縄文時代研究が世界有数の成果を上げた背景How Jomon Archaeology Rose in Twentieth-Century Japan

Today, I look at the particular background of the twentieth century in which research on the Jomon period, the most important period for Japan's ancient history, produced some of the world's leading results in the archaeology of prehistory.

Do you know where the word “Jomon” in Japan's periodization comes from?

The word Jomon comes from the “patterns on pottery.” In Japan, ancient pottery and artifacts had been found and recorded often since around the Edo period, but full-scale scholarly investigation began only after the tide of Westernization, in the Meiji era, when archaeology as a Western discipline was imported and research accelerated.

It began in 1877. Edward S. Morse (1838–1925), an American zoologist who investigated the Omori Shell Mounds on the coast of Tokyo, called the pottery he found there “cord-marked pottery” because rope patterns were carved into it.

In 1886, Shogoro Tsuboi (1863–1913), a physical anthropologist who had long done archaeological research with Morse and who was Japan's first anthropologist, first named the pottery of this age “Jomon pottery.”

Building on the results of the late 19th century, Sugao Yamanouchi (1902–1970), an archaeologist who had an enormous influence on Japanese archaeology, proposed the concept of “Jomon culture” in the 1930s. This is the source of the period division that archaeology calls the “Jomon period.” In other words, the distinctive name “Jomon period” took hold only after the 1930s.

In 1937 Yamanouchi published the journal Prehistoric Archaeology (Senshi Kokogaku), and in its first issue proposed, for the first time, a detailed and systematic arrangement of Jomon pottery types. This became the foundation of Jomon archaeology to this day.

The Jomon period is a periodization unique to Japan, corresponding worldwide to “prehistory” (some call it late prehistory). Unlike the usual definition in prehistoric research, then, the study of Japan's prehistory (the Jomon period) rests on “patterns on pottery.” And interestingly, it has produced rich results by world standards.

Why has research on the Jomon period achieved so much, compared with the Western countries where archaeology began earlier? The reason is deeply tied to the circumstances around the Second World War.

The late 1930s, when Yamanouchi was active, were a transition in which Japan was accelerating militarism and preparing for war. It was an age when emperor worship, answering that movement, was strengthened by the state. To raise the cohesion of the nation, the investigation of “Japan's own culture and history” was promoted by the state. That it produced great results is one factor.

One field that benefited was precisely Jomon research. In particular, to strengthen the unity of the people and to build up the theory of the emperor's “unbroken line,” it was necessary to show that Japanese history was as old as the ancient histories of the world.

This arose as a swing back from the way, during the Meiji era, the rush to take in Western learning had thinned the habit of looking at one's own history. That Yamanouchi's chronology of Jomon pottery appeared in the late 1930s was apt, seen from the flow of the times.

The other reason lies in postwar history. Because war had left many urban areas burnt-out ruins, from around the 1950s new city planning accelerated across the country. In the background was the Korean War: the US military regarded Japan as its most important base against communism and actively backed economic growth.

To build countless homes and buildings, ground surveys and the like were necessary. Since so many areas were then burnt-out ruins, building new cities there involved enormous surveys. As a result, this became the occasion for discovering astonishing Jomon sites and artifacts.

Since the 1930s Yamanouchi had actively investigated shell mounds in the Tohoku region and had proposed the hypothesis that the Jomon period flourished in Tohoku. Now the discovery of countless Jomon sites nationwide gave new vitality to people who had lost their confidence in defeat. This became the driving force, and research on the “Jomon period” accelerated regardless of whether one was a specialist.

At the same time, however, the new city plans had to be completed quickly. Even when Jomon sites were found across the country, plans could not be stopped or interrupted each time. For this reason most sites were discovered but filled in without proper investigation, and lie buried under the cities.

Even for some sites deemed important, the situation did not change much. Investigation was permitted, but everything had to be done in a very short time.

Given this particular background, Japanese archaeologists could not intensively investigate and study a single site. However many sites were discovered, the number of researchers could not keep up. And because even permitted investigations were limited to short periods, they had to carry the finds one after another into the laboratory and publish them one after another.

Interestingly, this astonishing speed of the archaeologists of the time became, strangely, the source of the richness of Japan's prehistoric research.

Of course, this led to the discovery of sites not only of the Jomon period but across all of Japanese history. As a result, 470,000 sites have now been confirmed across Japan, and Jomon sites alone (settlement remains and so on) number about 91,637.

The overall trend is that Jomon sites are concentrated in the Kanto and Tohoku regions. It has gradually become clear that the center of the Jomon period in Japan lies in eastern Japan, not in western Japan, headed by Nara and Kyoto, which have historically been the core of Japanese culture.