Jo ̄mon and Yayoi: premodern to hypermodernof five bronze bells, including the Bunchō bell, in his Kōnin rekiun kikō, based on the ninth-
century Kōnin rekiun ki, and concluded that they dated to the Age of the Gods.^30 Bells were not
the only bronze objects to attract attention: in 1175 the discovery of a bronze halberd from
Dazaifu in Chikuzen province (modern- day Fukuoka) was reported.^31 In 1823 Aoyanagi
(1766–1835) reported the discovery of some thirty- five Chinese bronze mirrors, beads, bronze
halberds, and bronze swords associated with a ceramic burial urn in Mikumo in Chikuzen prefec-
ture, and his account included illustrations of these objects. Mikumo is now known as a major
location of Yayoi activity.^32 One can but wonder how antiquarians such as Tani Bunchō and
Aoyanagi would have responded to discoveries such as those at Kōjindani and Kamo Iwakura in
Shimane prefecture, where 358 bronze swords were excavated in1996 and 39 bronze bells (dōtaku)
in 1998 respectively, confirming the antiquity of the political significance of the Izumo region.
In the same year as Aoyanagi was recording the discoveries from Mikumo, Philipp von Siebold
arrived in Deshima, the Dutch factory in Nagasaki which provided a window on the Western
world for Japan under the self- imposed isolation of the Tokugawa shogunate. Siebold was to go
on to produce his magisterial twenty- volume work Nippon from 1832 to 1851, and from an early
stage he, and latterly his son Heinrich, took interest in the archaeological remains they encoun-
tered. Indeed it was stone tools from the Siebold collection that the pioneering curator of the
British Museum, Augustus Woolaston Franks, introduced at the 3rd International Prehistory
Congress in Norwich and London, in one of the first public presentations on Japanese archae-
ology overseas, in which he argued for a “Stone Age From Japan” in 1868, a decade prior to
Morse’s investigations at Omori and just three years after John Lubbock introduced the concepts
of an Old Stone Age and a New Stone Age in his Prehistoric Times. A new era had begun, in which
external interest in Japanese antiquity was beginning, which was eventually to usher in a new age
involving “proper” archaeological investigation, and which was to see objects from the Jōmon
and Yayoi periods appearing in European and Amer ican museum collections and the first major
publications on the subject in English.^33
In 1784, a farmer on Shikanoshima in Chikuzen province (modern- day Fukuoka prefecture) in
northern Kyushu, unearthed a golden seal. He duly handed it in to the domanial authorities, the
Kuroda family, in whose possession it remains today. The seal comprised a square base, 2.4 centim-
eters long and just under 1 centimeter high, with a handle in the shape of an animal with a snake head.
The base of the seal bore an inscription in relief, comprising five Chinese ideographs in three columns,
which can be translated as “King of the state of Na of Wa, vassal of the Han.” Wa was the name given
to the Japanese islands in the third century Wei zhih. The Hou Han shu, a history of the later Han
dynasty (25–225), records that tribute was received from the King of Na, one of the “Eastern Barbar-
ians,” and that a seal was sent as acknowledgment of the relationship by Emperor Kuang- wu of the
later Han.^34 Although the authenticity of the seal is questioned by some, the object was ultimately
made a National Treasure and is today displayed in the Fukuoka Art Museum.
A number of scholars of the Edo period were fascinated by early Chinese documents, which
presented some of the first written accounts of Japan. The most important is the Wei zhih, which
not only provided details of everyday life and the politics of the peoples of Wa, but most intrigu-
ingly offered directions about how to get there from China, purportedly based on a journey
undertaken by envoys from the Wei court. Arai Hakuseki noted all this in his Koshitsū (“Treatise
on Ancient History”) of 1716, in which he assumed that the named country of Yamatai, ruled
over by Queen Himiko, the first named personage we know of from Japan, was located in
Yamato province (modern- day Nara prefecture). The leading light of the Kokugaku school of
National Learning, however, Motoori Norinaga, in his 1778 work Gyojū gaigen (“An Outline of
the Subduing of Foreigners”), claimed that by following the somewhat tortuous directions given
in the Wei zhih in detail suggested that Yamatai was in fact located in Kyushu. These claims gave