ill for the future of East Asia if these two great peoples cannot find common ground. A correct understanding of who the Japanese people really are, and how they diverged from the closely related Korean people, will be essential to finding that common ground.
STARTING POINTS FOR UNDERSTANDING JAPAN’S UNIQUE culture are its unique geography and environment. At first, Japan might seem to be geographically very similar to Britain, both being large archipelagoes flanking the Eurasian continent on the east and the west respectively. But there are detailed differences that prove important: Japan is somewhat larger and more distant. Japan’s area of 146,000 square miles is half again greater than Britain’s, and nearly equal to California’s. Britain lies only 22 miles from the French coast, but Japan lies 110 miles from the closest point of the Asian mainland (South Korea), and is 180 miles from mainland Russia and 460 miles from mainland China.
Perhaps as a result, Britain throughout its history has been much more closely enmeshed with mainland Europe than has Japan with mainland Asia. For instance, since the time of Christ there have been four successful invasions of Britain from the continent, but none of Japan (unless Korea really did conquer pre-chronicle Japan). Conversely, British troops have fought on the continent in every century since the Norman Conquest of A.D. 1066, whereas before the late 19th century mainland Asia was always free of Japanese troops except for Korea during pre-chronicle times and the last decade of the 16th century. Thus, details of geography have made Japan more isolated and, therefore, even more distinctive culturally than Britain.
As for Japan’s climate, its rainfall, ranging up to 160 inches per year, makes it the wettest temperate country in the world. Furthermore, in contrast to the winter rains prevailing over much of Europe, Japan’s rains are concentrated in the summer growing season. That combination of high rainfall and summer rains gives Japan the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zones. Half of its farmland is devoted to labor-intensive, high-yield, irrigated rice agriculture, facilitated by abundant rivers flowing from the wet mountains onto sloping lowland plains. While 80 percent of Japan’s land area consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture and only 14 percent is farmland, per square mile of that farmland Japan supports a population density eight times that of Britain’s. In fact, in proportion to its available area of farmland, Japan is the most densely populated major society in the world.
Japan’s high rainfall also ensures that its forest regenerates quickly after logging. Despite thousand of years of dense human occupation, everyone’s first impression of Japan is of its greenness, because more than 70 percent of its land area is still covered by forest (compared with only 10 percent for Britain). Conversely, all that forest means that there is no native grassland or natural pasture. Traditionally, the sole animal raised on a large scale for food in Japan has been the pig; sheep and goats have never been significant, and cattle were raised for pulling plows and carts but not for food. Japanese-raised beef remains a luxury food of the wealthy few, selling for up to $100 per pound.
Japanese forest composition varies with latitude and altitude: evergreen leafy forest in the south at low altitude, deciduous leafy forest in central Japan, and coniferous forest in the north and at high altitude. For prehistoric humans the most productive forest was the deciduous leafy forest because of its abundance of edible nuts, such as walnuts, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, acorns, and beechnuts. Like Japanese forests, Japanese waters are outstandingly productive. The lakes, rivers, Inland Sea, Sea of Japan to the west, and Pacific Ocean to the east teem with fish such as salmon, trout, tuna, sardines, mackerel, herring, and cod. Today, Japan is the largest catcher, importer, and consumer of fish in the world. Japanese waters are also rich in clams and oysters and other shellfish, crabs and shrimp and crayfish, and edible seaweeds. As we shall see, that high productivity of the land, fresh water, and seas was a key to Japan’s prehistory.
BEFORE WE TURN TO THE EVIDENCE OF ARCHEOLOGY, let us consider the evidence of Japanese origins from biology, linguistics, early portraits, and recorded history. The conflicts between these four familiar types of evidence are what make Japanese origins so controversial.
From southwest to northeast, the four main Japanese islands are Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu (the largest island), and Hokkaido. Until large-scale Japanese immigration into Hokkaido in the late 19th century, that island (plus northern Honshu) was inhabited in historic times mainly by Ainu, living as hunter-gatherers with only limited agriculture, while the Japanese occupied the other three islands. In their genes and skeletons as well as in external appearance, the Japanese are very similar to other East Asians, including North Chinese, East Siberians, and especially Koreans. Even my Japanese and Korean friends say that they sometimes have difficulty guessing whether someone is Japanese or Korean just by looking at his or her face.
