Jōmon period

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jomon period stretches across roughly 14,000 years of Japanese prehistory, from about 14,000 BCE to 300 BCE. That span is so vast it can be difficult to hold in the mind. Here is one way to feel its depth: the time separating the earliest Jomon pottery from the more celebrated Middle Jomon period is approximately twice as long as the gap between the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the 21st century. These people were not a footnote before Japanese history began. They were the main story for an almost incomprehensible length of time.

  The name itself comes from an American zoologist and orientalist named Edward S. Morse, who discovered sherds of pottery in 1877. Morse translated "straw-rope pattern" into Japanese as Jomon, meaning "cord-marked". That name now labels an entire civilization. And what a civilization it was: semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who crafted the world's oldest known ceramics, managed groves of useful trees, domesticated the adzuki bean, and built ornate ritual figurines. They populated a chain of islands stretching from Hokkaido to the Ryukyus, and their descendants still carry traces of Jomon ancestry in modern Japan today.

  Who were the Jomon people, where did they come from, and how did a hunter-gatherer society develop such remarkable complexity? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The World's Oldest Pots

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  Small fragments found at the Odai Yamamoto I site in 1998 are dated to roughly 14,500 BCE. Those fragments are among the oldest known ceramics on Earth. Pottery of comparable age was later found at two other sites: Kamikuroiwa and the Fukui cave. The antiquity of Jomon ceramics was not established until after World War II, when radiocarbon dating methods were applied to the question.

  The earliest Jomon vessels were mostly small and round-bottomed. Archaeologists think they were used for boiling food and perhaps storing it beforehand. They belonged to people who still moved through the landscape, and the modest size of those early pots may reflect a practical need for portability. As the centuries passed and Jomon settlements became more stable, bowls grew larger. That increase in size is now read as direct evidence of a more settled way of life.

  Over the full span of the period, Jomon pottery evolved in remarkable ways: undulating rims appeared, bases flattened so vessels could stand upright, and patterns grew increasingly elaborate. Archaeologists have classified the pottery into roughly 70 distinct styles, with many more local varieties. The decoration method that gave the culture its name involved pressing cords into the wet outer surface of clay before firing. That technique produced the textured, rope-marked surface Edward Morse first described and named.

• 3. An Island Apart

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  During the earliest Incipient Jomon phase, Japan was not yet an archipelago. It was still connected to continental Asia as a narrow peninsula. Then, around 12,000 BCE, the glaciers of the last glacial period melted and sea levels rose, separating the islands from the mainland. The closest point, in Kyushu, sits about 190 kilometers from the Korean Peninsula. Close enough to absorb continental influences; far enough to allow a genuinely independent culture to develop.

  The landscape that greeted the Jomon people after the Ice Age was diverse and productive. Broadleaf evergreen trees dominated southwestern Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. Broadleaf deciduous trees and conifers covered northeastern Honshu and southern Hokkaido. Beeches, buckeyes, chestnuts, and oaks produced edible nuts and acorns in abundance. Acorns from the Quercus crispula species could not be eaten raw because of astringent tannins, but they could be processed into food, and they were. In the northeast, the Oyashio Current carried rich marine life southward, especially salmon. Communities along both the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean consumed immense quantities of shellfish, leaving distinctive mounds of discarded shells known as middens. Those middens are now among the most valuable archaeological sources available.

  This productive environment is the key to understanding why the Jomon achieved a degree of cultural complexity unusual for hunter-gatherers. Food was abundant enough to support fairly large, semi-sedentary populations without requiring full-scale agriculture.

• 4. Roots and Genes

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  Modern Japanese people carry approximately 30% of their paternal ancestry from the Jomon, a far higher proportion than the roughly 15% maternal Jomon contribution and the approximately 10% autosomal contribution. That imbalanced inheritance has been labeled the "admixture paradox", and it is thought to contain clues about how the Jomon and the later Yayoi populations mixed.

  Full genome analyses completed in 2020 and 2021 revealed that early admixture between different groups was already happening during the Paleolithic, before what we call the Jomon period even begins. Constant gene flow from coastal East Asian groups followed, producing a heterogeneous population that then homogenized before the Yayoi arrived. The Jomon were not a single uniform people. Mitochondrial DNA studies link them to modern East Asians, but the picture is complicated. Gene flow from Northeast Asia is associated with the C1a1 and C2 lineages. Gene flow from the Tibetan Plateau and southern China is associated with the D1a2a and D1a1 lineages. Ancient Siberian ancestry is detectable in the northern Jomon of Hokkaido.

  A 2015 study introduced a further puzzle: specific gene alleles related to facial structure found in some Ainu individuals, who largely descended from Hokkaido Jomon groups, are typically associated with Europeans and absent from other East Asians. The exact origin of those alleles remains unknown. A 2019 study by Matsumura and colleagues suggested the underlying phenotypes were shared by prehistoric populations from China and Southeast Asia. The Jomon people were demonstrably more diverse than early models assumed.

