Japanese History： The Jomon Period (Japanese History： The Textbook Ep.1)

How was the island of Japan born? Where did its people come from? And what do we know about the earliest forms of culture to evolve and flourish there? Stay tuned for all that and more on this inaugural episode of Japanese History The Textbook on the Buyuuden Japanese History Channel. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Buyuuden Japanese History Channel. Buyuuden is a Japanese word that roughly translates to tales of heroic exploits or tales of valor. And with this channel, I'm hoping to explore a wide variety of topics in Japanese history. I think that outside of Japan, it's still surprisingly difficult to casually get one's hands on good, trustworthy, detailed information about Japanese history. And since I live in Japan and do a lot of reading about these subjects in Japanese, I would like to become a helpful source of information for those who may be interested. This first video series, Japanese History The Textbook, is going to be aimed at providing a general overview of the history of Japan starting in the truly ancient prehistoric period and going all the way up until the Bakumatsu and the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate at the end of the 1860s. The added twist for this series is that everything I tell you is going to be based on Japanese educational materials aimed at junior high school and high school students in modern Japan. So if you've ever wondered what kind of history actual Japanese people, and particularly public school students, are learning, how events are characterized, what is emphasized, what isn't, then this is the video series for you. And, of course, if you are just looking to get a general, foundational knowledge of Japanese history told in chronological order, then I also think you will enjoy this series. That being said, I am 100% intending to dive into some more specific topics at a later date, especially pertaining to Japan's Middle Ages and everyone's favorite history of the samurai. But for the time being, I want to start with this general outline so that we can all really fortify our knowledge base, and honestly also just for me to get some practice making videos. The two main sources I will be using for my information for this video series are the books Gakken Ryūkōsu Chūgaku Rekishi and Teimobetsu Dakara Rikai ga Fukamaru Nihonshi. The former is a Sankōshō, a reference book for junior high school students, and it's intended to be used as a supplement to whatever textbook that student is using, explaining things in depth and even providing sample test problems at the end of each major section. As it is a study supplement for public school students, it contains almost exactly the same info as a standard textbook does. I almost felt guilty buying it because I might have deprived some poor struggling kid of a helpful study resource. The second book is not explicitly aimed at students, but I did buy it not from the history section, but from the study reference section of my local bookstore, and its author is a professor at Showa Women's University, who also apparently lectures part-time at the junior and senior high schools attached to that institution. The book is full of pictures and diagrams and is laid out quite similarly to a textbook, so I think it will be a good addition to the first book and will provide us with some extra little details to flesh out our overview. Alright, without further ado, let's jump right in. Japan's Prehistory, the Paleolithic Period, and the Jōmon Period. The Japanese archipelago was formed about 30 million years ago when a massive earthquake on the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent caused a giant rift to form in the land along the Pacific coast. Over the course of millions of years, this rift gradually grew larger and became filled with seawater, and the land that would eventually become Japan began to separate away from the mainland. Some 20 million years ago, a collision between a volcanic island and this proto-Japan landmass resulted in the creation of the Izu Peninsula and the Kanto Plain, and about 5 million years after that, a collision with the Philippine sea plate further shaped the region's geography. Significant plate activity in this area is what resulted in the formation of Japan's many mountains, and it's also the reason that the country still experiences so many earthquakes and so much volcanic activity today. Finally, by about 3 million years ago, Japan had arrived at the shape and physical characteristics which it holds today. As an interesting aside, the period between 770,000 and 126,000 years ago, known to many as the Pleistocene Period, was renamed the Chibanian Period in 2017 after strata from the period which are preserved in Japan's modern Chiba Prefecture. During the Ice Age, or Last Glacial Period, which lasted up until about 10,000 years ago, the Japan Archipelago was covered in primeval forests and was still connected to the Asian continent by land due to the sea level being about 100 meters lower than where it currently is today. The first humans to cross over to Japan were likely following large animals such as Nauman elephants and giant elk, who had made their way over from the continent sometime prior. The Nauman elephant, a type of ancient elephant which existed in India, China, and Japan, weighed between 4 and 5 tons as an adult, and could provide a hunter with about 1.7 tons of meat. Simply from a volume perspective, this is enough to feed a single person with a kilogram of meat every day for more than four