S. Kaner
thorough exploration of their world in a Western language, that what this assortment of literati,
aesthetes, and eccentrics got up to was “almost archaeology,” I would argue that it was a long
way from what would in the “modern” world be regarded as archaeology, and oddly it may have
more to do with some of the concerns of postmodernity, or hypermodernity, the contexts within
which archaeology is practiced, and challenged, in contemporary Japan.^4
In an age when empathy with the past is encouraged as a mode for engaging with history, and
the positivist certainties of parts of the twentieth century are relegated from the front line to
studies of the history of the discipline, a shift given material form in the arrival of the World
Archaeological Congress in Kyoto in the summer of 2016, with all of its associated political
baggage and critique of the status quo that has for so long nurtured the Japanese archaeological
endeavor into one of the most affluent in the world, it is perhaps opportune to consider what the
“premodern” forbears of what we now know as the modern discipline of archaeology would
have made of the preoccupations of the field in the early twenty- first century.^5
Archaeology on display
Each year since the middle 1990s, the Japanese government Agency for Cultural Affairs
(Bunkachō) has organized a traveling exhibition of the key discoveries from the past year’s
archaeological investigations, under the title of “Hakkutsu sareta Nihon rettō” (“the Japanese archi-
pelago excavated”). Readers can explore for themselves the highlights of each year’s exhibition
by consulting the English language webpages of the Japanese Archaeological Association.^6
To whet the appetite, over the last decade these have included, from the Jōmon period: reports
of some of the earliest buildings, associated with some of the earliest pottery in the world, from
Kiyotake Kami Inoharu in Miyazaki prefecture (2008); the earliest ceramics from Hokkaido,
from the Taishō 3 site (2006); a re- investigation of Fukui Cave in Nagasaki prefecture, one of the
classic sites of Japanese archaeology, where the true antiquity of Jōmon pots was first established
(2015); a shell midden of huge oyster shells overlying hundreds of pits each containing excep-
tionally well- preserved basketry containing nuts at Higashi Myō in Saga prefecture (2007); stone
circles and other intriguing settings of stones associated with ceremonies and funerals, at Ōmori
Katsuyama in Aomori (2010) and Urushikita in Akita prefecture (2012); the smallest and most
ancient ceramic dogū figure, an exquisite headless torso that would not be out of place in a modern
art exhibition, but in fact dating to 11,000 years ago, from Aidani Kumahara in Shiga prefecture
(2011); the largest cache of human skeletons yet discovered from any single Jōmon site, repre-
senting ninety- one individuals from the Ōdake shell middens on the coast of Toyama prefecture
(2015), disturbed, as so many of the mass of traces of the Japanese past over recent decades have
been, through development (in this case the construction of the Hokuriku Shinkansen); village-
style settlements from Nagatake in Saitama, complete with the burials of those who originally
lived there (2014) and Ireibaru in Okinawa, right on the margins of the Jōmon world (2009); and
a structured deposit of four polished stone bars, carefully arranged on the floor of a 3000 year old
house, at Midorikawa Higashi in Tokyo (2013).
Among the highlighted finds from the Yayoi period exhibited in the same series of exhibitions
are: the remains of substantial ditch- enclosed agricultural settlements at Nishi Kawatsu in
Shimane prefecture (2013), Kyū Renpeijū in Kagawa prefecture (2012), thought to be on the
scale of the famous and now reconstructed settlement of Yoshinogari in Saga prefecture, origin-
ally claimed as the residence of one of Japan’s earliest named rulers (Queen Himiko of
Yamataikoku), Isshiki Aokai in Aichi prefecture (2011), and the northernmost such settlement
yet found along the Japan Sea coast, at Yamamoto in Niigata prefecture (2007); discoveries of
bronze bells and halberds at Yanagisawa (2009), and a bronze working center at the Sugu site in