S. Kaner
renowned in particular for his Tower of the Sun, which formed a centerpiece for the epoch-
defining Expo70 in Osaka. The tremendous diversity of Jōmon pottery styles was given order
initially by Yamanouchi Sugao and others in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
The many millennia of the Jōmon are now divided into six subperiods on the basis of chang-
ing pottery styles. Over seventy major regional ceramics styles are now recognized, along with
hundreds of local variants: a localism that would have doubtless appealed to the bussankai anti-
quarians of the Edo period.
The Jōmon peoples developed resilient lifestyles that supported a continuous tradition from
the start of the Holocene until the arrival of rice farming just under 3000 years ago. This resil-
ience and the apparent understanding of the environmental affordances of the Japanese islands
suggest to contemporary audiences a deep sympathy with natural rhythms leading to a har-
monious and peaceful coexistence with the world around them. This evokes respect and wonder
in Japan today, faced by seemingly overwhelming challenges including rural depopulation,
environmental degradation, and social alienation. A new romanticized view of the Jōmon period
is embedded in Jōmon-themed festivals, in which the forager lifestyle is increasingly
fetishized.^27
The sparkle of the Yayoi
Contemporary Japanese archaeology identifies the Yayoi period as beginning shortly after the
start of the first millennium bce in northern Kyushu, with the arrival of the first paddy fields for
growing wet rice from the Korean peninsula. The chronology of the start of the Yayoi and the
end of the Jōmon in that part of Japan is a continuing source of debate, but it now appears that it
took several centuries for the technological package involved in cultivating Japonica rice to be
accepted by communities further south and east, although once adopted, it was taken up with
enthusiasm—as indicated by the scale of early paddy field systems around western Japan.^28
The adoption of rice farming was closely followed by the appearance of bronze and then iron
objects, and was also associated with the advent of silk weaving, an industry with which Japan
was later to become very closely identified. Competition over good agricultural land, perhaps
heightened by population increases as a result of the additional carrying capacity afforded by an
agricultural economy gave rise to the first evidence for institutionalized violence in the archi-
pelago, as raiding and warfare became endemic later in the Yayoi period, as attested to by head-
less burials, an increase in weapons, and the appearance of defended hilltop settlements. The early
Chinese chronicles give some flavor of these developments in their accounts of the “Wajin
unrest,” as regional polities jostled for control of ever larger tracts of land. Not all interactions
were violent, however, and the exchange of commodities flourished, leading to the establish-
ment of trading entrepots through which flowed a wide range of goods, many from considerable
distances.
Although the Yayoi culture was not formally identified by archaeologists until excavations at
the Mukogaoka shell midden in Yayoi- chō (adjacent to the modern- day Hongō campus of the
University of Tokyo) in 1884, objects that can now be dated with certainty to the Yayoi period
were discovered in antiquity. In what was one of the earliest recorded such discoveries, in 668 a
bronze bell, or dōtaku, was discovered at Sūfukuji in Ōmi province (modern day Shiga prefec-
ture), as recorded in illustrated manuscripts associated with the establishment of the Ishiyama
temple in 749.^29
To date, over four hundred such bronze bells have been discovered from the central Chūgoku
and Kansai regions. One of the most renowned is thought to have been owned at one point by
the artist Tani Bunchō. The kokugaku scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) included illustrations