As for the Ainu, their distinctive appearance has resulted in more being written about the origins and relationships than about any other single people on earth. Ainu men have a luxuriant beard and the most profuse body hair of any people. That fact, coupled with some other inherited traits such as their fingerprint patterns and their type of ear wax, has often led to their being classified as Causcasoids (so-called white people) who somehow migrated east through Eurasia and ended up in Japan. In their overall genetic makeup, though, the Ainu are related to other East Asians, including the Japanese, Koreans, and Okinawans. Perhaps their distinctive external appearance involves relatively few genes that arose through sexual selection after they migrated from mainland Asia and became isolated on the Japanese archipelago. The distinctive appearance and hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Ainu, and the undistinctive appearance and the intensive agricultural lifestyle of the Japanese, are frequently taken to suggest the straightforward interpretation that the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original hunter-gatherer inhabitants, and that the Japanese are more recent invaders from the Asian mainland.
But this view is difficult to reconcile with the distinctiveness of the Japanese language, which everyone agrees does not bear a detailed close relation to any other language in the world (in the way that French is close to Spanish). Insofar as anything can be said about its relationships, many scholars consider it to be an isolate member of Asia’s Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic languages, Mongolian languages, and the Tungus languages of East Siberia. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabulary, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link French to Spanish. If one accepts that Japanese and Koreans are indeed related, however distantly, that sharing of 15 percent of their vocabulary suggests that the two languages began to diverge from each other over 5,000 years ago, rather than the mere 2,000 years or less during which French and Spanish have been diverging. As for the Ainu language, its relationships are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese.
After biology and language, our third type of evidence about Japanese origins comes from ancient portraits. The earliest preserved likenesses of Japan’s inhabitants are statues called haniwa, erected outside tombs around 1,500 years ago. Especially in their eye shapes, those statues unmistakably depict East Asians, such as modern Japanese or Koreans. They do not resemble the heavily bearded Ainu. If the Japanese did replace the Ainu over Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before A.D. 500. After the Japanese established trading posts on Hokkaido in 1615, they proceeded to treat the Hokkaido Ainu much as white Americans treated Native Americans. The Ainu were conquered, rounded up into reserves, forced to work for trading posts, driven off land desired by Japanese farmers, and killed when they revolted. When Japan annexed Hokkaido in 1869, Japanese schoolteachers made determined efforts to expunge the Ainu culture and language. Today, the language is virtually extinct, and probably no purebred Ainu survives.
Our earliest written information about Japan comes from Chinese chronicles, because China developed literacy long before it spread from China to either Korea or Japan. From 108 B.C. until A.D. 313 China occupied a settlement in North Korea and exchanged envoys with Japan. In the resulting Chinese accounts of various peoples referred to as “Eastern Barbarians,” Japan is described under the name of Wa, whose inhabitants were said to be divided into over a hundred little states that fought a lot with each other. Only a few Koreans of Japanese inscriptionsbefore the year A.D. 700 have been preserved, but extensive chronicles were written in A.D. 712 and 720 in Japan and later in Korea. While these Japanese and Korean chronicles purport to relate histories of earlier periods, they are full of obvious fabrications designed to glorify and legitimize ruling families—such as the Japanese account of their emperor’s descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Nevertheless, the chronicles suffice to make clear that there was massive influence of Korea itself, and of China via Korea, on Japan, leading to the introduction of Buddhism, writing, metallurgy, other crafts, and bureaucratic methods into Japan. The chronicles are also full of accounts of Koreans in Japan and of Japanese in Korea—interpreted by Japanese or Korean historians respectively as evidence of Japanese conquest of Korea or the reverse.
WE HAVE THUS SEEN THAT THE ANCESTORS OF THE Japanese reached Japan before they had writing, and that their biology would suggest a recent arrival but their language seemingly suggests arrival at least 5,000 years ago. Let us now turn to the evidence of archaeology in an attempt to solve this puzzle. We shall see that ancient Japanese societies were among the most remarkable in the world.
Shallow seas now surround much of Japan and coastal East Asia. Hence those seas became dry land during the Ice Ages, when much ocean water was locked up in glaciers and sea level lay at about 500 feet below its present stand. At those times, Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido was connected by a land bridge over what is now Sakhalin Island to the Russian mainland; Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu was connected by another land bridge to South Korea over what is now Tsushima Strait; all of the main Japanese islands were connected to one another; and much of the expanse of what are now the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea consisted of land extensions of mainland China. Hence it comes as no surprise that the mammals walking out to Japan in those land bridge days included not only the ancestors of modern Japan’s bears and monkeys but also ancient humans, long before boats had been invented. Stone tools indicate human arrival as early as half a million years ago. Ancient stone tools of northern Japan resemble those of Siberia and northern China, but those of southern Japan resemble those of Korea andsouthern China, suggesting that both the northern and southern land bridges were used.
