Doigahama, Japan: Yayoi Skulls That Gaze Toward China

A beautiful beach facing the Hibikinada Sea. I wanted to visit Doigahama, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, because I believed it would be an important point of departure for the research I am planning in Amami and the Ryukyus. From here, Tsunoshima, the island that social media made famous, is just a bridge away. I walked this land without crossing that bridge because what I had come for was the Doigahama site, a short way in from the shore.

To anyone drawn to the question of where the Japanese come from, the Doigahama site is one of the most important places there is. Research here spans nearly a century, and over the course of several excavations a great number of Yayoi skeletons have been unearthed. As I see it, this is the front line where the complex framework of the ancestral groups of the Japanese is being taken apart and rebuilt, again and again.

Most of us will remember being taught at school that our ancestors fit a two-part structure, the Jomon and the Yayoi. This is the so-called dual-structure theory of the Japanese. Then, in the early 2020s, a new picture won wide popularity: the Jomon, the Yayoi and the Kofun people each had different roots, and the Japanese of today are the three combined. This is the triple-structure theory of the Japanese.

Yet this catchy theory of ancestry, made to please everyone, is already beginning to come apart. Those mounting a quiet but incisive counterattack on its simplified structure are the researchers of this very site, Doigahama. Only they, I suspect, can dismantle and redefine the triple-structure theory. I believe this because no one has studied Yayoi skeletons as exhaustively as the researchers of this site.

Of course, it is true that the three structures of Jomon, Yayoi and Kofun lay at the base. If so, then surely the most complex of them are the Yayoi, who stand at the turning point. And yet, beside the Jomon period, loved for its clay figurines and pottery, and the Kofun period, admired for its enormous burial mounds, the Yayoi period draws little attention.

Until now, I have traveled the Japanese archipelago exploring every one of these periods. More than seven years of that experience have opened a view I could not have seen otherwise. I came here not to think about theories of ancestral structure, but because I felt that the bones found at this site speak of our ancestors more eloquently than any triple-structure theory. And to understand what they say, we must know an idea called inishi.

The sound inishi (or nishi), which lives on in and around the Ryukyus, probably comes from the language of the Yayoi, and it was originally one of the key concepts brought to light by Iha Fuyu, the founder of Ryukyuan ethnology. Put simply, it means “the path the ancestors traveled.”

And the Doigahama Yayoi point clearly in the direction of their inishi. They do it through the gaze of the skulls they laid in the earth.

What lies at the end of that gaze? The key was held by the partners with whom the Doigahama researchers carried out joint research for three years, beginning in 1994: researchers from Shandong Province in China. The skeletons found in these two distant places were concluded to be almost identical in form. What is more, genome analysis has recently shown that the Doigahama Yayoi were migrants who came from across the sea.

Did our ancestors, then, know where they had come from, and who they had been? That question still floats in my mind, long after I left Doigahama. In fact, when I stood at the site and on the beach and followed the line of the skulls’ gaze on a map, it pointed squarely at Shandong.

On that beautiful, empty beach facing the sea, as I gazed toward their inishi, I suddenly noticed how much of the debris around me had drifted ashore from Zhejiang Province in China.

If debris drifts ashore, so do people. Perhaps, for a long time, we had forgotten this obvious fact.