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Re-thinking Jōmon and Ainu in Japanese History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
For almost a century after E.S. Morse's 1877 excavations at Ōmori shell mound demonstrated the existence of a Stone Age culture in the archipelago, it was generally accepted that the Japanese people dated back only to the Yayoi period, the time when wet-rice farming was introduced from the continent. The Stone Age was associated with pre-Japanese peoples such as the Ainu. By the 1980s, however, the idea that the Stone Age Jōmon period formed a key component in Japanese culture became widely accepted in both academia and the popular imagination. ‘Jōmon’ became a household word for the first time. This essay uses recent interdisciplinary work in archaeology, linguistics and genetics to re-evaluate the contribution of the Jōmon to Japan. New genetic research has started to find significant Jōmon ancestry in ancient Korea, showing that Jōmon genomes were not limited to the Japanese archipelago. DNA studies have also concluded that Yayoi, Kofun and modern ‘mainland’ Japanese populations derive only around 10% of their ancestry from the Jōmon, a figure which rises to 25% for early modern and contemporary Okinawans. Such figures are comparable to reported levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry found in many European countries. Linguistically, with the exception of Ainuic in the north, Jōmon languages were replaced by the incoming Japonic family with, at best, limited borrowing. The idea that Jōmon culture has been a dominant factor in shaping modern Japan also requires reconsideration. Many ‘Jōmony’ traits in historic Japan reflect ecological constraints—there are only so many ways to eat an acorn. Other such traits can be seen as part of a transcultural strategic resistance to Japan rather than as unchanging tradition. While the Jōmon has proven a fecund source of ideology in post war Japan, its actual contribution to historic Japanese civilisation has been small. This conclusion requires a reevaluation of why the Ainu in Hokkaido were not absorbed in the same way as Jōmon cultures elsewhere and why they went on to make such an important contribution to the history of the northern archipelago.
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1 A position taken by, among others, Namio Egami, ‘The formation of the people and the origins of the state in Japan’, Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 23 (1964): 35-70.
2 Okamoto Tarō, ‘Jōmon dokiron’, Mizue February 1952. Translated by Jonathan M. Reynolds, ‘On Jômon ceramics’, Art in Translation 1 (2009): 49-60.
3 Yamada Yasuhiro, Tsukurareta Jōmon jidai: Nihon bunka no genzō o saguru (Shinchōsha, 2015), p. 4.
4 Eiji Oguma, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002), p. 57.
5 Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 88. In 1989 or 1990, I attended the Imperial Household Agency's annual presentation of its archaeological activities at the so-called imperial tombs, together with Professor Ueno Yoshiya, then head of Tokyo University's Department of Archaeology. On the table in the waiting room, we were offered tea and cigarettes printed with the imperial seal. Though I had never previously seen him smoke, Professor Ueno took a cigarette and smoked it, though with how much gratitude I cannot say.
6 Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 89.
7 Oguma, A Genealogy, pp. 229-230.
8 Oguma, A Genealogy, p. 236.
9 Cited in Kazurō Hanihara, ‘Dual structure model for the population history of the Japanese’, Japan Review 2 (1991): 1-33, p. 4.
10 Hyunjung Cho, ‘Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the making of Japanese postwar architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education 66 (2012): 72-83.
11 See Cho, ‘Hiroshima’, p. 74 for an illustration of this design plan.
12 Cho, ‘Hiroshima’, pp. 77-78.
13 Cited in Niiro Izumi, ‘Kokusai Nihon Bunka Kenkyū Sentā’ kōsō to ‘Umehara Nihongaku’, Kōkogaku Kenkyū 33 (1986): 17-27.
14 T. Umehara, ‘The civilization of the forest’, New Perspectives Quarterly Special Issue (1999): 40-48, p. 47.
15 Yasuda describes the murder case, the suspicions raised against him and his subsequent head-hunting by Umehara in a work of autobiography: Kankyō kōkogaku e no michi (Minerva Shobō, 2013), pp. 183-188.
16 Umehara Takeshi, Nihon no shinsō: Jōmon, Ezo bunka o saguru (Shūeisha, 1994), p. 16.
17 Yasuda Yoshinori, ‘Jōmon ga ichimannen ijō jizoku shita riyū‘, in Hirano Hideki and Yasuda Yoshinori, Ubawareru Nihon no mori: gaishi ga mizu shigen o neratte iru (Shinchōsha, 2010), pp. 169.
18 Kobayashi Tatsuo, Jōmon bunka ga Nihonjin no mirai o hiraku (Tokuma Shoten, 2018), p. 98. This book is discussed by M. Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2021), pp. 57-60.
