The gaze of the dead knows more than the genome

LIVING QUESTIONS

Driving along the coast of Yamaguchi, I pass paddies where the harvest is only about to begin, but once the road turns inland into the mountains, the new rice is already being shipped. Golden ripened rice, and green coming up where the fields have been cut. I love this contrast, and here I can take my fill of a landscape the cities have lost.

Signs along the road announce "new rice," and a countryside that seems shut away at the back of memory still spreads out around them. In Yamaguchi and nearby, rows of distinctive tiled roofs, as if coated in a deep brown glaze, line up beyond the paddies, keeping a beautiful landscape of origin alive to this day.

At this time of year, one flower serves as a marker: the higanbana, the red spider lily. Blooming in countless numbers along the ridges between the paddies, it is the flower of higan, the season about to begin. Higan comes from a Buddhist observance held twice a year, in spring and autumn, and lasts seven days, with the spring or autumn equinox at its center and three days on either side.

This year it runs from 20 to 26 September. As the old Japanese saying goes, "heat and cold last until higan": from around this time the summer heat begins to ease noticeably, and the season turns in earnest toward autumn. Once I cross from Yamaguchi into the mountains of Shimane, I can already feel the cold from dusk.

In the past, once the rice harvest was over, farmers began preparing to shut themselves in for the winter. In the mountains, where travel was limited and food hard to obtain, those who came before us created food cultures of fermented foods, pickles and dried foods suited to many different lands. It was, in effect, the farmers' last season before hibernation. And the flower that announces the end of the rich harvest is the higanbana, in its faded red.

But all this is already in the past. People no longer pass the winter living modestly on simple meals. With countless large supermarkets, convenience stores and ramen shops now in place, it is effectively possible, even in the countryside, to eat and drink to excess twenty-four hours a day.

As a result, serious health problems have begun to surface, quietly and steadily. For the genes these people inherited from their ancestors are not adapted to such an unhealthy diet, and they are causing all kinds of problems on many fronts.

Okinawa was once known for longevity, but its diet changed greatly under postwar American rule, and of the 47 prefectures, Okinawan men now rank 43rd and Okinawan women 16th, an extreme decline. What deserves attention is Aomori, last for both men and women.

Life expectancy can of course be said to be shorter in colder regions, but the bigger reason Aomori's people are not living longer is how much they drive. Not only in Aomori: in the regions, unlike the cities, daily life cannot be completed by public transport, so they inevitably become car societies.

But Aomori, the northern tip of Honshu and a land of heavy snow in winter, was originally a region with a very frugal diet. On top of the great decline in the food environment I described, car-bound life came as a further blow, so that people barely exercise and have suffered the damage of a worsening diet in the starkest way. I have been to Aomori many times myself, and I have seen people who love greasy food and pay very little attention to what they eat.

And now, with Japan in a super-aged society, people keep disappearing from depopulated areas, local supermarkets and convenience stores are closing, and residents who depended on the old convenience are watching the lifelines of their daily lives give out. In this situation, it is effectively impossible for people over eighty or ninety to drive to the nearest city to shop, and scenes that can only be called unsustainable are spreading everywhere.

The super-aged society Japan is the first in the world to face is, frankly, wretched beyond words. Villages are breaking down, and as more and more places have residents whose average age is in their seventies or eighties, driving naturally becomes impossible too. Yet amid such harsh conditions there is one strange fact: only the paved roads are abnormally clean.

In a world where the people living there, with their age and all, have seen their health deteriorate badly and nothing works anymore, where the village is in ruins and the supermarkets and convenience stores have closed, only the road running through the village is clean. It is an all too uncanny scene.

This, perhaps, is the darkness the real Japan carries, an advance notice that the system is ending. To my eyes the scene is like the higanbana announcing the coming of a harsh season.

Still, the rice fields at harvest are beautiful.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

Who are the Japanese? Even now, in the late 2020s, the answer to this question has hardly become clear. Personally, I think there are two main reasons. One is that the particular circumstances of an island country make it harder to unravel. The other is that instability in East Asia stands in the way of joint research.

Amid this, a site discovered nearly a hundred years ago has recently begun, quietly, to draw attention again: the Doigahama site in Yamaguchi. Doigahama is a small settlement on the Kyushu side of Yamaguchi, facing the Hibikinada Sea on the Sea of Japan, and it almost never draws notice.

Yet for anyone interested in anthropology, this place where there is nothing is impossible to look away from, because a burial ground of Yayoi people more than 2,300 years old was found here. The discovery itself goes back to 1930, and after nearly a century of research about three hundred skeletons, densely packed, have been excavated so far, putting it in an extremely important position at the front line of research on the Yayoi.