Ice Age Japan was not a great place to live. Even though most of Japan escaped the glaciers that blanketed Britain and Canada, Japan was still cold, dry, and extensively covered with conifer and birch forests offering little plant food to humans. Those drawbacks make the precocity of the Ice Age Japanese all the more impressive: around 30,000 years ago, they were among the earliest people in the world to develop stone tools with edges ground to a sharp edge instead of just chipped or flaked. In the archaeology of Britain, edge-ground tools are considered a big cultural advance that separates the Neolithic (New Stone Age) from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), but they don’t show up in Britain until agriculture’s arrival less than 7,000 years ago.
Around 13,000 years ago, as glaciers melted rapidly all over the world, conditions in Japan changed spectacularly for the better, as far as humans were concerned. Temperatures, rainfall, and humidity all increased, raising plant productivity to the modern high levels for which Japan is preeminent among temperate-zone countries. Deciduous leafy forests full of nut trees, which had been confined to southern Japan during the Ice Ages, expanded northward at the expense of coniferous forest, thereby replacing a forest type that had been rather sterile for humans with a much more productive forest type. The rise in sea level severed the land bridges, converted Japan from being a piece of the Asian continent to being a big archipelago, turned what had been a plain into rich shallow seas, and created thousands of miles of productive new coastline with innumerable islands, bays, tidal flats, and estuaries, all teeming with seafood.
The end of the Ice Age was accompanied by the first of the two most decisive changes in Japanese history: the invention of pottery. For the first time in human experience, people now had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil, steam, or simmer food, they gained access to abundant food resources that had previously been difficult to utilize: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dehydrate if cooked over a fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic or bitter, but otherwise nutritious, foods like acorns and horse chestnuts, which could now have their toxins leached out by soaking. Soft boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting the kids to be weaned earlier and their mothers to produce babies at shorter birth intervals. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand people to a quarter of a million.
Naturally, the Japanese were not the sole ancient people with pottery: it was invented independently at many different times and places around the ancient world. But the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. When those radiocarbon dates were announced in 1960, not even Japanese scientists could at first believe them. In the usual experience of archaeologists, inventions are supposed to flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. Especially in the experience of Japanese archaeologists, China is regarded as the source of cultural breakthroughs in East Asia, such as agriculture, writing, metallurgy, and everything else of significance. Today, nearly 40 years after those early dates for pottery in Japan were measured, archaeologists are still reeling from the carbon 14 shock, as it is termed. Other early pottery has been found in China and in eastern Russia (near Vladivostok). Asian archaeologists are racing to beat the Japanese record. (In fact, I just heard rumors that the Chinese and Russians are close to beating it.) But the Japanese still hold the world record, with pottery thousands of years older than the oldest from the Fertile Crescent or Europe.
The prejudice that islanders are supposed to learn from superior continentals wasn’t the sole reason why record-breaking Japanese pottery caused such a shock. In addition, those first Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, and that also violated established views. Mostly, pottery is owned by sedentary societies: what nomad wants to carry a collection of heavy pots, as well as weapons and the baby, every time he or she shifts camp? Hence hunter-gatherers usually don’t have pottery, because most sedentary societies elsewhere in the world arose only with the adoption of agriculture. But the Japanese environment is so productive that it was one of the few locations where people could settle down and make pottery while still living as hunter-gatherers. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers to exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan. In contrast, pottery wasn’t adopted in the Fertile Crescent until about a thousand years after the adoption of agriculture.
Not surprisingly, ancient Japanese pottery was technologically simple by today’s standards. It lacked glazes, was made by hand rather than on potters’ wheels, was baked in open fires rather than in kilns, and was fired at relatively low temperatures. But, as time went on, it came to be made in an incredible profusion of shapes that rate as great art by the standards of any era. Much of it was decorated by rolling or pressing a cord on the clay while it was still soft. Because the Japanese word for “cord marking” is jomon, the term jomon is applied to the pottery itself, to the ancient Japanese people who made it, and to that whole period in Japanese prehistory beginning with the invention of pottery and ending only 10,000 years later.
The earliest Jomon pottery of 12,700 years ago comes from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island. Thereafter, pottery spread north, reaching the vicinity of modern Tokyo around 9,500 years ago and the northernmost island of Hokkaido by 7,000 years go. Pottery’s northward spread followed the northward spread of deciduous forest rich in nuts, suggesting that the food explosion was what permitted sedentary living and the pottery explosion. Reinforcing that interpretation of a single invention of pottery in the south and a spread from that one source, the style of the earliest Jomon pottery is fairly uniform over the whole of Japan. With time, a few dozen regional styles developed over the 1,500-mile length of the Japanese archipelago.
