Jomon period

The start of the Jōmon period is defined by the appearance of pottery. Fragments from the Ōdai Yamamoto I site in Aomori Prefecture have been radiocarbon-dated to roughly 16,000 years ago, which is why the period is often said to begin around 14,000 BCE; some scholars prefer a later start tied to the warming of the Holocene around 10,000 BCE. Its end is equally debated. Textbooks long placed the transition to the Yayoi period around 300 BCE, but accelerator radiocarbon dating by the National Museum of Japanese History suggests that wet-rice farming reached northern Kyushu several centuries earlier, around the tenth century BCE.

Archaeologists divide Jōmon into six phases – Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late and Final – based on pottery styles. The transition was not simultaneous: in Hokkaido, farming did not take hold at all, and a foraging culture known as Epi-Jōmon (Zoku-Jōmon) continued into the first centuries CE.

Jōmon people typically lived in pit dwellings – round or oval houses sunk into the ground and roofed with thatch or earth – grouped around a central plaza. Villages ranged from a few households to large, long-lived settlements with storage pits, raised-floor buildings, refuse mounds and burial grounds. There was no state and no evidence of warfare on a significant scale; social organisation was based on kin groups, and burial goods suggest only modest differences in status, becoming more pronounced in the Late and Final phases.

Population grew during the warm Early and Middle phases, especially in eastern Japan, and is estimated to have peaked at a few hundred thousand people before declining as the climate cooled after about 2500 BCE. Practices such as ritual tooth extraction, which appears widely in the later phases, may have marked coming of age or marriage.

The Jōmon economy rested on the rich temperate forests and coasts of the archipelago. Chestnuts, walnuts, horse chestnuts and acorns were gathered, processed to remove bitterness and stored; deer and wild boar were hunted with bows and pit traps; salmon, sea bream, tuna and shellfish were caught with nets, harpoons and fishhooks of bone and antler. The shell middens left along former coastlines record the Jōmon transgression, a rise in sea level that peaked around 4000 BCE and pushed the sea far inland.

Plant management went beyond gathering: chestnut groves appear to have been tended, and impressions of soybeans and adzuki beans in pottery indicate their cultivation. Long-distance exchange moved obsidian from sources such as the Wada Pass in present-day Nagano, jadeite from the Itoigawa area of Niigata and asphalt used as an adhesive across hundreds of kilometres.

Without writing, Jōmon beliefs can only be inferred from objects and sites. Clay figurines (dogū), mostly female and often deliberately broken, are generally interpreted as linked to fertility, healing or renewal. Stone rods (sekibō) of phallic form, stone circles and carefully arranged burials, including infants placed in pottery jars, indicate a rich ritual life concerned with birth, death and the cycles of nature.

The great stone circles of northern Japan, such as those at Ōyu in Akita Prefecture, combine cemeteries with alignments that some researchers link to the setting sun at the summer solstice. Such interpretations remain debated, but they show that communities invested considerable collective labour in ritual landscapes.

Jōmon pottery is the defining craft of the period and among the oldest known anywhere. Early vessels were simple deep pots for boiling; over millennia they became vehicles for extraordinary sculptural invention. The flame-style pots (kaen doki) of the Middle Jōmon in present-day Niigata, with their rims of swirling, flame-like projections, are the most famous; they were used for cooking, as soot marks show, yet were clearly also objects of display.

Other crafts included lacquered wooden bowls and combs – evidence that lacquer technology in Japan reaches back to this period – woven baskets, bone and antler tools, and ear ornaments of clay and stone. The Final Jōmon Kamegaoka culture of Aomori produced finely made red-lacquered vessels and the 'goggle-eyed' figurines (shakōki dogū) whose stylised eyes resemble snow goggles.

Jōmon sites number in the tens of thousands, from shell mounds on Tokyo Bay to highland villages in Nagano. Northern Honshu and Hokkaido preserve some of the best-studied settlements, seventeen of which were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2021 as the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan.

The Jōmon people did not vanish when farming arrived. Genetic studies show that the present-day population of Japan descends from a mixture of Jōmon ancestry and later migrants from the Asian continent, with the Jōmon share highest among the Ainu of Hokkaido and noticeably higher in the Ryukyu Islands than on the main islands. Some scholars see continuities in later practices, from the use of lacquer to certain ritual traditions, although such links are difficult to prove.

Since the late twentieth century the Jōmon has also become a cultural symbol: the artist Okamoto Tarō's enthusiasm for flame-style pottery in the 1950s helped turn Jōmon objects from archaeological finds into icons of Japanese art, and the 2021 World Heritage inscription has made Jōmon villages some of the most visited prehistoric sites in the country.