縄文ブームの展覧会の歴史Rediscovering Jomon Wisdom for Sustainable Living in Japan

The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear accident prompted reflection in Japan on the excesses of twentieth-century capitalist society: environmental destruction, mass consumption, and the loneliness and mental stress that come from thinning human ties.

Facing new problems such as environmental destruction and mental stress, people have begun to rethink sustainable ways of living, and the Jomon period has drawn fresh attention. Its features can be gathered into three: coexistence with nature, community, and spirituality.

These show up in many forms: harmony and coexistence with nature against today's environmental destruction, the rebuilding of community bonds against a society that breeds isolation and loneliness, and richness and spirituality against mental stress. Where we stand now is that a growing number of people sense a future in the Jomon way of life.

Against this background of problems peculiar to modern society, many Japanese, not only archaeologists, show strong interest in the Jomon period, and a large movement is expected to form over the coming decades. But reexamining Jomon culture is no simple matter.

Full-scale Jomon research began less than a hundred years ago, yet it is already stalled in places by incredible confusion. The main cause is that the networks among researchers were very fragile, so the field only split into countless subdivided categories, and no one understands the whole picture of the Jomon period in an integrated way.

Archaeologists were strongly aware of this problem in the second half of the twentieth century, but entered the twenty-first without finding a way through.

In the 2010s, however, attention began to gather on the culture, lifestyle and spirituality of the Jomon people, and events such as Jomon exhibitions at museums followed one after another, strongly influencing the Japanese.

So let us first look at how today's interest in the Jomon period took shape, from the viewpoint of exhibitions.

Going back, there have been four major exhibitions on the Jomon. Each differs in character according to its age, and together they show the historical background of the rising interest in the Jomon period. All the venues below began at the Tokyo National Museum.

First, the Jomon Art Exhibition of 1951. Held after the Second World War, it dealt mainly with the representative pottery and clay figures (dogu) of the Jomon period, and was the first occasion to place them as “works of art.”

As for the circumstances, from the defeat of 1945 through the occupation, dissatisfaction built up among Japanese who had been deprived of the chance to reflect on their own culture and history. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950 and American eyes were fixed on the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese had, for the first time since the war, a chance to reflect on their own country.

Many people were moved by the exhibition held on this current and took an interest in Jomon art; the artist Taro Okamoto, who created the Tower of the Sun at the Osaka Expo, is the best known.

Next came the Great Exhibition of Jomon Pottery, held ten years later, in 1961, at the Tokyo National Museum. Its background was the recovery from the burnt-out ruins of the war and the rapid advance of large-scale city planning into the era of high economic growth, as a result of which many Jomon sites were found and investigated across the country and countless artifacts excavated.

Representative Jomon pottery gathered from all over the country, with focus on formal beauty and regional diversity. Visitors had never had a chance to see these together, and while they were amazed at the diversity of Jomon culture, they recognized for the first time that it had a unified cultural value.

Third was the Jomon Dogu Exhibition of 1986. Until then focus had been on the pottery that gave the “Jomon period” its name, but this exhibition for the first time focused on the dogu.

It made widely known the mysterious and spiritual side of the dogu, used chiefly in the rites of the Jomon people, and set off a big Jomon boom. Because it was also the first to tour the whole country, it was the first event to make a large number of Japanese interested in the Jomon period.

Last, the 2018 exhibition Jomon: 10,000 Years of Prehistoric Art in Japan, which I also visited. It was the first large exhibition to reappraise the Jomon period in earnest as “art,” and representative pottery and dogu gathered from all over the country. As a result, 350,000 people came during the run alone, and it became the foundation of the great Jomon boom that continues today.

But here, don't you wonder?

Why did the exhibitions spreading the Jomon period, held steadily until 1986, suddenly stall, and why did interest in the Jomon revive again in 2018, more than thirty years later?

In fact, the background of these “thirty empty years” is deeply tied to the new circumstances that arose in Japan in the late 1980s. Next time, from an interesting angle, I will look at the extreme decline of interest in the Jomon period that stemmed from the rejection of spirituality, and the revival thirty years later.