The Jomon

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Somewhere in what is now Aomori Prefecture, at the northern tip of Honshu, a hand pressed a length of twisted plant-fiber cord against the wet wall of a clay pot and rolled it along the surface. It left a band of fine, even impressions — the grain of the cord printed into the clay. This was something like sixteen thousand years ago. The pot was fired, used, broken, and buried; the cord itself, being fiber, rotted to nothing, and only its negative survived, held in the baked clay like a fingerprint. That impressed line is among the oldest things about these people that anyone can name. As it happens, it is also their name.

The mark and the name

The people who made those pots left no word for themselves that can be recovered. The label came from outside, and late. In 1877 an American zoologist named Edward S. Morse, newly arrived in Japan and hunting brachiopods, glimpsed a bank of discarded shells from a train window near the village of Omori, south of Tokyo, and set about excavating the mound. Among the shells were sherds of ancient pottery whose surfaces carried the impress of twisted cord. Morse described the ware as “cord-marked,” and the phrase passed into Japanese as jōmon — cord-pattern. A word coined for a decoration has since been stretched to cover a whole culture of the archipelago, conventionally dated from about 14,000 to 300 BCE and split by archaeologists into six long phases: Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final. Each of those phases is itself a span of centuries or millennia; the whole is one of the longest continuous cultures known anywhere.

The physical genealogy runs older than almost anyone expected. Small fragments recovered from the Odai Yamamoto I site in Aomori, excavated in 1998, have been dated to roughly 14,500 BCE, which places them among the oldest fired ceramics known on Earth. The point is worth holding still for a moment, because it inverts a familiar order of things. Across most of the world, pottery is a companion of the farmer: heavy, breakable, useful mainly to a people who have settled down beside their fields and need to store and cook a grain harvest. The Jomon made pots thousands of years before anyone in the archipelago farmed anything. The cord-marked vessel is older than the rice paddy, older than the bronze, older than the written name given to the people who made it. It comes out of the ground first, and the people are reconstructed backward from it and from the shell mounds, the pit floors, and the bones.

Those bones, and the teeth in them, are where the deep question begins — because the thread that runs forward from the Jomon does not stop at a museum case. It runs, by an argument still being conducted, to a people alive today. The Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils, are held by the weight of current scholarship to be the closest living relatives of the Jomon, together with the Ryukyuan people of the far south. Everything that makes the Jomon more than a collection of handsome pots — the claim that they are somebody’s ancestors, that their silent world lies beneath a living religion — hangs on that thread, and the thread is contested along its whole length.

An abundance without farming

What the Jomon did that was genuinely unusual was to stay put. Foragers, as a rule, move: they follow the game and the ripening and the fish runs, and their settlements are light. The Jomon, in a landscape of extraordinary natural richness — salmon rivers, deer forests, nut-bearing woods, a coastline thick with shellfish — did the un-obvious thing and settled. They built villages of pit dwellings, sunk floors roofed over with timber and thatch. They dug storage pits. They piled the great refuse heaps of shell that Morse would one day cut into, middens that grew over generations in one place. They worked lacquer, a demanding and patient craft. And in at least one case they held a single site for the better part of two millennia.

That site is Sannai-Maruyama, on a river terrace in what is now Aomori City, occupied from roughly 3900 to 2200 BCE — the middle of the Early Jomon into the late Middle Jomon, close to seventeen hundred years of continuous life in one place. Its scale was not suspected until 1992, when the prefecture, surveying the ground for a baseball stadium, cut into one of the largest Jomon settlements ever found and abandoned the stadium. The excavators uncovered longhouses running to more than thirty meters, hundreds of dwellings, and, most arrestingly, the foundations of a massive structure raised on six great chestnut pillars set in two rows — post-holes two meters across, the timbers themselves the girth of a grown tree. Genetic testing of chestnuts from the site showed that the trees were cultivated, not merely gathered: the villagers were managing groves. Jade from the Sea of Japan coast, amber, and obsidian from distant sources turned up in the deposits, none of it local, all of it carried in along trade routes that reached far beyond the valley. This was a sedentary, laborious, provisioned, connected society — an abundance built without a single planted field of grain.

