Jōmon culture

For more than ten thousand years before rice farming reached Japan, the islands were home to communities of foragers, fishers and part-time cultivators that archaeologists group together as the Jōmon culture. Its span is usually given as roughly 14,000 to 300 BC. Its makers produced some of the world's oldest pottery, lived in settled villages, and left a lasting mark on the ancestry of both the Japanese and the Ainu.

Archaeologists divide the period into six phases that grow shorter over time: Incipient (about 13,750–8,500 BC), Initial (8,500–5,000 BC), Early (5,000–3,520 BC), Middle (3,520–2,470 BC), Late (2,470–1,250 BC) and Final (1,250–500 BC). These divisions rest mainly on changing pottery styles, checked against radiocarbon dates. The end date is disputed: recent work places the close of the Final phase around 300 BC, while some radiocarbon results put the start of the following period earlier. The single label also hides great variety between regions. In Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands a separate chronology is used, and in Hokkaido the Jōmon was followed not by farmers but by the Zoku-Jōmon (Epi-Jōmon) and Okhotsk cultures.

The name means "cord-marked". It comes from the American zoologist Edward S. Morse, who found sherds in 1877 and described their decoration of cords pressed into wet clay; his phrase was rendered into Japanese as jōmon. Fragments from the Odai Yamamoto I site, found in 1998, have been dated to around 14,500 BCE. The first vessels were small, round-bottomed cooking bowls; later ones became larger, flat-based and elaborately shaped, culminating in the "flame-style" pots of the Middle phase. Specialists recognise about 70 styles. Jōmon people also made clay figurines called dogū, lacquerware and ornaments of bone, shell and stone.

As the Ice Age ended, rising seas cut the islands off from the mainland and forests of oak, chestnut, beech and buckeye spread. Nuts and acorns, some needing processing to remove tannins, were stored in pits for winter. Coastal groups harvested shellfish on a scale that left huge shell middens, and in the north-east salmon carried by the Oyashio Current were a staple. Deer and wild boar were hunted. Whether the Jōmon were purely foragers is debated: there is evidence that they tended chestnut and lacquer trees and grew plants such as soybean, bottle gourd and hemp, and genetic study suggests the adzuki bean was domesticated in eastern Japan. Villages of pit-houses grew sharply in number during the warm Early phase.

The Middle phase was the warmest, and its villages, monuments and ornate goods mark a high point. After about 1500 BC a colder climate set in, and the number of known sites falls steeply. Researchers link the late population decline to food shortages and environmental stress rather than large-scale warfare, for which skeletons show little sign.

Genetic and dental studies show a varied population formed from several Palaeolithic groups, with later gene flow from the mainland and, in Hokkaido, from Siberia. How the Jōmon relate to the modern Japanese, Ryukyuans and Ainu is still being worked out. Modern Japanese carry a minority share of Jōmon ancestry, estimated at about 10 per cent of the autosomal genome, with a higher paternal share. In Hokkaido, Jōmon groups are seen as one root of the later Ainu. Which languages the Jōmon spoke is unknown.

From around 900 BC, settlements of Korean type appeared in western Kyushu, bringing wet-rice farming, metalworking and new pottery. Outside Hokkaido the Jōmon gave way, over centuries of coexistence and mixing, to the Yayoi culture. Jōmon art has enjoyed a modern revival in Japan: a 2018 exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum drew 350,000 visitors.

Our maps draw the Jōmon across the Japanese islands in 3000, 2000, 1500, 1000, 700, 500 and 400 BCE, in places labelled "Late Jomon culture". The outline is approximate and marks a cultural area, not a state. Hokkaido is labelled Ainu even on the earliest maps, although Ainu culture formed much later, partly from Hokkaido's Jōmon groups. By the 400 BCE map the Jōmon area has shrunk to eastern Japan, with the Yayoi in the west.