Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History

Agriculture and food production

Polyculture of grains and vegetables

While our understanding of Japanese food production was widely marked by the idea of irrigated
rice cultivation, the archaeological and historical data available to us from the 1980s onwards
give a different picture and present a much wider range of agricultural produce. Polyculture
predominated in Japan from the beginning of agriculture up to the modern period.
When irrigated rice cultivation reached northern Kyushu in the early first millennium bce,
dry rice and other graminae had already been known there for one or two millennia. Archaeolo-
gists have discovered traces of buckwheat (soba) and barnyard millet (hie) in Hokkaidō, dated
from the early Neolithic (Jōmon, 4000–3000 bce), as well as common millet (kibi), and foxtail
millet (awa) in archaeological sites of northern Honshu from the mid- Neolithic (3000–2000 bce).
These cereals spread from the northeast to the southwest of the archipelago. Other plants have
been present across the Japanese archipelago since the early Neolithic, such as beans (ryokutō) and
tubers (taro [satoimo] and yams [yamaimo]). Dry rice cultivation was also practiced in western
Honshu and Kyushu from the mid- Neolithic, long before irrigated rice agriculture had reached
the Japanese Islands.^4
Other edible plants are known from archaeological sites of the Yayoi period. In the 1980s,
Terasawa Kaoru challenged the traditional view that irrigated rice cultivation was the only or
even the main agricultural practice during the Yayoi period. He conducted archaeological
research on the general plant situation in Japan after the introduction of irrigated rice growing,
identifying 173 edible plant species in 224 archaeological sites dating from the Yayoi period,
discovered in the form of seeds and pollens. Most plants were collected or gathered and thirty-
seven plants, like millet and beans, were probably also cultivated. The fourteen most often- found
plants (in order of frequency) were: acorns and beechnuts, rice, peaches, beans, gourd- calabash,
walnuts, sweet chestnuts, barley and wheat, water- pepper, melons, horse chestnuts, vitaceae
(grapes, etc.), camellia, and water chestnuts. These figures are, of course, biased by the conserva-
tion degree of plant remains. Thus the nut shells are better preserved in the soil than beans or the
cereals. Yet it is reasonable to suppose that all these grains, nuts, vegetables, and fruits continued
to play a crucial role in the diet throughout the prehistoric period.^5
Archaeologists have long discussed prehistoric food acquisition systems. Miyamoto Kazuo,
for example, contends that food acquisition has gone through the following stages:

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Miyamoto dates the beginning of agriculture to the Middle or Late Neolithic but other archae-
ologists or ethnologists opt for the Final Neolithic. More recently (in 2014) Shitara Hiromi chal-
lenged these views and asserted that agriculture started only after the Neolithic, in the early
Yayoi period.^7 There is thus a consensus among archaeologists on the principle of polyculture,
but the dating of early agriculture still remains subject to debate.
Written sources on agricultural practices and food production become available from the
Nara period (710–784). They provide a good picture of the production of grains, vegetables,
fruits, and nuts. Provincial “Geographical Records” (fudoki), the documents of the Shōsōin
(Shōsōin monjo), wooden strips with inscriptions (mokkan), all from the eighth century, as well as