Into the wet clay of their pots the Jomon pressed more than cord. By the Middle Jomon the surface decoration had erupted, in certain regions, into pure sculpture: the flame-style vessels, kaengata doki, whose rims writhe upward in three-dimensional crests and hooks that lick the air like fire and answer no functional need whatever. A pot has to hold soup; it does not have to grow flames. The flame-style ware, first recognized from sherds dug at Umataka in Niigata in the 1930s, is the signature of a people who had energy to spend on their objects far past the point of use.

A flame-style (kaengata) vessel of the Middle Jomon, attributed to Umataka in Niigata, c. 3000–2000 BCE, in the Tokyo National Museum. Photograph by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The silence of the figures

And they made the dogu. These are humanoid figures of fired clay, and they were made in enormous numbers — the recovered count runs into the tens of thousands, with estimates spread from about fifteen thousand to more than twenty. They are overwhelmingly female in form, with breasts and swelling hips and, often, the marks of pregnancy; the faces are heart-shaped or masked or, in the famous “goggle-eyed” type of the Final Jomon, hidden behind vast slitted eyes. And they are, almost as a rule, found broken — a leg snapped off, the body cracked across — in a way that the excavators long ago concluded was deliberate, part of whatever the figures were for rather than an accident of the ground.

The most celebrated of them is the Jomon Venus, a figure about twenty-seven centimeters tall, of clay polished until it gleams and mixed with mica so that it catches the light. She was unearthed in 1986 at the Tanabatake site in Chino, in Nagano Prefecture, and belongs to the Middle Jomon, around 2500 BCE. In 1995 she became the first Jomon object ever designated a National Treasure of Japan; four more dogu have since been raised to that rank, five in all. She stands, unusually, intact, a heavy-hipped woman balanced on solid legs, plainly made with great care and plainly meant to matter.

Here the honest account has to draw a line and stand on it. The dogu clearly did something more than feed or shelter anyone; they belonged to a world of meaning. But what that meaning was cannot be read out of the figures, because the Jomon left nothing to read it with. They kept no writing. They left no epic, no chant, no attested word for any spirit, nothing that names a bear or a hearth-fire or a river as a person to be honored. The temptation, working backward from what is known of the later Ainu, is enormous and must be resisted at exactly this point. The Ainu keep a coherent and dignified religion of the kamuy — the divine persons who visit the human world clothed in a body, bringing the gift of their meat and fur, hosted and prayed to and formally sent home so that they will come again. It is a whole moral economy of hospitality between two peoples, human and divine, and it is attested in the living tradition, in the epic songs, and in the ethnographic record. None of it can be transferred onto the Jomon as fact. A broken clay woman from Chino is not a document of a religion; she is, at most, a very long material substratum out of which some part of a later religion may — or may not — have grown. Archaeology can support that in outline. It can never confirm it in doctrine.

The Jomon Venus, a Middle Jomon dogu (c. 2500 BCE) unearthed at Chino, Nagano, in 1986 and named Japan’s first Jomon National Treasure in 1995. Photograph by Takuma-sa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ancestors by inference

That the Jomon are ancestors at all — and whose — is the load-bearing question, and it is genuinely open. The framework most people still argue with was set out in 1991 by the anthropologist Kazuro Hanihara, whose “dual-structure model” held that the modern Japanese population formed from two sources: an indigenous Jomon substrate, present in the islands for millennia, overlaid after about 300 BCE by Yayoi migrants — rice farmers and metalworkers arriving from continental East Asia. On Hanihara’s account the mixing was thorough in the center of the archipelago and weakest at its ends, so that the Ainu of the far north and the Ryukyuans of the far south, least admixed with the incoming Yayoi, preserved the Jomon inheritance most fully.

The genetic evidence assembled since has broadly supported the outline while complicating the detail. The Jomon come out of the ancient-DNA studies as a deeply divergent, basal East-Asian lineage — a branch that split early and then sat, for a very long time, in relative isolation on the archipelago. Their closest living relatives, on that evidence, are the Ainu and the Ryukyuans; mainland Japanese carry a smaller Jomon share, on the order of a tenth to a fifth of their autosomal ancestry, the residue of that old substrate beneath the continental flood. In the paternal line the signal is sharper still. Y-chromosome haplogroup D-M55, a marker read as a paternal fingerprint of Jomon descent, occurs in roughly four in five — about 81 percent — of Ainu men in Hokkaido, a concentration found nowhere else at anything like that level.

