The Jomon period dates back to about 12,000 years B.C. in Japan’s prehistoric era. The Jomon culture was characterized by a semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer lifestyle and was named after the Jomon pottery of the era – this was pottery decorated with the patterns that formed when cord was pressed into wet clay. When Sir George Bailey Sansom, a British diplomat and professor of Japanese studies at Columbia University, wrote his influential book Japan: A Short Cultural History (rev.ed. 1946), he offered the West a detailed description of ancient Japanese culture including Japan’s Neolithic Jomon culture. It was, however, American zoologist and orientalist Edward Sylvester Morse (1838 – 1925) who first wrote in English about Japanese pottery and “cord-marked” pottery in his book Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886). The term “cord-marked” went on to be translated into Japanese as Jomon which became the name not only for this type of pottery, but for this entire period of Japanese history.
What’s interesting about the Jomon period is the insight it gives us into the origin of today’s Japan. In the book The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001), Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, uses human DNA testing to trace the ancestry of all European’s back to only seven women, the lives of whom he depicts at the end of the book. As he traces the movement of human civilisations across the globe, he briefly touches on the Jomon people of Japan and their links to modern day Japanese. Japan is made of four main islands: Honshu (the largest), Hokkaido to the north, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa in the south. It turns out that Japanese people from the mainland of Honshu actually share more in common genetically with the migrations of Yayoi people from Korea, rather than the Jomon who came across the Asian tundra to Japan. The Ainu from Hokkaido in the north and Ryukyuans of Okinawa in the south, however, do not share this Korean DNA, but do share similar genetics with each other despite the geographical distance. The theory goes that these two races are decendants of the Jomon who, at one time were present across Honshu, but were pushed away to the north and south by the immigration of the Yayoi.
In a world where we focus on our differences, whether cultural, linguistic or religious, and where debate on immigration is always in the news, our modern world actually has been shaped by immigration and societies founded on a mix of different cultures. OK…so this might be a slightly hippy “hey man, let’s just all get along” kind of attitude, but nevertheless it’s sometimes interesting to reflect that our ancestors may not come from where we consider home. They travelled thousands of miles over many millennia, along ice passages and links in terrain between countries that no longer exist. When the Yayoi people came to Japan, perhaps if the Jomon people had had the ability to write, their messages in the dust might have read something like: “Stop immigration – say no to more Yayoi!”