HOW DID JOMON PEOPLE MAKE THEIR LIVING? WE have abundant evidence from the garbage that they left behind at hundreds of thousands of excavated archaeological sites and huge shell mounds distributed all over Japan. It turns out that they were hunters, gatherers, and fishing people enjoying a remarkably diverse and well-balanced diet that modern nutritionists would applaud.
One major food category was nuts, especially chestnuts and walnuts, plus horse chestnuts and acorns leached free of their bitter poisons. Nuts could be harvested in autumn in prodigious quantities and then stored for the winter in underground storage pits up to six feet deep and six feet wide. Other plant foods included berries, fruits, seeds, leaves, shoots, bulbs, and roots. In all, archaeologists sifting through Jomon garbage have identified 64 species of edible plants.
Then as now, Japan’s inhabitants were also among the world’s leading consumers of seafood. Tuna were harpooned in the open ocean; porpoises were driven into shallow water and clubbed or speared, just as they are in Japan today; seals were killed on the beaches; seasonal runs of salmon were exploited in the rivers; a wide variety of fish were netted, captured in weirs, and caught on fishhooks carved out of deer antlers; and shellfish, crabs, and seaweed were gathered in the intertidal zone or harvested by divers. Jomon skeletons show a high incidence of what pathologists term auditory exostosis, meaning abnormal bone growth in the ears as often observed in divers today.
Among land animals hunted, wild boar and deer were the commonest prey, followed by mountain goat and bear. These game animals were caught in pit traps, shot with bow and arrow, and run down with dogs. Pig bones appeared in Jomon times on offshore islands where pigs do not occur naturally, making one wonder whether Jomon people were starting to experiment with pig domestication.
The most debated question about Jomon subsistence concerns the possible contribution of agriculture. Jomon sites often contain remains of edible plants that are native to Japan as wild species but are also grown as crops today, including adzuki bean, mung bean, and barnyard millet. The remains from Jomon times do not clearly show morphological features distinguishing the crops from their wild ancestors, so we do not know whether these plants were gathered in the wild or were being intentionally grown. Sites also have debris of edible or useful plant species that are not native to Japan, and that must have been introduced for their value from the Asian mainland, such as buckwheat, melons, bottle gourd, hemp, and shiso or beefsteak plant (used for seasoning). Around 1200 B.C., toward the end of the Jomon period, a few grains of rice, barley,foxtail millet, and broomcorn millet, the staple cereals of East Asia, began to appear. All of these tantalizing clues make it likely that Jomon people were starting to practice some slash-and-burn agriculture, but it was evidently in a casual way that made only a minor contribution to their diet.
I don’t mean to leave the impression that every one of these foods that I’ve mentioned was eaten everywhere throughout Jomon Japan. In the nut-rich forests of northern Japan, nut storage pits were especially important, along with seal hunting and sea fishing. In the nut-poor southwest, shellfish assumed a greater role. But diversity still characterizes local Jomon diets and even individual Jomon meals. For instance, as shown by preserved remains of meals, Jomon people blended chestnut and walnut flour, pig and deer meat and blood, and bird eggs in various proportions to produce either a high-carbohydrate Mrs. Jomon’s cookie or a high-protein McJomonburger. Recent Ainu hunter-gatherers kept a ceramic stewpot simmering constantly on the fire and threw all types of foods together into it; their Jomon predecessors, living at the same sites and eating the same foods, may have done the same.
I mentioned that their pottery (including heavy pieces up to three feet tall) suggests Jomon hunter-gatherers to have been sedentary rather than nomadic. Further evidence of fixed residence comes from their heavy stone tools, remains of substantial semi-underground houses with signs of remodeling, big village sites of a hundred or more dwellings, and cemeteries. All of these features distinguish Jomon people from observed modern hunter-gatherers who shift base every few weeks, build only shelters, and burden themselves with few and easily portable possessions. This sedentary lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available to Jomon people within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans.
Jomon people lived at some of the highest population densities ever estimated for hunter-gatherers, especially in central and northern Japan with its nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas. Estimates of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak are 250,000—trivial of course compared with modern Japan’s, but impressive for hunter-gatherers. Their closest rivals in modern times would have been American Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast and of California, subsisting similarly off of nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas—a striking case of convergent evolution of human societies.
