Jo ̄mon and Yayoi: premodern to hypermodernSuzuki Hiroyuki has provided a recent and engaging summary of Morse’s encounters with some
of these people, in particular Ninagawa Noritane, described by Morse as a “celebrated antiquar-
ian.” Ninagawa is especially well known for his seven- volume series Kanko zusetsu: Tōki no bu (to
which Ninagawa himself gave the French title, Notice historique et descriptive sur les arts et industries
japonaises: Art céramique), published between 1876 and 1880. Suzuki reproduces Morse’s own
accounts of his meetings with antiquarians, which included intense object handling sessions.^24
Such haptic encounters with ancient artifacts was clearly an important part of the antiquarian
experience, lost on generations of later museum- goers whose experience is limited to gazing at
the material traces of the past through vitrines, but which resonates with those for whom the
practice of archaeology involves intimate studies of artifacts, something which has once again
come into vogue with the “material turn” in the discipline in the West, and which perhaps never
went out of fashion in Japan, where vestiges of these small gatherings of antiquarians can perhaps
be found in the myriad specialist archaeology meetings that happen with a remarkable frequency,
often at weekends, in contemporary Japan.
Antiquarian interests in early modern Japan often coincided with interests in travel and local
specialties and regional products (bussangaku). Minomushi Sanjin was one such itinerant antiquar-
ian, and others included Matsuura Takeshirō (1818–1888), the explorer of Ezō, who introduced
Morse to his extensive collection of ancient beads and other stone artifacts, and who coined the
name Hokkaido for Japan’s northern island. But new drafts were disturbing the refined world of
the traditional Edo antiquarians, and the Meiji era rejection of “old things” was associated with
the development of new approaches: the archaeology espoused by Morse himself, drawing on
principles of evolution and stratigraphy, geology, and anthropology.
Much of the later nineteenth century was taken up with attempting to determine where Jap-
anese populations fitted within the family of races, and early anthropological archaeologists such
as Tsuboi Shōgorō, who was to study in London from 1888 to 1891 exerted great effort in trying
to identify which peoples were responsible for what, and in particular how the Ainu, considered
aboriginal peoples of northern Japan, related to later Japanese populations. Mark Hudson has
surveyed the development of the study of ethnogenesis in the archipelago, which still structures
much of the debate around the transition from the Jōmon to Yayoi periods, as generations of
scholars attempted to link the findings of biological anthropology (latterly including genetic
studies) with reconstructing a linguistic prehistory of the Japanese language, with the traces of
material culture.^25
For long the Ainu were considered the direct descendants of Jōmon peoples, and it is only in
relatively recent years that they are now recognized as having their own distinct ethnic identity.
This identity was forged in medieval rather than ancient times, and late twentieth- century revival
in awareness of this identity underpinned moves which culminated in the recognition by
UNESCO of the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan in their own right, shortly to have their
own National Museum in Shiraoi where the bones of Ainu ancestors, dug up and investigated by
anthropologists from the later nineteenth century as Hokkaido became the focus of colonization,
to then be stored in university museums as objects of research interest rather than ancestral
remains requiring appropriate respect. Walter Edwards has traced the shifts in prewar ideologies
and the associated development in archaeology and cultural property management.^26
Concern about exactly who the Jōmon populations were have faded in recent years, as their
material achievements have given rise to their rehabilitation from primitive aborigines to wise
ancestors who knew how to inhabit the archipelago in very different ways to contemporary
Japanese populations. This rehabilitation has taken various guises, perhaps starting with the
recognition of the artistic creativity evident in their trademark products, pottery. This was
perhaps first recognized by Okamoto Tarō, the surrealist- inspired modern Japanese artist,