Was Shandong the Homeland of the Doigahama Yayoi? Skulls Gazing Toward the Northwestern Sea

Last week, touching on the image of the Yayoi people that is re-edited year after year, I wrote about the Doigahama site, which faces the Hibiki Sea in Yamaguchi Prefecture. I closed by saying that the Yayoi people who lived at Doigahama could basically be called immigrants, but that, quite intriguingly, long before any genetic testing was done, it had been pointed out that their bones closely matched the features of a certain ancient people. This time I begin with that people.

They are the ancient people of Shandong Province in China.

The most fascinating subject in recent research on ancient history is the Yayoi people. Recent studies of the Yayoi have made it impossible to speak of the roots of the Japanese in sweeping terms, using broad divisions such as Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun. In my own view, the Yayoi period is what must be unraveled in order to return the Jomon and the Kofun, the two eras that tend to draw attention in ancient history, to their unity in non-separation.

Looking back, even the groundbreaking “triple-structure model of the Japanese,” proposed just a few years ago in the early 2020s, has come under criticism from researchers centered on Doigahama. Yet this is no longer a question of which side is right and which is wrong. What the Yayoi people are telling us, their descendants, is that we do not have a suitable grammar for talking about peoples in the first place. It seems to me that the time has come to understand this reality.

The triple-structure model sorted things by separating them, the Jomon as indigenous, the Yayoi as Northeast Asian, and the Kofun as East Asian, and compressed the image of the people into a form anyone could grasp at a glance. But if the Yayoi people were of Northeast Asian origin, there is no way to explain the fact that whole-genome analysis of remains from the Doigahama site, dating to the early Yayoi period, clearly showed a predominance of East Asian ancestry.

Structural models are certainly easy to understand. But for all that they are clear and accessible to everyone, they must be handled with care. For one thing, I do not trust the theory that the Jomon were a single, uniform people either, and I continue my research on the assumption that the ancestors of the Japanese may be considerably complex. What this firsthand sense leads me to feel comes down to one thing, that being swept along by genetic research, with its new discoveries year after year, is not what matters. Genes are only supporting evidence, and they do not lead directly to answers. With all this in mind, let us look at the intriguing Yayoi of Doigahama.

Even before the image of the Yayoi began to waver as it does today, it had drawn attention that most of the skeletons buried at Doigahama had, for some reason, been laid out with their skulls toward the southeast. The skulls were buried gazing far across the sea to the northwest. What, then, lies at the end of the gaze of these Doigahama skulls? Thinking about that is far more useful than being thrown into confusion by genetic results, because this direction holds a clue to “their roots.”

If you follow the skulls’ line of sight a little to the northwest from the burial ground, you reach a beautiful beach facing the sea. Beyond the water you can see Tsunoshima, an island famous among tourists, and after that only emerald-blue sea stretches out. When I checked for myself where the skulls were looking, from both the site and the beach, I realized that their gaze ran exactly toward the Shandong Peninsula.

In fact, the research group at the Doigahama site noticed this possibility early on, and beginning in 1994 they carried out a joint Japanese and Chinese survey in Shandong Province over three years. As a result, they concluded that the ancestors of the Doigahama Yayoi were very likely the ancient people of Shandong.

The whole-genome analysis of 2024 did not uncover anything new. Rather, it reinforced the existing theory about Doigahama. This is probably how genetic research ought to be used in anthropology. The fact detected here, that this individual carried genomic components characteristic of East Asian populations, suggests that “they,” at least, may have been related to ancient people of Shandong lineage.

If the Yayoi of Doigahama were closely related to the ancient people of Shandong, then Shandong may have been their homeland, or the root of their parent population. To put it more boldly, they may once have been one and the same people.

Unfortunately, though, nothing more is likely to become clear. It has long been pointed out that the Doigahama Yayoi probably had little influence on the modern Japanese, and in China too it is estimated that the ancient people of Shandong had little influence on the modern Chinese. In other words, it is highly likely that they could not survive as a people either in their homeland in China or in Japan, where they had migrated.

At first glance, it seems that any chance of our knowing the true picture of these vanished Yayoi has dropped to zero. Yet research on the Doigahama Yayoi, across its long history, points to an intriguing picture of the Yayoi. Next time, I will look at the strong traces that bring us closer to the Yayoi of Doigahama, and at a lost ancient world around the Sea of Japan.