With all this stress on what Jomon people did have, we need to be clear as well about what they did not have. They had no intensive agriculture, and only questionably any agriculture at all. Apart from dogs (and questionably pigs), they had no domestic animals. They had no metal tools, no writing, and no weaving. Jomon villages and cemeteries do not consist of a few richly decorated houses and graves contrasting with numerous spartan ones but are instead rather uniform—suggesting that there was little social stratification into chiefs and commoners. Theregional variation in pottery styles suggests little progress toward political centralization and unification. All of these negative features contrast with features of contemporary societies only a few hundred miles distant from Jomon Japan in mainland China and Korea—and with the changes that swept over Japan itself after 400 B.C.
Despite its distinctiveness even in East Asia at that time, Jomon Japan was not a completely isolated universe. Distribution of pottery and of obsidian (a very hard volcanic rock favored for stone tools) shows that Jomon watercraft connected the Izu island chain stretching 180 miles south from Tokyo. Pottery, obsidian, and fishhooks similarly testify to some Jomon trade with Korea, Russia, and Okinawa—as does the arrival of the half-a-dozen Asian mainland crops that I already mentioned. But archaeologists studying Jomon Japan have found little evidence of direct imports from China, in contrast to China’s big influence on subsequent Japanese history. Compared with later eras, what is impressive about Jomon Japan is not that some contact with the outside world did occur but that it had so little influence on Jomon society. Jomon Japan was a conservative miniature universe that maintained its isolation and changed surprisingly little over the course of 10,000 years—an island of stability in a fragile, rapidly changing contemporary world.
To place the distinctiveness of Jomon Japan in a contemporary perspective, let us remind ourselves of what human societies were like on the Asian mainland a few hundred miles west of Japan in 400 B.C., just as the Jomon lifestyle was about to come to an end. China consisted then of kingdoms with rich elites and poorer commoners, living in walled towns, and on the verge of political unification to become the world’s largest empire. Beginning around 7500 B.C., China had developed intensive agriculture based on millets in the north and rice in the south, and with domestic pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. China had had writing for at least 900 years, and metal tools for at least 1,500 years, and had just invented the world’s first cast-iron production. Those Chinese developments were also spreading to Korea, which had already had agriculture for several thousand years (including rice since 2200 B.C.) and metal since 1000 B.C.
Given all of these developments going on for thousands of years just across Tsushima Strait and the East China Sea from Japan, it seems at first astonishing that Japan was still occupied in 400 B.C. by people who had some trade with Korea but remained preliterate, stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers. Throughout human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have swept away sparser populations of stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers. How did Jomon Japan survive so long?
To understand the answer to this paradox, we have to remember that, until 400 B.C., the frontier of Tsushima Strait separated not rich farmers from poor hunter-gatherers but poor farmers from rich hunter-gatherers. China itself and Jomon Japan were not in direct contact. Instead, Japan’s trade contacts, such as they were, involved Korea. But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop new, cold-resistant strains of rice. Early rice agriculture in Korea used dry-field methods rather than irrigated paddies and was not particularly productive. Hence early Korean agriculture could not compete with Jomon hunting and gathering. Jomon people themselves would have seen no advantage warranting adoption of Korean agriculture, insofar as they were aware of its existence; and poor Korean farmers possessed no advantages enabling them to force their way into Japan. As we shall see, the advantages finally reversed suddenly and dramatically.
I ALREADY MENTIONED THAT THE INVENTION OF POTTERY in Kyushu around 12,700 years ago and the resulting Jomon population explosion were the first of two decisive changes in Japanese history. The other decisive change, which triggered a second population explosion, began around 400B.C. with the arrival of a new lifestyle (and people?) from South Korea. This second transition poses in acute form our question about who the Japanese are. Does the transition mark the replacement of Jomon people with immigrants from Korea, ancestral to the modern Japanese? Or does it merely mark Japan’s original Jomon inhabitants continuing to occupy Japan while learning valuable new tricks?
The new lifestyle appeared first on the north coast of Japan’s southwesternmost island of Kyushu, immediately across Tsushima Strait from South Korea. The most important new elements were Japan’s first metal tools, of iron, and its first undisputed full-scale agriculture. That agriculture came in the form of irrigated rice fields, complete with canals, dams, banks, paddies, and rice residues revealed by archaeological excavations. Archaeologists term the new lifestyle “Yayoi,” after a district of Tokyo where in 1884 its characteristic pottery was first recognized. Unlike Jomon pottery, Yayoi pottery had shapes very similar to those of contemporary South Korean pottery. Among the new Yayoi culture’s many other elements that were unmistakably Korean but previously foreign to Japan were bronze objects, weaving, glass beads, underground rice storage pits, the custom of burying remains of dead people in jars, and Korean styles of tools and houses.