But descent from the Jomon to the Ainu is not a single unbroken line, and this is where the caution earns its keep. The road runs through named intermediary cultures: the Epi-Jomon of Hokkaido, then the Satsumon, and it folds in a wholly separate maritime people, the Okhotsk culture, sea-mammal hunters who moved down from the Sakhalin and Amur world into northern Hokkaido between roughly the fifth and thirteenth centuries CE. The Okhotsk contribution is not a footnote. One of the most vivid features of later Ainu religion — the elaborate ceremonial of the bear, the raising of a cub and its ritual sending — is now thought by many scholars to derive substantially from the Okhotsk stream rather than the Jomon one, on the blunt ground that no trace of such a bear rite has been found at Jomon or Epi-Jomon sites at all. Bear ceremonialism runs in a broad band across the peoples of the Amur and Sakhalin, the living Nivkh among them; how much of it reached the Ainu from that maritime northern world, and how much from the deep Jomon past, is exactly the kind of question that remains argued rather than closed. The Jomon supply the oldest layer. They do not supply a simple pedigree.

A contested inheritance

For a long time the Jomon were filed under a double disparagement, and it is worth naming because it was wrong on both counts. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century science — the same colonial optics that dismissed the living Ainu religion as “primitive nature-worship” — filed the Jomon under savagery and stasis: a people frozen in a childhood of the human story, waiting to be redeemed by the civilizing arrival of rice agriculture from the continent. Both framings are historiographic distortions, and both collapse on contact with the evidence. The Jomon sustained one of the longest continuous cultures on the planet, pioneered ceramics for the world, managed their forests, held their villages for centuries, and made objects of real ambition. The Ainu, for their part, are not a relic but a living indigenous people, formally recognized as such by Japan only in 2019, under the Ainu Policy Promotion Act that followed a Diet resolution of 2008 — a recognition whose institutions, from the national center at Upopoy to the Saru-valley heartland around Nibutani, are the standing rebuttal to a century of assimilationist erasure.

The reappraisal of the Jomon came from the ground. The excavations at Sannai-Maruyama through the 1980s and 1990s made the old picture of pre-agricultural simplicity untenable; a settlement of that size, that duration, and that reach could not be squeezed into the category of primitive wandering. On 27 July 2021 the reappraisal reached its formal summit when UNESCO inscribed the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan — seventeen sites across Hokkaido and the northern Tohoku prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, and Akita, Sannai-Maruyama among them — as a World Heritage property, valued precisely for what the old frame could not see: a sedentary, materially rich, spiritually elaborate forager society that endured for more than ten thousand years without farming.

So the Jomon are now claimed in two directions at once, and the directions pull against each other. In one, they are the deep floor of a pan-Japanese antiquity, the archipelago’s own ancient past, a source of ceramic firsts and World Heritage prestige. In the other, more pointed, they are ancestors within the Ainu story — the material proof of a Jomon-descended presence in the islands reaching back fourteen thousand years, a claim reasserted by the living Ainu community and by the scholars who worked alongside it against the long pressure to fold the Ainu into a homogeneous Japan. The genetics, meanwhile, keeps sharpening the picture rather than settling it: recent ancient-DNA work argues for a tripartite origin of the modern Japanese — the Jomon plus not one but two later continental streams — refining Hanihara’s dual model without dislodging the Jomon from the base of it.

The Jomon supply a floor, and not a doctrine. A hand in Aomori pressed cord into clay; more than ten thousand years later, people who trace part of their descent to whoever lived on that land sing to the grandmother of the hearth-fire and send the bear home an honored guest. The rope strung between those two facts is spun from tooth measurements and buried pottery and the frequency of a chromosome marker, and it is strong enough to carry the weight of a people’s claim to their own deep past — and it snaps the instant anyone asks it to carry a single named god across the ten thousand years, from a broken figure of clay to a spirit with a name.

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