The Ten-Thousand-Year Riddle: Why Did Jomon Endure?

If we imagine the history of the world as a single book, many of its pages are filled with the records of rising and falling dynasties and wars. A new empire rises, lands are fought over, and in time it perishes. Civilization has often been told as a relentless succession of such violent overwriting. And yet the Japanese archipelago is said to have had an age that strays far from that common picture. With almost no traces of large wars, no tombs of kings, no ruined capitals, it continued gently for more than ten thousand years. That is the age called ‘Jomon.’ This series begins with the riddle of its strange length.

Ten Thousand Years: A Dizzying Length

When did the Jomon period begin, and when did it end? The answer has in fact been rewritten little by little as research has advanced. Its beginning, once placed ‘about ten thousand years ago,’ has reached further back as the precision of radiocarbon dating improved. Today, based on some of the world’s oldest known pottery unearthed at sites such as Odai Yamamoto in Aomori Prefecture, the view that it began roughly 16,000 years ago is widely favored. Its end, while varying by region, is generally placed at about 2,400 years ago.

Lay these two numbers side by side, and the span between them is roughly thirteen thousand years. It is commonly described as having ‘lasted more than ten thousand years.’ Even told that figure, it is hard to grasp. Considering that the written history of humankind is at most about five thousand years, Jomon walked on for more than twice that time without writing or metal tools. Even the pyramids of Egypt, which feel to us like the distant past, are some forty-five centuries old. The people of Jomon were living on the same archipelago long before the pyramids were built, and went on living there long after.

Placed on the same timeline as the world, that length stands out all the more. Around the time Jomon is said to have begun, the earth still lay within the lingering traces of the ice age. After that, cities, writing, and kings were born in Mesopotamia and Egypt, bronze spread, vast structures were raised, and empire after empire rose and fell. Over that same span, while history on the continent was rewritten again and again, on the Japanese archipelago people are said to have quietly passed down a closely similar way of life from generation to generation. On the map of world history, Jomon comes to look like a single river, unusually long and flowing gently.

That said, this long stretch of time was not flat and uniform. Researchers grasp the Jomon period as divided into six phases: Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final. The climate swung between cold and warm, coastlines shifted greatly, and the shapes of pottery and the size of the population changed over time. Ten thousand years was not time that stood still, but time that slowly kept changing.

Why Did It Not Greatly Waver?

Survey world history, and ages that lasted this long are not many. Most civilizations changed their form, over spans of a few centuries to a millennium and more, through war, conquest, and shifts in climate. So why did Jomon last so long without greatly wavering?

One clue often cited is the nature of its foundation of living. As later episodes will explore in detail, the people of Jomon are thought to have lived without relying on full-scale farming, combining hunting, gathering, and fishing. Nuts, fish, shellfish, game. The rich nature of the archipelago held a breadth in which, even if one food failed, another could make up for it. Compared with a society that staked all of life on a single crop, such a many-sided way of living may have been more resilient against nature’s caprice — so the thinking goes.

Another is a difference in how wealth was stored. In a farming society able to store great quantities of grain, disparity and conflict are said to arise readily over those stores. The Jomon way of life, by contrast, was based on what nature gave season by season, and is thought to have been unlikely to become a system for piling up wealth without limit. Where there are no stores great enough to be worth seizing, large-scale war is also less likely to occur — this view of an ‘unstealing, circulating society,’ the theme of this series, has its roots here.

In addition, the geography of the archipelago itself may have played a part. The islands, surrounded by sea, were to some degree shielded from the large armies pressing in from the continent and from abrupt replacements of peoples. It is not that new people and techniques never came in at all, but the islands were less exposed to the fierce waves of collision than the continent — such conditions, too, have been pointed to as part of the background of the long stability. Yet none of these is a decisive ‘answer’; for now, the measured view is to understand it as the result of several factors overlapping.

Before Idealizing, See the Shadows Too

Here, there is something at which we should pause. In recent years, Jomon has increasingly been told as ‘an ideal society without conflict, in harmony with nature.’ Its appeal is real, but excessive romanticizing calls for caution.

The Jomon way of life was by no means a paradise. The average lifespan of the time is estimated to have been far shorter than today, and it is said to have been not unusual for infants to die before they could grow. Through shifts in climate and shortages of food, settlements could become unable to sustain themselves. The wearing-down of teeth and the traces left on bones let us read the reality of people who lived within a harsh nature. That traces of war are scarce is indeed noteworthy, but it is not proof that ‘conflict was entirely absent’; it is, rather, the fact that ‘traces of large-scale war are scant’ — a fact to be handled with care.

And yet, even so, the length of ten thousand years draws our hearts. Not fiercely seizing from one another, but placing oneself within the circulation of nature, time continued gently. From here on, episode by episode, we will trace its true shape, following the evidence that archaeology has unearthed.

At the starting point of that long stability lay a single small invention. A vessel that does not crack even over fire, and that turns hard nuts into something edible — pottery. Next time, we trace how this revolution of ‘boiling’ changed the table and the life of Jomon.