Now, the troublesome part is the Yayoi people themselves. They are generally thought of as the group that appeared after the Jomon, and they are the link to the Kofun people who came later. If you take the Jomon as the indigenous baseline, the Yayoi period is when large-scale migration first began, so it carries a very complicated history.

Human bones draw little general interest, but they are time capsules that preserve the history of our ancestors, and by studying skeletal features and genes we can bring our ancestors into view with reasonable precision. And the Doigahama site is the most important base for reconstructing the ancient past.

In anthropology, people have begun to think that while the physical traits of the Jomon were relatively consistent across the Japanese archipelago, the Yayoi were extremely diverse. The old dual contrast of "Jomon" and "Yayoi" has already been discarded, and as things stand we can see them as the people of the Jomon period, quite likely of relatively similar kind, and the people of the Yayoi period, considerably diverse.

The identity of these Yayoi has been in great confusion in recent years, and their picture changes almost every year. Until a few years ago, for example, the Yayoi of northwestern Kyushu, centered on Nagasaki, and the Doigahama Yayoi were thought to have been completely different, even in the same period. The conventional Japanese view of history held that the Jomon period ended and a new Yayoi period was formed by migrants, but that view was rejected here, and it was supposed instead that a very complicated state of tribes had spread across the whole archipelago.

Recently, though, it has become more complicated still. In January 2026, a joint team including the University of Tokyo and the Doigahama research group published its results. It analyzed the nuclear genomes of four Yayoi individuals, about 2,300 to 2,500 years old, from two sites in Nagasaki in northwestern Kyushu, and found that two of the four held genomic components almost identical to the Jomon, while the other two had components derived from both the Jomon and the migrants.

Set this against the whole-genome analysis of one Doigahama individual done a little earlier, in 2024, and an unexpected picture emerges. Leaving the technical details aside, the Yayoi of northwestern Kyushu around Nagasaki were found to be either Jomon or a Jomon-and-migrant mix, with ample components from both Jomon and migrant ancestry. The Doigahama individual, by contrast, had Jomon elements but very few, and was shown to be overwhelmingly of migrant ancestry. Roughly speaking, the Doigahama Yayoi was about 5 percent Jomon and about 20 percent Northeast Asian, and the rest, surprisingly, was made up of an East Asian component.

I say surprisingly because as of the early 2020s, the Yayoi were thought to be of Northeast Asian origin. Before this result was published, in other words, contact with East Asian groups was thought to have been extremely limited, with no direct connection to the Yayoi. That has been overturned.

From this, the Yayoi who lived at Doigahama can be called essentially of migrant ancestry, but, very interestingly, long before any genetic testing it had been pointed out that their bones almost exactly matched those of one particular ancient people: the ancient people of Shandong Province in China.

Considering these relationships, the roots of the Japanese can no longer be told simply through divisions like "Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun." The triple-structure model of the Japanese, proposed only a few years ago in the early 2020s, is now under strong criticism from researchers centered on Doigahama, because it separated "the Jomon as indigenous," "the Yayoi as Northeast Asian" and "the Kofun as East Asian." If the Yayoi were Northeast Asian, there would be no explaining the fact that the whole-genome analysis of an early Yayoi individual from the Doigahama site clearly showed an East Asian predominance.

Structural models are easy to understand and made for everyone, but they must be handled with care. To begin with, I do not trust the theory that the Jomon were a single people either, and I research on the assumption that the ancestry of the Japanese may be very complex.

Still, my own view is that what matters is not being swept along by the genetic discoveries that come one after another each year. Genes are only reinforcement; they do not lead straight to an answer. So, with all this in mind, let me turn to something truly fascinating.

For some reason, most of the skeletons buried at Doigahama were laid with their skulls toward the east (southeast). The skulls, in other words, were buried gazing toward the far northwest. If we ask what lies at the end of the gaze of the skulls of Doigahama, I think this direction, more than any genetic result, holds a clue to "their roots."

Follow the gaze of the skulls a little west from the burial ground and you reach a beautiful beach facing the sea. When I checked the line of their gaze for myself from the burial ground, I saw that it extended exactly toward the Shandong Peninsula. In fact, the Doigahama research group noticed this possibility early on and carried out a joint Japanese-Chinese survey in Shandong for three years from 1994, concluding that the ancestors of the Doigahama Yayoi were very likely ancient people of Shandong.

So the whole-genome analysis of 2024 did not make a new discovery; the cutting-edge technology reinforced the existing theory. The genomic component characteristic of East Asian groups found here, as far as these people are concerned, very likely relates to ancient people of the Shandong line. If the Doigahama Yayoi were closely related to the ancient people of Shandong, that may be called their homeland, or the root of their parent group. To put it more boldly, they were the same people.

