4
Jo ̄mon and Yayoi
Premodern to hypermodern
Simon Kaner
Encounters with two eccentric antiquities got me thinking about the relationship between the
ancient past (a space now occupied by what are termed the Jōmon and Yayoi periods, which
combined lasted from around 15,000 years ago to around 300 ce) and the premodern period in
Japan. The first, a woodblock print assigned to the artist Utagawa Toyokuni based on a drawing
of the Forum at Rome, caught my attention in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum
in London in 2005. Utagawa certainly never visited the Forum at Rome and must have derived
his inspiration from information that filtered into Tokugawa period (1600–1868) Japan through
the activities of the Dutch East India Company, and he would not have known that the Roman
Empire, whose glories are reflected in his woodblock print, was the contemporary of the Yayoi
period, which was influenced by Rome’s counterpart in East Asia, the Han empire, in whose
records occur the first mentions of what we know as Japan.^1 The second is the lower part of a
Jōmon pot, which we now know was probably made around 5000 years ago, and which appears
to have been re- used as a water container for the tea ceremony, sometime between the seven-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, most likely by someone who did not know the term “Jōmon,”
and yet latterly ended up in the British Museum in London and gained new fame courtesy of the
BBC Radio series, “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”^2
Both were probably appreciated by collectors and practitioners of antiquarianism in Edo
period Japan, and today both retain a potent agency to transport those who encounter them to
other places, and other times.^3 Both are clearly eccentric, and it is perhaps that sense of difference,
along with the hints of long- forgotten stories of how they came to be made and their intriguing
object biographies, that make them so appealing to contemporary viewers, just as their strange-
ness spoke to premodern antiquarians.
The scientific discipline of archaeology is an assuredly modern field of discourse in Japan as
elsewhere, and indeed the first recognized “archaeological excavation” of an “archaeological
site” in Japan, the Ōmori shell middens in 1877, was part of the intellectual revolution that
accompanied the adoption of modernity by the Meiji government. Modern archaeology is the
study of the human past through its material remains. During the “premodern” period (an appel-
lation that is itself an homage to the teleology of so much Japanese historiography), the material
traces of antiquity were the preserve of collectors intrigued by the strange forms they encoun-
tered in the natural world around them. Despite Peter Bleed’s assertion in what remains the most