19 M. Fukuda, ‘Hokkaidō to Saharin, Chishima: Nichiro nikoku no kōkogaku kara mita Jōmon bunka no hokuhen’, Kikan Kōkogaku 125 (2013): 62-65.
20 H. Takamiya, C. Katagiri, S. Yamasaki and M. Fujita, ‘Human colonization of the Central Ryukyus (Amami and Okinawa archipelagos), Japan’, Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology 14 (2019): 375-393.
21 M. Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages’, Nature 599 (2021): 616-621.
22 Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation’; P. Gelabert et al., ‘Northeastern Asian and Jomon-related genetic structure in the Three Kingdoms period of Gimhae, Korea’, Current Biology 32 (2022): 1-13.
23 D-N. Lee et al., ‘Genomic detection of a secondary family burial in a single jar coffin in early medieval Korea’, accessible here (pre-print not yet peer-reviewed).
24 Ilona Bausch, ‘Prehistoric networks across the Korea strait (5000-1000 BCE): “Early globalization” during the Jomon period in northwest Kyushu?‘, in T. Hodos (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, pp. 413-437 (Routledge, 2017).
25 Umehara Takeshi and Kenji Nakagami Kenji, Kimi wa Yayoijin ka, Jōmonjin ka: Umehara Nihongaku kōgi (Asahi, 1984), p. 76.
26 Umehara and Nakagami, Kimi wa, pp. 77-78.
27 A large literature on this topic includes Richard Reitan, ‘Ecology and Japanese history: reactionary environmentalism's troubled relationship with the past’, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus 15 (2017): 3-2; Aike P. Rots, Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) and ‘Environmentalism’ in E. Bafelli, A. Castiglioni and F. Rambelli, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, pp. 65-72 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); and Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory.
28 Economic historian Saitō Osamu has studied deforestation in comparative perspective and noted the importance of market economies rather than cultural or religious factors in determining forest use: Saito, ‘Forest history and the Great Divergence: China, Japan, and the West compared’, Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 379-404. In modern Japan, forests were often the site of political resistance. Gluck describes long-lasting protests from 1881-1905 in the Kiso valley (Nagano) against the confiscation of farm and satoyama commons for the purpose of expanding imperial forests; similar land disputes occurred in other parts of Meiji Japan: Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, pp. 97-101.
29 Yasuda, ‘Shift of the lifestyle: from the dry field farming with cattle breeding to the rice cultivating piscatory life style’, Journal of Kyosei Studies 7 (2016): 76-86 (Japanese with English summary). The original quote on p. 83 reads ‘Kokkai ni Amaterasu o saikō kami to suru tennō heika ga rinseki sareru koto o yurasanai’.
30 On the family, see Yasuda, Seimei bunmei no seiki e: ‘Jinsei chirigaku’ to ‘kankyō kōkogaku’ no deai (Daisan Bunmeisha, 2008), p. 71 and ‘Gyoshoku no bunmei, nikushoku no bunmei’, Nihon Kenkyū 35 (2007): 491-525, pp. 511, 522. I have discussed these ideas in Conjuring Up Prehistory, p. 14.
31 Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory, pp. 50-54.
32 Oguma, A Genealogy, pp. 16-30.
33 Inoue Tetsujirō writing in 1889, cited by Oguma, A Genealogy, p. 23.
34 In a farcical re-imagination of the trope of an ‘advanced’ Japan helping a ‘backward’ China, Yasuda proposed that Japanese ‘eco-rangers’ be sent to clean out toilets in China: see Reitan, ‘Ecology and Japanese history’, p. 12 and Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory, pp. 61-62.
35 Yasuda, ‘Shift of the lifestyle’, p. 84 and ‘Jōmon ga ichimannen’.
36 Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation supports agricultural spread’.
37 John Maher, ‘“North Kyushu Creole”: a hypothesis concerning the multilingual formation of Japanese’, International Christian University, Library Open Lectures 6 (1991): 15-48, pp. 16-17. This ‘twittering’ could just have been a different dialect or sociolect.
38 David Pollack, The Fracture of Meaning: Japan's Synthesis of China from the Eighth Through the Eighteenth Centuries (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 68.
39 See E. de Boer, M.A. Yang, A. Kawagoe and G.L. Barnes, ‘Japan considered from the hypothesis of farmer/language spread’, Evolutionary Human Sciences 2 (2020): e13 and G.L. Barnes, ‘The Jomon-Yayoi transition in eastern Japan: enquiries from the Kanto region’, Japanese Journal of Archaeology 7 (2019): 33-84.
40 S. Murayama, ‘The Malayo-Polynesian component in the Japanese language’, Journal of Japanese Studies 2 (1976): 413-436. Polivanov was arrested and shot by the NKVD in 1938.
