Rice Arrives — The End of Jomon and What Did Not Disappear

Last time, we saw obsidian and jade crossing back and forth across the archipelago, and watched how the Jomon world was tied together by invisible threads. Goods carried over seas and over mountains, people loosely connected to one another — ten thousand years of it. Yet that long, circulating way of life did not, in the end, go on forever.

From the direction of the mainland, a single plant arrived. Planted in flooded paddies, it brought a great harvest in autumn — rice. This was not merely a matter of one new food being added. What to eat, where to live, how to work, with whom to quarrel: rice gradually rewrote the very foundations of daily life. In this chapter, we trace the shift from Jomon to Yayoi, within what is known, from both the side of rupture and the side of continuity.

A new technology called wet-rice farming

Rice itself is thought to have reached the archipelago before the Yayoi period began. In the period corresponding to the later and final phases of the Jomon era, it is widely held that rice had already been brought from the mainland and that cultivation was being attempted in a limited form. What greatly changed life, however, was not rice itself so much as the systematic technology of growing it in quantity — wet-rice farming.

Wet-rice farming arrived as, so to speak, a single package: the whole set of steps, tools, and procedures by which one levels the land, draws in water, floods the paddies, plants the seedlings, and reaps in autumn. As for who carried it, people who had crossed the sea from the direction of the mainland and the Korean Peninsula — the so-called immigrants — are thought to have been deeply involved, and there are several views on the route of transmission, including one from the Yangtze basin and one by way of the southern Korean Peninsula. This technology, which reached northern Kyushu, eventually spread eastward.

What deserves caution is that the arrival of rice farming did not mean the people across the archipelago all transformed into farmers at once. The timing of accepting rice farming differed greatly by region, and in lands such as Tohoku and Hokkaido, a life centered on hunting, gathering, and fishing continued for a long time afterward. The new technology spread like a wave — but slowly.

More people, and the boundaries that were born

One of the greatest changes brought by wet-rice farming is thought to have been population. Rice yields many calories from a given piece of land, and it can be stored for a long time. As stably stored food increased, the number of people who could be supported grew as well. Estimates in research vary widely, but it is thought that over the course of the Yayoi period the population of the archipelago increased considerably compared with the Jomon era.

Yet that things could be stored also meant that ‘those who have’ and ‘those who have not’ could come into being. Rice, paddies, and the labor that worked them could become someone’s possession. And where there is wealth that can be hoarded, the seeds of conflict over it are also born. In fact, from Yayoi-period sites there come to be found traces of conflict that had not been so conspicuous before: moated settlements ringed with ditches, human bones buried still pierced with arrowheads, and tools thought to have been used as weapons.

The Jomon world we saw in earlier chapters, where traces of warfare are said to have been relatively few. That relative calm seems to have wavered along with rice farming. Still, one would want to be careful about reducing this simply to ‘peaceful Jomon’ versus ‘warring Yayoi.’ Jomon was not without conflict, and Yayoi had its calm regions and times as well. What changed was less the presence or absence of conflict than that the conditions under which conflict more easily arises — stores, boundaries, and disparity — began to grow within society.

Did they disappear, or did they continue?

Where, then, did the Jomon people go? It was once told as if people who brought rice farming came and replaced the people who had been there from the start. In recent years, however, a somewhat more complex picture has been drawn.

In anthropology, the ‘dual structure model’ — in which people who migrated from the direction of the mainland from the Yayoi into the Kofun period joined the lineage of the Jomon people originally on the archipelago, the two mixing to lead into the people of the archipelago today — has long served as the ground for discussion. In recent years, genome analysis that reads DNA from ancient human bones has advanced, and it is gradually being clarified that the origins of the migrant peoples, and the degree of their mixing with people of Jomon lineage, differed by region. The research is still ongoing and interpretations have their range, but understanding is deepening in the direction that, at least, it does not seem to be the simple story that ‘the Jomon people were entirely replaced.’

And so the circulating society of Jomon, which had lasted some ten thousand years, slowly melted into the new age that came with rice. It was neither defeat nor extinction, but perhaps an inheritance that had changed its shape. We stand at the end of this long story. Yet an end is also the beginning of a question. What, after all, does this circulating way of life, which lasted ten thousand years, ask of us who live now? In the final chapter, I would like to look at that question as modestly as I can, yet head-on.