and a half years, so it's not hard to see why these animals were an attractive hunting target. Tusks of these elephants, as well as antlers of the aforementioned giant elk, have been discovered deep in the bed of Lake Nojiri in modern Nagano Prefecture, providing scientists with proof of these animals' migration. The human crossing to Japan seems not to have been a uniform event, with at least two disparate groups coming over to the island. The first of these groups, who we call the Jomon people, came from Southeast Asia, and they were the group who came over on the previously discussed land bridges during the The second group, who we call the Yayoi people, came from the northern part of the Asian continent much later, during the Yayoi period, which we will discuss in our next episode. Most modern Japanese are a blend of these two groups, although there are of course some other groups involved. There is still no consensus as to when exactly the Jomon people made their way over to Japan, but the earliest evidence of human activity on the island dates back to around 40,000 years ago. Japan's Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age, Kyuuseki Jidai, began several tens of thousands of years ago, and lasted up until about the end of the Ice Age. In pre-war Japanese academia, it was long thought that Japan had no Paleolithic period, and that there were no humans on the island at all, but new discoveries in the post-war era revealed that this was in fact not the case. The first of these was the discovery of the Iwajuku site in the modern-day city of Midori in Japan's Gunma Prefecture. In 1946, amateur archaeologist Aizawa Tadahiro was passing through the city, at that time called Kasagake Village, as part of his day job as a traveling salesman, when he discovered a flaked stone tool, known in Japanese as Dasei Seki, made of obsidian, Kokuyoseki. Gunma Prefecture is part of the Kanto region of Japan, and much of this region is covered by what is known as the Kanto Loam, a layer of volcanic ash soil which is thought to have finished accumulating about 10,000 years ago. Following Aizawa's discovery, a full-fledged archaeological survey was carried out in 1949 by Meiji University, and it was officially confirmed that Japan did indeed have a Paleolithic period. The people living in Japan during this age subsisted through hunting, gathering, and fishing, using the aforementioned Dasei Seki, flaked stone tools, but not yet creating any sort of ceramics. Their tools included handless axes for chopping and working with wood, spearheads which were attached to wooden shafts and used in hunting, and knives used for things such as skinning and carving the hunted animals. They lived in caves or simple huts in groups of roughly 10 or so, and lived a lifestyle of periodic migration within a fixed area. Given the distribution of obsidian tools that have been uncovered since the Iwajuku discovery, it is clear that these people were already engaging in trade between different regions of the archipelago. Around 20,000 years ago, the Earth's climate slowly began to warm, and as such the extremely large animals which had theretofore existed, such as our friends the Nauman elephant and the giant elk, began to phase out. With this change, human tools began to change as well, generally becoming smaller, but also improving in functionality. With the glacial melting accompanying the end of the Ice Age, the sea level rose, and this, as well as some intense seismic activity around the same time, resulted in Japan becoming the disconnected island, or group island rather, that it is today. As Japan became isolated from the Asian mainland, the stage was set for linguistic and cultural characteristics unique to the island of Japan to begin to form. As another little side story for you, in the 1990s there was a Japanese archaeologist named Fujimura Shinichi who was known in the archaeological community as God Hand, because whenever he visited a prehistoric dig site, some new artifact was discovered. In particular, at the Kamitakamori site in Miyagi Prefecture, he discovered a stone tool that proved the existence of Paleolithic culture in Japan as far back as 700,000 years ago. That is, until it was revealed that Mr. Fujimura had faked the artifact, as well as artifacts at 41 other dig sites. According to him, he started faking the artifacts out of a desire for recognition, and then continued because of the pressure of the God Hand nickname. Either way, the revelation of Fujimura's trickery caused quite a stir and reminded the Japanese archaeological world of the need to always be extra careful when verifying finds. The era known as the Jomon Period is typically thought to have lasted from about 12,000 years ago up until the 4th century BC. The culture of people of this era is characterized by ground stone tools rather than flaked ones, bone tools, wooden tools such as boats and bows, and of course, perhaps most famously, Jomon pottery. This pottery is characterized by patterns reminiscent of knotted rope and was fired at a low heat, giving it a blackish-brown hue and making it both thick and yet also relatively fragile. Many of these pottery items were used for culinary purposes. The pottery is actually the basis for the name of the era, with the jo in Jomon being the onyomi or Chinese reading for nawa, or rope, and the mon meaning pattern, so literally rope pattern. Given the difficulty of defining Japan's Neolithic period, this term Jomon is typically used instead. As I mentioned, the period is generally held to have begun 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, but