Yayoi culture

Wet-rice farming, bronze and iron arrived in the Japanese archipelago with the Yayoi culture, the archaeological period between the foraging world of the Jōmon and the age of great burial mounds. It is often dated from about 300 BC to AD 300, though many scholars now begin it several centuries earlier. Over this time migrants from the mainland and the islands' older inhabitants mixed to form the population from which most modern Japanese descend.

The label comes from the Yayoi district of Tokyo, where pottery of this kind was first identified in the nineteenth century. The period is defined by the start of food production on one side and the appearance of the large tomb mounds called zenpokoenfun on the other. Its beginning is contested. The traditional start of around 300 BC has been challenged by radiocarbon dates from residues on pottery, which some read as pointing to between about 1000 and 800 BC, a view that remains controversial. Most accounts place the end, and the start of the Kofun period, in the mid-third century AD, though that boundary is also debated.

The earliest Yayoi sites, such as Itazuke and Nabata, lie on the north coast of Kyushu, the part of Japan nearest Korea, and the culture spread from there into Honshu. Archaeologists point to a long list of traits shared with southern Korea, among them bounded paddy fields, polished stone tools, wooden farm implements, weaving, storage jars and ditched settlements; some studies have also found resemblances to remains from coastal China. Yet the newcomers did not simply replace the Jōmon: some Yayoi pots show Jōmon influence, pit-dwellings continued, and Jōmon traits stayed stronger in Kyushu, Tōhoku and Okinawa. Many scholars think a rise in population, put at roughly four million between the two periods, came partly from migration and partly from the shift to a farming diet.

Most linguists and archaeologists hold that the Japonic language family spread through the archipelago in the Yayoi period. One influential hypothesis, associated with the linguist Whitman and others, holds that Japonic was earlier spoken in parts of southern Korea and was carried to Japan by rice farmers sometime between 700 and 300 BC.

Yayoi craftsmen cast bronze bells known as dōtaku, mirrors and weapons, and by the first century AD iron tools and arms were in use. Stored grain and land created wealth and social ranks. Many villages were moated or set on hilltops, and finds such as headless skeletons at Yoshinogari in Saga Prefecture point to frequent fighting between communities.

The first written descriptions of people in Japan come from China, which called them Wa (Wo). The Book of the Later Han, compiled in the fifth century, records that in AD 57 the Han emperor Guangwu sent a gold seal to the Na state of Wa; a seal found in northern Kyushu in the eighteenth century is identified with it. Third-century Chinese writers portrayed Wa as many small polities, with taxes, granaries and markets.

The Records of the Three Kingdoms describe Yamatai and its queen Himiko, a ritual leader chosen after a period of war, whose brother managed government and who exchanged envoys with the Chinese state of Wei. Where Yamatai lay is a long-running debate between sites in northern Kyushu, such as Yoshinogari, and Makimuku in Nara; recent research has strengthened the case for Makimuku, and some identify the Hashihaka mound there as Himiko's tomb. By the Kofun period, skeletons from most of Japan, though not those of the Ainu, resemble the Yayoi type.

Our 400 BCE map draws the Yayoi in Kyushu and western Honshu beside the Jōmon to the east; by the 100 CE map they cover the islands as far as northern Honshu, with Ainu land in Hokkaido. The outline is approximate and marks a cultural area rather than a state, within modern Japan.