Sadly, though, we will probably learn no more than this. It has been suggested that the Doigahama Yayoi had almost no influence on the modern Japanese, and in China these ancient people of Shandong are thought to have been weeded out, with almost no influence on the modern Chinese. In all likelihood, then, they could not survive as a people either in their homeland, China, or in Japan, where they migrated.

What deserves further attention is that the Doigahama people wore ornaments of gohoura and cone shells, found only in Okinawa and the other southwestern islands. Such ornaments reached as far as Hokkaido, which shows that a vast trade network spread along the Sea of Japan side was already highly developed by the Yayoi period. And since it has already been reported that the Yayoi of northwestern Kyushu and Yayoi found on Miyakojima in Okinawa were of nearly the same kind, I sense that they moved across very wide stretches of sea and intermixed again and again. The source of this trade network lies in the Jomon period, when it was already complete. To put it another way, this picture will not emerge unless we throw away the foolish idea that ancient people were barbarians.

Perhaps the migrant Yayoi who settled in various places came to intermix through the Jomon sea peoples, who moved freely across the sea. If so, the conventional view of history is turned upside down. At the same time, my interest lies elsewhere. The Doigahama people were certainly migrants, and as newcomers they probably did not share much in the benefits of that trade. In fact, almost nothing is known of their customs, including whether or not they had rice farming. The only certainties are the many skeletons laid with their heads toward the east (southeast) in strangely uniform rows, and the genomic information analyzed from one individual.

They knew, so to speak, exactly who they were and where they came from. They deliberately laid out their dead toward "the path the ancestors traveled." That they laid the remains in the same direction makes it very likely that not only the dead but the living too performed their rites facing the same way. Their persistent "gaze to the northwest," I believe, expresses their origin itself.

And an ancient word (from the Yayoi language) that expresses origin survives precisely in Okinawa: the sound inishi (イニシ). It is confusing, but in modern Japanese the sound nishi refers to the direction west (west, too, is pronounced "nishi"), whereas in Okinawa the sound nishi often refers to the north.

This puzzle was once solved by Iha Fuyu, the founder of Ryukyuan folklore studies, who said that the Ryukyuan word inishi indicates "the path the ancestors traveled." In other words, nishi is not the direction west but the path by which each tribe's ancestors came, so, as a direction, it varies from tribe to tribe. In the case of the Ryukyuans' ancestors, the word nishi carries the memory of some of them having come south, mainly from the north. It is a word that carries the old memory of passing from southern Kyushu through Amami Oshima and landing in the Okinawa islands.

But this word was surely not limited to the Ryukyus; I believe it was a word the Yayoi used. Probably, as the court expanded after Yamato, the old words were gradually replaced, and inishi at some point fell out of use, or may have fused with "west" as the direction we know today. It is also possible that the ancient word spread to various places on the trade routes described above.

If the word has its source in the Yayoi period, then the direction the Doigahama Yayoi faced after burial was not simply "east (southeast)" but, for them, their "inishi." Since that direction points to the area around the Shandong Peninsula, and since the joint survey with the Shandong side revealed a close resemblance, they may have been the last figure in East Asia of a group that has already died out.

As I looked toward their "inishi" from Doigahama near the site, turning all this over in my mind, I noticed that all the debris washed up around me was in Chinese. Looking closely, almost all of it had come from Zhejiang. Zhejiang lies below Shanghai, to the south as seen from Shandong; in Japanese terms its position is close to that of Amami, and it faces the East China Sea.

If debris drifts ashore at Doigahama from Zhejiang, then, whatever the many conditions, the currents very likely connect this far. And the Yayoi people of northwestern Kyushu resemble the type found on Miyakojima in Okinawa, and shells from the Okinawa side were carried as far as Hokkaido through the trade network.

When we look at an age that had this vast maritime trade network, we must change the way we think, because we can easily suppose that it was entirely possible to head not only from Okinawa to Hokkaido but also toward Zhejiang, Shanghai and Shandong. The geopolitical divisions of today did not exist then, so we must consider that possibility. The sea belonged to no one; it was completely open.

Quiet Doigahama in Yamaguchi. The many skeletons found there, laid 2,300 years ago facing the Shandong Peninsula, and the debris that still drifts ashore from distant Zhejiang in China. To my eyes this contrast is of one kind; I cannot help feeling that the two somehow overlap. If debris drifts ashore, so do people. Our ancestors seem to be teaching us to look hard, once more, at the natural force of the flow of the tide.