The Limits of Views of Japan That Lack the Sea｜The Five Spheres of Jomon Pottery and the Origins of the Visiting Gods

The deeper I dive into Japan, the more clearly one recurring problem comes into view, and that problem is the missing “view from the sea.”

Not only in history but whenever people look at Japan, the difficulties they run into usually come from lacking a view from the sea, or from making light of it. Put simply, the existing discourse on Japan and the Japanese has, almost without exception, been built from “the view from the land.”

Since the Japanese archipelago is a chain of islands surrounded by the sea, we have to look both ways, toward the sea and toward the land. In reality, though, nearly everything has been concentrated on the land. From the postwar years through the late twentieth century, a handful of thinkers who doubted this land-centered approach argued for the importance of looking at the sea, and they spent enormous effort trying to bring “the real Japan” to light. Yet even now, the weight remains tilted toward the land, and the true picture of Japan is slow to come into focus.

Shinobu Orikuchi, the folklorist, studied the marebito, the visiting gods of the ancient world, and in the course of that research he showed that the gods originally appeared from the sea. Yet the gods did not always come from the sea. In later ages, they came down from the mountains, and in more abstract conceptions, they descended from the heavens, changing their nature as time went on.

On land, the footprints of our predecessors remain, and so do their structures and artifacts. The sea is different. The tracks of those who crossed it are erased by the waves in an instant, and whatever they left behind is carried off by the currents. From the standpoint of discovery, too, one can settle in on land and excavate with patience, but at sea that is impossible. Compared with the land, the sea is an unknown realm that keeps no traces, and in truth it is a world far more worth exploring than outer space.

In a sense, what we most need to uncover is the history of our ancestors’ movements. Yet instead of looking directly at movement across the sea, archaeologists of the Jomon period turned their attention to the styles of the pottery the Jomon people made. Over roughly a century, they systematically organized the pottery that was found, compiled the surveys from every region, and studied in detail how far each style’s influence reached. What came into view at the end of this unimaginable labor was an unexpected history.

“Didn’t the Jomon people move around far more than we imagine?”

Anyone who has looked even briefly at the Jomon period is bound to feel this nagging doubt. People today have a bad habit of seeing those of the distant past as a less civilized race, but if you set that habit aside and look with honest eyes, you will be moved by the extraordinary world that rises up before you, the history of the Jomon people on the move.

Researchers divide the period differently, but it is generally split into six phases, the Incipient (about 16,000–11,500 years ago), Initial (about 11,500–7,000 years ago), Early (about 7,000–5,500 years ago), Middle (about 5,500–4,500 years ago), Late (about 4,500–3,300 years ago), and Final (about 3,300–2,800 years ago). The diversity of pottery styles becomes marked from the Early phase onward and peaks in the Middle phase, and its sheer plurality is astonishing.

Already in the Initial phase, eastern Japan saw a succession from cord-wrapped-stick pottery of the Igusa, Natsushima, and Inaridai types, to incised-line pottery of the Lower and Upper Tado types, and then to the Kayama type, its surfaces scraped with shells. Centered on the Kanto region, the Boso Peninsula and southern Kanto formed something close to a single cultural sphere.

In western Japan, roller-stamped pottery spread from the Seto Inland Sea through the Kinki and Chubu regions to Kyushu, so that a pattern of different pottery styles standing side by side in east and west emerges remarkably early. Now as then, the archipelago holds two entirely different worlds in its east and its west, and that difference goes back to the Jomon period. In southern Kyushu, meanwhile, shell-impressed pottery and pottery with raised clay ridges, such as the Maehira and Shikazegashira types, developed on their own.

Through the Early phase, truly regional identities took shape, and with the arrival of the Middle phase, richly decorated styles burst out across the regions. This was the golden age of the Jomon people.

In the central highlands and western Kanto, the Katsusaka type appeared, known for its sculpted face-shaped handles and serpent motifs, while the Kasori E type formed a vast sphere covering the whole of Kanto. From northern Tohoku across the Tsugaru Strait to southern Hokkaido, the Upper Ento type carried forward a tradition reaching back to the Early phase, and in its wake, the Daigi type took hold throughout Tohoku. In the same period, in Hokuriku and the mountains of Chubu, the Umataka type emerged in the middle of the Middle phase, including the flame-style vessels and crown-style vessels now designated National Treasures.

In the Final phase, the Kamegaoka culture of Tsugaru, known for its goggle-eyed clay figurines, the Shakoki dogu, has an overwhelming presence. Kamegaoka-style pottery turns up, as imports and as imitations, well beyond Tohoku, in Kanto, Chubu, and even northern Kyushu, which makes it a remarkable presence whose influence reached across the whole archipelago. Western Japan, by contrast, was in steady decline. In the latter half of the Final phase, the Kurokawa type developed in Kyushu, the Shigasato type in Kinki, and, across western Japan, Tottaimon pottery with its applied raised bands, but once the Tottaimon stage begins, the Jomon period proper is generally considered to have ended. As if to symbolize this, the Yusu type of northern Kyushu is placed at the final stage of Tottaimon pottery, and at the Itazuke site, among others, where the oldest traces of wet-rice paddies were found, it has been confirmed to occur together with pottery of the Initial Yayoi period.

All of this is provisional, but in broad terms, one can say that five great spheres took shape and shifted over time. They were a northern Japan sphere from northern Tohoku to the Donan area of southern Hokkaido, a sphere of the central highlands and Kanto, a distinct sphere of Hokuriku and the Shinano River basin, a western Japan sphere of Kinki and the Seto Inland Sea, and a Kyushu sphere. This broad picture of spheres, as it happens, also proves to be very important for reading the myths of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.

In the history of changing pottery styles, attention tends to fall on the vessels themselves, above all the ones named National Treasures, but we must not forget that behind every spread of a style there was always contact between people. In the Jomon period, this meant encounters between different peoples, and because it bears directly on the origins of the marebito, it deserves careful attention.

When people hear the phrase “visiting gods from the sea,” they almost inevitably picture immigrants arriving from abroad. Visiting gods did come from the continent, the Korean Peninsula, and Oceania, it is true. At the same time, the archipelago of that era was a plural world in which each place was home to a different people, so contact across the sea may have created the very prototype of the visiting god.

Suppose, for example, that a tribe from around Lake Jusan in Tsugaru crossed the Sea of Japan to Suzu on the Noto Peninsula. To the people of Suzu, they would have been strangers of another tribe, and at the same time “visiting gods from the sea.” The view from the sea is the most important question for me as well. It is a long-term line of research that brings together tides, ocean currents, and seasonal winds, along with place names, sounds, and the worship of the gods, and it moves forward only by weighing each of them with care.

A Japan that does not look at the sea will never see Japan. Only by knowing both the sea and the land does Japan come into sharper resolution.

What we need is not new discoveries but a higher resolution on what has already been found. Having looked at countless remains and artifacts, I now feel strongly that this may be the greatest key to understanding Japan.