41 For an extreme example of this argument, see Kobayashi, Jōmon bunka ga Nihonjin no mirai o hiraku, a text discussed by Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory, pp. 58-60.
42 Osamu Sakiyama, ‘Is Japanese an isolated, or Altaic language?‘, in Keiichi Omoto (ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese, pp. 281-289 (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 1999), pp. 282-283.
43 Two examples are described by Peter Bakker, A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Pieter Muysken, ‘Code-switching processes: alternation, insertion and congruent lexicalisation’, in Martin Pütz (ed.), Language Choices: Conditions, Constraints and Consequences, pp. 361-380 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997).
44 There is now a very large literature on this topic. For influential overviews, see Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (Linguistic Circle of New York, 1953) and Sarah Thomason & Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolisation and Genetic Linguistics (University of California Press, 1988).
45 O. Sakiyama, ‘Formation of the Japanese language in connection with Austronesian languages’, in T. Akazawa and E. Szathmáry (eds.), Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals, pp. 349-358 (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 350. Japanese authors often fail to capitalise the sub-phases of the Jōmon period but we can perhaps assume Sakiyama here means the Late Jōmon. Likewise, the ‘terminal Jōmon’ of his second stage presumably refers to the Final Jōmon.
46 Sakiyama, ‘Formation of the Japanese language’, p. 357. While at first glance appearing to be totally arbitrary, Sakiyama's scheme of population migrations derives from the Kulturkreise school popular with certain Japanese ethnologists in the mid-twentieth century.
47 A Bayesian estimate of ca. 5230 years ago is provided by R.D. Gray, A.J. Drummond and S.J. Greenhill, ‘Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement’, Science 323 (2009): 479-483.
48 John Maher, ‘North Kyushu creole: a language-contact model for the origins of Japanese’, in D. Denoon, M. Hudson, G. McCormack and T. Morris-Suzuki (eds.), Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern, pp. 31-45 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
49 Thomason and Kaufmann, Language Contact.
50 A point made some years ago by Martine Robbeets, Is Japanese Related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), pp. 37-38.
51 Jarosz, M. Robbeets, R. Fernandes, H. Takamiya, A. Shinzato, N. Nakamura, M. Shinoto and M. Hudson, ‘Demography, trade and state power: a tripartite model of medieval farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyu Islands’, Evolutionary Human Sciences 4 (2022): e4, p. 6.
52 John Kupchik, ‘Ainu loanwords in Hachijō‘, in J. Kupchik, J.A.A. de la Fuente and M.H. Miyake (eds.), Studies in Asian Historical Linguistics, Philology and Beyond, pp. 91-102 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
53 An analysis of ancient DNA extracted from Jōmon skeletal remains was published as early as 1989: S. Horai, K. Hayasaka, K. Murayama, N. Wate, H. Koike and N. Nakai, ‘DNA amplification from ancient human skeletal remains and their sequence analysis’, Proceedings of the Japan Academy Ser. B 65 (1989): 229-233.
54 See Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory; M. Hudson, S. Nakagome and J. Whitman, ‘The evolving Japanese: the dual structure hypothesis at 30‘, Evolutionary Human Sciences 2 (2020): e6.
55 von Bälz, ‘Die Riu-Kiu-Insulaner, die Aino und andere kaukasierähnliche Reste in Ostasien’, Korrespondenz-Blatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthroplogie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 42 (1911): 187-191; T.A. Jinam, Y. Kawai and N. Saitou, ‘Modern human DNA analyses with special reference to the inner dual-structure model of Yaponesian’, Anthropological Science 129 (2021): 3-11.
56 Hanihara, ‘Estimation of the number of early migrants to Japan: a simulative study’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon 95 (1987): 391-403.
57 Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation supports agricultural spread’; C-C. Wang et al., ‘Genomic insights into the formation of human populations in East Asia’, Nature 591 (2021): 413-419; N.P. Cooke et al., ‘Ancient genomics reveals tripartite origins of Japanese populations’, Science Advances 7 (2021): eabh2419.
58 Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation’; Jarosz et al., ‘Demography, trade and state power’.
59 Cf. W. Haak et al., ‘Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe’, Nature 522 (2015): 207-211.
60 Robbeets et al., ‘Triangulation’ and Cooke et al., ‘Ancient genomics reveals tripartite origins’.
61 Y. Yoshida and J. Ertl, ‘Archaeological practice and social movements: ethnography of Jomon archaeology and the public’, Journal of the International Center for Cultural Resources (Kanazawa University) 2 (2016): 47-71.
62 Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, pp. 7-8 notes that shisō was sometimes used as an alternative to ideorogii (ideology) which denoted a false consciousness in the Marxist sense.