Although rice was the most important Yayoi crop, 27 other crops new to Japan plus unquestionably domesticated pigs were grown as well. Yayoi farmers may have practiced double-cropping, with paddies irrigated for rice production in the summer, then the same fields drained for dry-land cultivation of millets, barley, and wheat in the winter. Inevitably, this highly productive system of intensive agriculture triggered an immediate population explosion in Kyushu, where archaeologists have identified far more Yayoi sites than Jomon sites, even though the Jomon period lasted 14 times longer.
In virtually no time, Yayoi farming jumped from Kyushu to the adjacent main islands of Shikoku and Honshu, reaching the Tokyo area within 200 years and the northern tip of Honshu (1,000 miles from the first Yayoi settlements on Kyushu) in another century. The earliest Yayoi sites on Kyushu contained pots both in the new Yayoi styles and in the old Jomon styles, but the latter dropped out as Yayoi culture and pottery spread north through Honshu. However, some elements of Jomon culture did not vanish completely. Yayoi farmers continued to use some Jomon types of chipped-stone tools, which had already been completely replaced by metal tools in Korea and China. Some Yayoi houses were in Korean styles, some in Jomon styles. Particularly as Yayoi culture spread north of Tokyo, into cooler areas where rice farming was less productive and where Jomon hunter-gatherers had lived in the highest population densities, a mixed Yayoi/Jomon culture arose, with fishhooks made of metal but in Jomon shapes, and with pots made in modified Yayoi forms but with Jomon cord marking. After briefly occupying the cold northern tip of Honshu, Yayoi farmers abandoned that area, presumably because rice farming just could not compete there with the Jomon hunter-gatherer lifestyle. For the next 2,000 years, northern Honshu remained a frontier zone, beyond which the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido and itsAinu hunter-gatherers were not even considered part of the Japanese state until their annexation in the 19th century.
Yayoi iron tools were initially imported from Korea in enormous quantities, until domestic Japanese iron smelting and production began after several centuries. It also took several centuries for Yayoi Japan to exhibit the first signs of social stratification, as reflected especially in cemeteries. After about 100 B.C., separate parts of cemeteries began to be set aside for the graves of what was evidently an emerging elite class, marked by luxury goods imported from China, such as beautiful jade objects and bronze mirrors. As the Yayoi population explosion continued, and as all the best swamps or irrigable plains suitable for wet rice agriculture began to be filled up, archaeological evidence for war became more and more frequent: mass production of arrowheads, defensive moats surrounding the villages, and buried skeletons pierced by projectile points. These hallmarks of war in Yayoi Japan corroborate the earliest accounts of Japan in Chinese chronicles, which describe the land of Wa and its hundred little political units fighting with one another.
In the period from A.D. 300 to 700, both archaeological excavations and frustratingly ambiguous accounts in later chronicles let us glimpse dimly the emergence of a politically unified Japan. Before A.D. 300, elite tombs were small and exhibited a regional diversity of styles. Beginning around A.D. 300, increasingly enormous earth mound tombs termed kofun, in the shape of a keyhole, were constructed in Honshu’s Kinai region and then appeared over the whole former Yayoi culture area, from Kyushu to North Honshu. Why the Kinai region? Perhaps because it contains some of Japan’s best agricultural land, where super-expensive Kobe beef is raised today, and where Japan’s ancient capital was located at Kyoto until the capital’s shift to Tokyo in 1868.
Kofun tombs are up to 1,500 feet long and over 100 feet high, making them possibly the largest earth mound tombs in the ancient world. The prodigious amount of labor required to construct them, and the uniformity of their style over Japan, imply powerful rulers who commanded a huge labor force and were in the process of achieving Japan’s political unification. Those kofun that have been excavated contain lavish burial goods, but excavation of all of the largest ones is still forbidden because they are believed to contain the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line. This visible evidence of political centralization that the kofun provide reinforces the accounts of Kofun era Japanese emperors written down much later in Japanese and Korean chronicles. Massive Korean influences on Japan during the Kofun era—whether through Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view)—transmitted Buddhism, writing, horse riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.
