The Gaze of the Dead Knows More Than the Genome

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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."

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.

What has long interested me personally is the "orientation" of the mounds.

As for burial, if a body were laid facing west or east it would be easy to understand through the historical view of life and death, but looking at the mounds of Sakai, many face north-northeast and so on, and the reason remains a mystery. … A certain direction may seem to appear as a lineage of local belief, yet next to it many mounds face the opposite way, so it is hard to give any clear answer as to what the orientation of the mounds means.

In Yamato under Himiko, real political authority was entrusted to her brother, not held by her. But because every political judgment was made through the will of the gods, her religious power inevitably rose.

What Himiko received from the gods by oracle was the will of the gods themselves, so a political decision passed through this husband to her brother became the will of the gods and could not be defied.

The Gishiwajinden calls this religion kido (鬼道) and records that Himiko served kishin (鬼神). This is quite difficult, since in the modern reading 鬼 (oni) is translated as devil or demon. That reading is entirely wrong, and even in ancient China 鬼 did not mean a devil or demon. It was a very plural being, and only later joined with ideas closer to devils and demons.

The original meaning of 鬼 on the Chinese side is the dead, and the spirits of the dead. But the dead here are not the dead as we now imagine them. They are the corpse of a person turned to white bone, with an interval of time.

On the premise of this many-sided character, Himiko's 鬼 and 鬼神 are spiritual beings with the power to govern the human world, close to gods, awe-inspiring spirits who are the object of ritual. The 道 (do) of 鬼道 has the nuance of a teaching, which suggests that a new religion with a mythic world of its own was formed in Yamato.