63 Segawa Takurō, Jōmon no shisō (Kōdansha, 2017), p. 12.
64 Segawa, Jōmon no shisō, p. 13.
65 Segawa, Jōmon no shisō, p. 14.
66 Segawa, Jōmon no shisō, pp. 32-33, quoting Sakata Kunihiro, ‘Gendai Nihonjin ni mirareta fūshūteki basshirei’, Kōkogaku Jānaru 89 (1973) and Harunari Hideji, Jōmon shakai ronkyū (Hanawa shobō, 2002).
67 The modern history of Hokkaido can certainly be approached through a settler colonialism model, though the prehistoric settlement of that island was rather complex. Neither should we assume that native cultures were isolated or ‘pristine’, a premise in many writings about the Jōmon/Yayoi dichotomy. The role of outside contacts on Aboriginal Australia is discussed, among many other works, by Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and M. Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 27-28. Recent research in ancient DNA is beginning to confirm enormously complex population histories for parts of Europe. For Britain, for instance, see an accessible essay by Ian Armit and David Reich, ‘The return of the Beaker folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory’, Antiquity 95 (2021): 1464-1477. Given the small number of ancient DNA samples so far published from Japan, it is too early to say whether or not the population history of early Japan was radically simpler than, for example, Britain.
68 A key theoretical text to understand this process in prehistory is Helle Vandkilde, ‘Bronzization: the Bronze Age as pre-modern globalization’, Praehistorische Zeitschrift 91 (2016): 103-123. Serena Autiero and Matthew A. Cobb's edited volume Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-modern World (Routledge, 2022) provides another useful introduction to ideas of past transculturality.
69 For the Late and Final Jōmon, see M. Hudson, I. Bausch, M. Robbeets, T. Li, J.A. White and L. Gilaizeau, ‘Bronze Age globalisation and Eurasian impacts on later Jōmon social change’, Journal of World Prehistory 34 (2021): 121-158. For non-farming groups in the Yayoi, see M. Hudson, ‘Dragon divers and clamorous fishermen: bronzization and transcultural marine spaces in the Japanese archipelago’, in Autiero and Cobb, Globalization and Transculturality, pp. 103-119. For pirates, see Peter D. Shapinsky, Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2014).
70 These ideas are discussed by H. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Hudson, Conjuring Up Prehistory.
71 Yoshida and Ertl, ‘Archaeological practice and social movements’, p. 67.
72 For this argument, see Hosanna Fukuzawa, ‘Ainu ethnogenesis and state evasion (12th – 17th centuries’, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus 20(13) (2022): e5719.
73 Fujimoto, Mō futatsu no Nihon bunka: Hokkaidō to nantō no bunka (Tokyo University Press, 1988) and S. Fujio, ‘The frame of the Yayoi culture: is wet rice cultivation with irrigation system an indicator of the Yayoi culture?’, Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History 178 (2013): 85-120 (Japanese with English summary). These ideas by Fujimoto and Fujio have been discussed in English by Bruce Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries and Interactions (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003) and M. Hudson, ‘Towards a prehistory of the Great Divergence: the Bronze Age roots of Japan's premodern economy’, Documenta Praehistorica 46 (2019): 30-43.
74 Some of this theoretical background is suggested by J. Ling, T. Earle and K. Kristiansen, ‘Maritime mode of production: raiding and trading in seafaring chiefdoms’, Current Anthropology 59 (2018): 488-524. For preliminary discussions of the archaeological evidence, see M. Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia and ‘The Okhotsk culture and the formation of the medieval Ainu diaspora’, in G. Crawford, S. Kaner and G-A. Lee (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Japanese and Korean Archaeology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
75 Gelabert et al., ‘Northeastern Asian and Jomon-related genetic structure’.
76 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 19.
77 Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 24.
78 Okamoto, ‘On Jômon ceramics’, p. 52.
79 Okamoto, ‘On Jômon ceramics’, p. 59.
80 Okamoto, ‘On Jômon ceramics’, pp. 52-53.
81 Okamoto, ‘On Jômon ceramics’, p. 59 also made the following enigmatic comments: ‘We must look directly at the place of the non-spiritualistic spirit of Jômon culture's primitive art … and we must seize this purposeless purpose and this meaningless meaning as our method.‘
82 The Art of Taboo: Nobuyuki Oura. Video interview with the artist, available here. A transcript of this interview can be found here.
83 This was despite the emperor's fundamental association with Japan's capitalism, a link analysed by H. Harootunian, Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan's Modern History (Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 350-351.
84 Yanagita Kunio's link between the emperor and the ‘mountain people’ has been much discussed. Perhaps less well known is work by Senda Minoru connecting the ama sea people with imperial power: Ōken no umi (Kadokawa, 1998) and ‘Japanese culture and the ocean people’ in Omoto Keiichi (ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese, pp. 335-338 (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 1999).