Finally, with the completion of Japan’s first chronicle, in A.D. 712, partly myth and partly rewritings of true events, Japan emerges into the full light of history. As of 712, the people inhabiting Japan were at last unquestionably Japanese, and their language (termed Old Japanese) was unquestionably ancestral to modern Japanese. Japan’s Emperor Akihito, who reigns today, is the 82nd direct descendant of the emperor under whom that first chronicle of A.D. 712 was written. He is traditionally considered the 125th direct descendant of the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, the great-great-great-grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu.
JAPANESE CULTURE UNDERWENT far more radical change in the 700 years of the Yayoi era than in the ten millennia of Jomon times. The contrast between Jomon stability (alias conservatism) and radical Yayoi change is the most striking feature of Japanese history. Obviously, something momentous happened at 400 B.C. What was it? Were the Jomon people, the Yayoi people, or a mixture of them the ancestors of the modern Japanese? Japan’s population increased by the astonishing factor of 70 during Yayoi times: what caused that change? A passionate debate has raged around three alternative hypotheses.
One theory is that Jomon hunter-gatherers themselves gradually evolved into the modern Japanese. Because they had already been living a settled existence in villages for thousands of years, they may have been pre-adapted to accepting agriculture. At the Yayoi transition, perhaps nothing more happened than that Jomon society received cold-resistant rice seeds and information about paddy irrigation from Korea, enabling people to produce more food and increase their numbers. This theory appeals to some modern Japanese, because it minimizes the unwelcome contribution of Korean genes to the Japanese gene pool, and because it portrays the Japanese people as uniquely Japanese for at least the last 12,000 years.
A second theory, unappealing to those Japanese who prefer the first theory, argues instead that the Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice. According to one estimate, Yayoi Japan received several million immigrants from Korea, utterly swamping out the genetic contribution of Jomon people (thought to have numbered around 75,000 just before the Yayoi transition). If so, modern Japanese are descendants of Korean immigrants who developed a modified culture of their own over the last 2,000 years.
The last theory accepts the evidence for immigration from Korea but denies that it was massive. Instead, highly productive agriculture enabled a modest number of immigrant rice farmers to reproduce much faster than Jomon hunter-gatherers and eventually to outnumber them. For instance, suppose that a mere 5,000 Koreans had come to Kyushu, but that rice agriculture had enabled them to feed babies and to increase their numbers at a rate of 1 percent per year. That rate is much higher than observed for hunter-gatherer populations but is easily attained by farmers: Kenya’s population is now growing at 4.5 percent per year. In 700 years those 5,000 immigrants would have left 5,000,000 descendants, again swamping out the Jomon people. Like the second theory, this one considers modern Japanese to be slightly modified Koreans but dispenses with the need for large-scale immigration.
By comparison with similar transitions elsewhere in the world, the second or third theory seems to me more plausible than the first theory. Over the last 12,000 years, agriculture arose at not more than nine places over the face of the earth: China, the Fertile Crescent, and a few other places. Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers’ elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative, as Jomon people evidently were from 10,700 to 400 B.C. Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers’ outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture. In modern times, European farmers thereby replaced western North American Indian hunters, Aboriginal Australians, and the San people of South Africa. Stone-tool-using farmers similarly replaced hunters prehistorically throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. Compared with the only modest advantage that farmers enjoyed over hunters in these prehistoric expansions, Korean farmers of 400 B.C. would have enjoyed an enormous advantage over Jomon hunters, because the Koreans already possessed iron tools and a highly developed form of intensive agriculture.
Which of the three theories is correct for Japan? The only direct way to answer this question is to compare Jomon and Yayoi skeletons and genes with those of modern Japanese and Ainu. Measurements have now been made of many series of skeletons. In addition, within recent years, molecular geneticists have begun to extract DNA from ancient human skeletons and to compare the genes of Japan’s ancient and modern populations. What one finds is that Jomon and Yayoi skeletons are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to have shorter stature, relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial “topography” with strikingly raised brow ridges, noses, and bridges of the nose. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, had close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat brow ridges and noses. Some skeletons of the Yayoi period were still Jomon-like in appearance, but that is to be expected by almost any theory of the Jomon/Yayoi transition. By the time of the Kofun period, all Japanese skeletons except those of the Ainu formed a homogeneous group, resembling modern Japanese and Koreans.
In all of these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. On the assumption that modern Japanese people arose as a mixture of a Korean-like Yayoi population with an Ainu-like Jomon population, geneticists have attempted to calculate the relative contributions of the two gene pools. The resulting conclusion is that the Korean/Yayoi contribution was generally dominant. The Ainu/Jomon contribution was lowest in southwest Japan, where most Korean immigrants would have arrived and Jomon populations were sparse, and relatively greater in northern Japan, where forests were richer in nuts, Jomon population densities were highest, and Yayoi rice agriculture was least successful.
Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. The Ainu are more nearly the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.
Given the overwhelming advantage that rice agriculture finally gave to Korean farmers over Jomon hunters, one has to wonder why the farmers achieved victory so suddenly, after making little headway in Japan for thousands of years after farming reached Korea. I already mentioned that early Korean farming was relatively unproductive and resulted only in poor farmers outclassed by rich hunters. What finally tipped the balance to the farmers and triggered the Yayoi transition was probably a combination of four factors coming together: the development of irrigated rice agriculture, instead of less productive dry-field rice agriculture; the continuing improvement of rice strains adapted to a cool climate; the growth in Korea’s farming population, putting pressure on Koreans to emigrate; and the development of iron tools for efficiently mass-producing the wooden shovels, hoes, and other tools needed for rice paddy agriculture. The fact that iron and intensive farming reached Japan simultaneously is unlikely to be a coincidence.
I BEGAN THIS PIECE BY MENTIONING A TRANSPARENT interpretation for how the distinctive-looking Ainu and the undistinctive-looking Japanese came to share Japan. On the face of it, these facts would appear to suggest that the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original inhabitants, and that the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals. We have now seen that the combined evidence of archaeology, physical anthropology, and genetics supports this view.
But I also mentioned at the outset a potent objection that causes most people (especially the Japanese themselves) to seek other interpretations. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar to each other. More generally, if the Japanese people arose recently from some mixture, on the island of Kyushu, of original Ainu-like Jomon inhabitants with Yayoi invaders from Korea, the Japanese language might show close affinities to both the Korean and the Ainu languages. Instead, Japanese and Ainu have no demonstrable relationship, and the relationship between Japanese and Korean is distant. How could this be so if the mixing occurred a mere 2,400 years ago? I suggest the following resolution of this paradox: that the languages of the Kyushu Jomon residents and of the Yayoi invaders were in fact unlikely to have been very similar to the modern Ainu and Korean languages, respectively.
Taking first the Ainu language, that language as we know it is the one that was spoken in recent times by the Ainu on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Therefore, Hokkaido’s Jomon inhabitants also probably spoke an Ainu-like language, but the Jomon inhabitants of Kyushu surely did not. From the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido, the Japanese archipelago is nearly 1,500 miles long. We know that in Jomon times it supported great regional diversity of subsistence techniques and of pottery styles and was never unified politically. During the 10,000 years of Jomon occupation, Jomon people would have evolved correspondingly great linguistic diversity. Their languages may even have been already diverse over 12,000 years ago, if the northern and southern Jomon people arrived over land bridges from Russia and Korea, respectively, as the archaeological evidence seems to indicate.
In fact, many Japanese place-names on Hokkaido and northern Honshu include the Ainu words for “river” (nai or betsu) or cape (shiri), but such Ainu-like names do not occur farther south in Japan. This suggests that Yayoi and Japanese pioneers adopted many local Jomon place-names, just as white Americans did from Native Americans (think of “Massachusetts,” “Mississippi,” and so on), but that Ainu was the Jomon language only of northernmost Japan. The Jomon language of Kyushu may instead have shared a common ancestor with the Austronesian language family, which includes Polynesian and Indonesian languages and the Aboriginal languages of Taiwan. As many linguists have pointed out, the Japanese language shows some influence of Austronesian languages in the shared preference for so-called open syllables (a consonant followed by a vowel, as in “Hi-ro-hi-to”). Ancient Taiwanese were great seafarers whose descendants spread out far to the south, east, and west; some of them may also have spread north, to Kyushu.
That is, the modern Ainu language of Hokkaido is not a model for the ancient Jomon language of Kyushu. By the same token, the modern Korean language may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 B.C. In the centuries before Korea became unified politically in A.D. 676, it consisted of three kingdoms. The modern Korean language is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla, the kingdom that emerged triumphant and unified Korea, but Silla was not the kingdom that had had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages. While the languages of the kingdoms defeated by Silla are poorly known, the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms (Koguryo) are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modern Korean words. Korean languages may have been even more diverse in 400 B.C., before political unification had reached the stage of three kingdoms. I suspect that the Korean language that was carried to Japan in 400 B.C., and that evolved into modern Japanese, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.
This conclusion is likely to be equally unpopular in Japan and in Korea, because of the current mutual dislike of those two peoples. History gives them good reason to dislike each other: especially, for Koreans to dislike Japanese. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are peoples joined by blood, yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia and in the Middle East. Reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.