Japanese History · Chronicle I of XI
縄文・弥生 · Before the State
The islands before writing: Jōmon foragers, then Yayoi rice, bronze and the first chiefdoms.
The Jōmon PeriodCultural
As the ice age ends, hunter-gatherers in the Japanese islands make cord-marked pots — among the earliest ceramics ever found.
The word Jōmon means "cord-marked," after the patterns pressed into the clay. Made by settled foragers rather than farmers, these vessels are older than pottery anywhere in the Near East, and mark the beginning of one of the longest continuous cultures in human history.
The Jōmon PeriodCultural
Jōmon communities such as Sannai-Maruyama grow into large, settled villages living on nuts, fish and game.
The site of Sannai-Maruyama in the north supported hundreds of people for over a millennium, with great timber posts, storage pits and long-distance trade in obsidian and jade. Rich in marine and forest food, the Jōmon reached a density and permanence rare for a people without agriculture.
The Jōmon PeriodReligious
Late Jōmon artisans shape enigmatic clay figurines, the dogū, with goggle-eyes and elaborate bodies.
Thousands of these figurines survive, most deliberately broken, perhaps in rituals of healing or fertility. Alongside stone circles and elaborate burials, they reveal a spiritual world of remarkable depth in a society still thousands of years from cities or kings.
The Yayoi PeriodCultural
Migrants from the Asian mainland bring wet-rice paddy farming and metalworking, opening the Yayoi age.
Named for a district of Tokyo where their plainer pottery was first found, the Yayoi transformed the islands. Paddy fields fed a growing population, iron tools and bronze ritual objects spread, and society began to divide into rich and poor, ruler and ruled.
The Yayoi PeriodPolitical
Moated villages compete for land and water, and communities cast great ceremonial bronze bells, the dōtaku.
As paddy land became wealth worth fighting for, villages fortified themselves with ditches and watchtowers, and chiefs rose above the rest. The bronze dōtaku, too thin to ring and buried on hillsides, hint at farming rituals that bound these little polities together.
The Yayoi PeriodPolitical
The Chinese Han court grants a gold seal to an envoy from the country of Na — Japan's first appearance in written history.
A Han history records that in 57 AD an embassy came from Na, one of the many statelets of Wa, as the Chinese called Japan. A gold seal reading "King of Na of Wa, vassal of Han" was dug up on Kyushu in 1784, a startling confirmation of that first contact across the sea.
Queen HimikoPolitical
The Chinese chronicles describe Himiko, a shaman-queen who ruled the land of Yamatai and sent tribute to the Wei court.
According to the Wei Zhi, Himiko unified some thirty warring communities and ruled through religious authority, secluded and served by a thousand attendants. Where Yamatai lay — on Kyushu or in the Yamato plain — is still fiercely debated, for it touches the very origins of the later Japanese state.
