A Society Without Kings? The Mystery of Ten Thousand Years With Little Conflict

Turn the pages of a history textbook, and the chapters on ancient times are often filled with the names of kings and heroes, and the dates of the battles they fought. Castles rise, armies move, and the victor hoards the wealth—that is usually how the story of civilization unfolds. Yet when you peer into the Jomon world, which lasted more than ten thousand years, you notice that the plot is oddly quiet. No giant royal tombs, no fortress walls, no great stockpiles of weapons clearly stand out. So did the Jomon have no kings? Was it a gentle society with no ranks, no inequality, no conflict? This question is one of the themes now being debated within archaeology—quietly, but with real heat.

Almost No Traces of War

The grounds for calling Jomon society ‘an age of little conflict’ rest not on romance or wishful thinking, but on the human bones that come out of the earth. Counting skeletons that were wounded by weapons, or buried with an arrowhead still lodged in them—so-called injured skeletons—and examining their proportion is one way archaeology approaches the question of violence.

In recent years, research groups at several universities carefully tallied the data on injured skeletons across the Jomon period. According to their work, more than twenty-five hundred skeletons were examined, and only a couple of dozen could be clearly judged as bearing wounds from violence. The death rate from violence derived from this came to roughly 1.8 percent. Compared with prehistoric and ethnographic societies around the world, this is reported to be a strikingly low level.

Of course, this does not mean there was never any killing among the Jomon people. Individuals have been found with traces of sharp blows to the skull, and so violence itself did exist. But such cases are few, and they are hard to tie to evidence of ‘groups fighting in an organized way,’ such as fortress walls or great quantities of weapons. That is why many researchers cautiously position the violence in Jomon as closer to personal quarrels or duels than to organized warfare. At the very least, it clearly looked different from the scenes of battle that appear in later ages.

Were There ‘Kings’? The Debate Over Wealth and Inequality

Spoken of alongside the scarcity of war is the ‘equality’ of Jomon society. A powerful king or chief monopolizing great wealth and ruling over others—such a clearly stratified picture has long been said to be hard to read out of Jomon graves and settlements. A situation in which one giant tomb, monopolizing lavish grave goods, stands head and shoulders above the rest is typically not often seen.

For a long time, Japanese archaeology explained that the accumulation of wealth, inequality, and war began in earnest with the Yayoi period, when wet-rice farming spread. The Jomon, sharing game and nuts, were relatively equal; the Yayoi, competing for rice and land, gave rise to hierarchy and conflict—a clear and compelling sketch. But in recent years, voices have grown stronger arguing that this contrast may not be quite so simple. To suppose that everyone who went hunting or fishing worked exactly the same amount and received exactly the same share may, in fact, be unnatural. It is entirely possible that a skilled hunter, or a person who held the settlement together, obtained more food or finer goods. Indeed, in certain regions and periods, graves accompanied by more elaborate ornaments than others, and figures hinting at special roles, have been noted. Rather than a perfectly uniform society, it may be closer to reality to see gentle differences and a bias of roles as having existed.

Why Could It Stay Peaceful for So Long?

Supposing that Jomon was a society with less conflict than later ages, where did the reason lie? There is no certain answer, but several views have been offered.

One is that the foundation of life rested not on intensive farming like rice cultivation, but on diverse food sources—hunting, gathering, and fishing. If there were no vast paddies to defend and no monopolizable mountains of harvest, then the motive to fight on a large scale over land or stores is less likely to arise—such an explanation is often given. The very way of life, in which wealth was hard to pile up in one place, may have softened hierarchy and conflict, the reasoning goes.

Still, here too caution against idealizing is needed. Even if there was little conflict, it does not mean Jomon life was easy. Poor nut harvests and cooling climates are said to have driven people into hunger, and average lifespans are thought to have been incomparably shorter than today. Nature was a partner that gave both abundance and harshness. That there was little ‘war over plunder’ and that it was ‘a gentle, contented paradise’ need to be considered separately.

Even so, to eyes accustomed to telling history through weapons and walls, the existence of a society that lasted more than ten thousand years with few royal names and few dates of great battles throws up a fresh question. Is it possible for people to keep one way of life over a long span while avoiding large-scale conflict? Jomon stands, even now, at the center of researchers’ debates as one example—by no means a simple one—of an answer to that question. And those islands were not isolated and silent; they were also bound to one another by invisible threads that crossed sea and mountain.