Jo ̄mon and Yayoi: premodern to hypermodernancient chronicles. There appears to have been a broad ontological security deriving from an
absolute belief in the accounts of the origins of the Japanese archipelago set out in Kojiki and
Nihon shoki.
Despite the best efforts of early chroniclers of Japanese archaeology, notably Neil Gordon
Munro, who dedicated much space in the early sections of his monumental Prehistoric Japan to
speculations on an Old Stone Age, it was not until 1949 when excavations at Iwajuku in Gunma
Prefecture produced irrefutable evidence for a Palaeolithic period—an Old Stone Age predating
the use of pottery.^16 Currently the earliest human occupation of the Japanese archipelago dates to
around 40,000 years ago. The transition from the Jōmon to the Yayoi, from prehistoric non-
agricultural foraging societies to protohistoric (i.e., there are historical documents from China
which refer to what was happening in Japan at the time) farming, metal- using societies continues
be a preoccupation of many Japanese archaeologists, even though some scholars now try to
understand the sequence in terms of continuities, in particular in regard to the origins of
agriculture.^17
Classifying the past into neat, discrete periods, one progressing from another in a tidy uni-
lineal sequence, is a product of enlightenment modernity, and the desire to separate fully modern
humans from their primitive predecessors. Recent Japanese historiography is prone to the valori-
zation of the transition: the recognition of key dates that represent major thresholds in the nar-
rative of history, disjunctures that mark a new direction, points of no return that consign all that
went before to the dustbin of the past. Perhaps it begins with the founding of imperial capitals:
710 is the start of the Nara period, 794 marked the start of the Heian civilization, just as 1185
marked its end; Japan was reunified in 1603 under the Tokugawa shoguns, only to be reborn
again in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration, wherein lay the seeds of the latest transformation
borne from destruction, 1945, and defeat at the end of World War II.
This final transition was of the utmost importance for the subsequent development of Jap-
anese archaeology. For the first time in the history of Japan, the authority of the Kojiki and Nihon
shoki was not only questioned, but entirely rejected. Clare Fawcett and Junko Habu have docu-
mented how the postwar occupying powers oversaw the redaction of Japanese school texts on
history: enforcing the deletion of sections that referred to the early texts and their mythological
dogmas. Japan’s early history was expunged, leaving a void that was to be filled by
archaeology.^18
Often inspired by Marxist- informed notions, new generations of archaeologists such as
Wajma Seiichi and Kondo Yoshiro, and school teachers including Miyasaka Eiichi organized
public excavations designed to elucidate the everyday lives of Japanese ancestors. School children
had the opportunity to recover the material traces of the ancient lives from the soil at sites such
as Tsukinowa, a large burial mound in Okayama, Toro a rice- farming village in Shizuoka and
Togari- ishi, a Jōmon settlement in Nagano, in place of learning about the exploits of imperial
ancestors.^19
For many years, prehistoric archaeologists clung to such certainties in their own chronologies.
The Palaeolithic ended around 10,000 years ago, conveniently coinciding with the end of the last
Ice Age. The Jōmon period, named after the cord- marked pottery that Edward Morse identified
at Ōmori, ended at 300 bce, with the arrival of rice farming and metallurgy. The subsequent
Yayoi period, which saw the rise and fall of a series of regional polities (the countries or “kuni”
identified in Chinese dynastic records, such as the Wei zhih), lasted until around 300 ce, when the
hegemony of the Yamato dynasty coalesced into something akin to a unified state that controlled
hitherto uncontrollable lands from its core in the Kinai region of modern- day Nara, Kyoto, and
Osaka, materialized in the construction of large mounded tombs or kofun. New generations of
absolute dating methods, including radiocarbon dating supported by tree- ring calibration, is