some new discoveries in Aomori Prefecture of pottery dating back to 16,500 years ago have cast some doubt on this definition. The people of the Jomon era, like those of previous periods, lived in small, close-knit groups bound by ties of kinship and relied mostly on hunting, gathering, and fishing for survival. They tended to live close to bodies of water and in post-in-ground pit dwellings, tateyana juukyo. The floors of these dwellings were dug about 50 centimeters down into the ground, and they were covered with grass-thatched roofs supported by posts which were also dug into the ground. Interestingly, the size of one of these dwellings is described in the textbook I'm using here as being about that of a 4-5 tatami mat room, as this is typically how room sizes are described in modern Japan. This equates to about 7-9 square meters, and typically 4 or 5 people would have lived in one of these homes. In the early Jomon period, people tended to live in communities of just a few family units, but by the middle to late Jomon, this had increased to communities of dozens or even close to a hundred families living together. Much of what we know about these people comes from kaizuka, literally shell mounds, piles of shells, fish, and animal bones, and other discarded materials. These refuse piles were typically located in the vicinity of living areas, and so the remains of Jomon period residences are often discovered near them as well. The first survey on such a mound was carried out by the American professor Edward Morse, who discovered one while looking out the window of a train in 1877 while he was teaching zoology at Tokyo University. He initiated an excavation on the mound, known as the Oomori Kaizuka, and this created the impetus for great development within the field of Japanese archaeology. Another important discovery in the study of the Jomon period was that of the Sannai Maruyama site, the Sannai Maruyama Iseki, in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. This site was a large-scale settlement inhabited between about 5,500 and 1,500 years ago, and it is estimated that about 500 people lived in this community as permanent inhabitants. Given that it was long believed that the people of the Jomon era were semi-nomadic, the discovery of this site was quite groundbreaking for the field of Japanese prehistory. Not only this, but excavations of the site have also revealed that its inhabitants engaged in the cultivation of beans, squash, gobo, or burdock root, and tree nuts such as chestnuts, further shaking established theories regarding the lifestyle of the people of this era. The site also contains evidence of a watchtower and a large-scale residence that may have been used as a meeting area or a space for communal work. Amongst the artifacts uncovered from the site are non-local minerals indicating that the people of Sannai Maruyama were engaged in trade over a surprisingly wide radius. Examples include decorative jade from Niigata Prefecture, obsidian, amber, and asphalt used to attach arrowheads to their shafts. In the past, it was believed that the average lifespan of the people living in Japan at this time was only about 30, but at the Sannai Maruyama site, the bones of yellowtail fish buri, red sea bream madai, and mackerel saba have been found in strikingly large quantities, and there is also evidence that alcohol brewed from fruits such as grapes and raspberries was also being produced. These people were getting ample nutrition, and in a 2010 survey of 86 Jomon era skeletons, 32% of the people surveyed had lived to be 65 or older. With their relatively stable supply of food, the people of the Jomon era were able to spend some of their time engaging in cultural pursuits, such as the creation of elaborately decorated pottery and the ceramic dolls for which the era is famous. These people worshipped nature as a deity, and belief in the charms and divination played a large part in their lives. The aforementioned dolls were ritualistically used to pray for good harvests, family prosperity, and protection from evil, and the fact that they are often found in a destroyed state leads us to believe that their destruction was a part of these rituals. The pots of the early Jomon period are characterized by their round or pointed bottoms, and the dolls of this era were typically flat and fairly two-dimensional. In the middle Jomon period, decoration on pots becomes more three-dimensional, and their bases begin to flatten out, and the dolls also become three-dimensional figurines. By the late Jomon, the shapes of the pots became truly refined, and we really begin to see specific shapes being used for specific purposes. The Jomon people also had a number of unique and characteristic customs, such as burying their dead with their arms and legs bent into a sort of fetal position, and a tooth-pulling ritual, in which certain specific teeth were removed, which was carried out as a sign that one had reached adulthood. Skeletal remains from the tail end of the period begin to show signs of weapon-inflicted wounds, and it is believed that the population increase and food shortages resulting from climate changes were beginning to result in armed conflict between settlements. And with that bit of foreboding information, we have reached the end of our history of Japan's Paleolithic period and Jomon era. Tune in next time as we tackle the Yayoi period, where we will take a look at the country of Yamatai, also known as Yamato, and its mysterious priest-queen Himeko. Thanks for watching, have a great day, and BUUU INORUZO!