• 5. Farming at the Edges

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  There is no scientific consensus that the Jomon were purely hunter-gatherers. Evidence points to arboriculture: the deliberate tending of lacquer trees (Toxicodendron verniciflua) and chestnut trees (Castanea crenata and Aesculus turbinata). The Jomon also cultivated soybean, bottle gourd, hemp, Perilla, and adzuki beans. They occupied a position somewhere between hunting-gathering and full agriculture.

  An apparently domesticated variety of peach appeared at Jomon sites dated to between 6,700 and 6,400 years before present, roughly 4,700-4,400 BCE. That variety was already similar to modern cultivated forms. Intriguingly, the closest equivalent in China itself only appears later, around 5,300-4,300 years before present, even though peach domestication began in China long before the Jomon period. A genomic study of the adzuki bean supplied another striking finding. All present-day cultivated adzuki beans descended from wild adzuki in eastern Japan. Mutations linked to key domestication traits had a single origin in Japan. Those mutations began increasing in frequency around 10,000 years before present, meaning domestication pressures were being applied far earlier than large-scale cultivation is visible in the archaeological record.

  The Early Jomon phase, dated from 5,000 to 3,520 BCE, saw a notable explosion in population, reflected in a sharp rise in the number and size of settlements. This period coincided with the Holocene climatic optimum, when the local climate was warmer and more humid than before or since.

• 6. Figurines, Beads, and Houses

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  The Middle Jomon period, spanning from 3,520 to 2,470 BCE, left some of the most visually dramatic artifacts of the entire era. Highly ornate pottery figurines called dogu appeared alongside so-called "flame style" vessels and lacquered wood objects. Archaeologist Jun Takayama has theorized that the patterns impressed on dogu depicted tattoos. Even as ornamentation on pottery grew more elaborate, the ceramic fabric itself remained quite coarse throughout.

  Magatama, the curved stone beads that became one of the enduring symbols of Japanese culture, made an interesting transition during this period. From being common jewelry found in homes, they shifted to serving as grave goods. Large burial mounds and monuments also appeared. Pit-house design became more complex, with some dwellings acquiring paved stone floors. A 2015 study found that this form of dwelling continued in use all the way into the Satsumon culture. Pollen analysis has confirmed the Middle Jomon as the warmest of all the sub-phases. By the end of this period, the climate began cooling.

  That cooling trend intensified. After 1,500 BCE, the climate entered a stage of neoglaciation and populations appear to have contracted sharply. Relatively few archaeological sites can be found after that date. The Japanese chestnut, Castanea crenata, became essential during this Late Jomon phase, valued not only as a food source but also as a timber well suited to wet conditions and used heavily in house construction.

• 7. Arrivals and Endings

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  Around 900 BCE, in the Final Jomon period, Korean-type settlements began appearing in western Kyushu. The settlers brought wet rice farming, bronze and iron metallurgy, and pottery styles similar to those of the Mumun pottery period. The settlements of these arrivals and the existing Jomon communities appear to have coexisted for roughly a thousand years.

  Outside Hokkaido, the Jomon period was eventually succeeded by the Yayoi culture, dated from around 300 BCE to 300 CE, named after an archaeological site near Tokyo. In Hokkaido, the story was different. The Jomon there gave way not to the Yayoi but to the Zoku-Jomon (also called Epi-Jomon) culture, which later merged with or was replaced by the Okhotsk culture, and eventually connected to the Satsumon culture around the 7th century. The Ryukyu Islands and Okinawa followed yet another path: Jomon people were largely absent there, and the region uses a separate chronology, the Shellmidden Period.

  At the close of the Jomon era, the local population declined sharply. Researchers point to food shortages and environmental stress as the likely causes. Examination of human remains from across the Jomon period shows no evidence of warfare or violence on a scale sufficient to account for those deaths. The collapse was ecological, not military. What the Jomon left behind, however, was an enduring foundation. The traditional founding date of Japan by Emperor Jimmu, recorded as the 11th of February 660 BCE in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, falls within the Final Jomon period. Those texts date to between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, but the story they tell reaches back to a time when Jomon and newcomers were still learning to share the same islands.

• 8. Living Legacy

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  A 2018 exhibition dedicated to Jomon culture at the Tokyo National Museum drew 350,000 visitors, roughly three and a half times more than the organizers had anticipated. That figure captures something real about the shift in how modern Japan perceives its deepest past.

  In the early 21st century, the cord-marking style associated with Jomon pottery was revived and applied to clothing, accessories, and tattoos. A movement to reproduce ancient Jomon ceramic techniques using bonfire firing methods had already begun in the 1970s. Today, dogu motifs appear on vessels, origami, cookies, candies, notebooks, and neckties. Publications such as Jōmonzine keep the period in public conversation. Pit houses built in the ancient style have been recreated at sites including the Jomon Village Historic Garden.

  Some elements of modern Japanese culture may carry direct traces of Jomon influence: precursors to Shinto, certain architectural traditions, lacquerware, the laminated bows called yumi, and early metalworking. Certain linguists argue that Japonic languages were already present in the archipelago and coastal Korea before the Yayoi period, linked to one of the Jomon populations of southwestern Japan. If that theory holds, then the language spoken in Japan today descends not from the rice-farming newcomers but from the cord-marked pottery makers who came before them. The adzuki bean, domesticated in eastern Japan, remains a staple of Japanese cuisine.