Can We Learn from Jomon? — A Question Ten Thousand Years Old

Last time, we saw out the changes that rice brought, and traced how the circulating society of Jomon, which had lasted some ten thousand years, melted into a new age. Pottery, settlement, a life that did not take by force, the Sannai-Maruyama settlement, the circulation of the shell mounds, the prayer of the clay figurines, the scarcity of conflict, trade across the archipelago — everything we have seen in this series converges on a single question. Why did this way of life last ten thousand years? And what does it teach us?

In the final chapter, I would like to handle that question as carefully as I can. There are surely things we can learn from Jomon. Yet when we peer into the past, we often see only what we wish to see. So this chapter is not a chapter for producing an answer. It is a chapter for receiving the question as a question.

Why Jomon, why now

In recent years, interest in Jomon has quietly risen. Exhibitions featuring clay figurines and flame-style pottery have drawn many visitors, and, mainly among the younger generation, magazines and events with Jomon motifs have appeared. In 2021, the ‘Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan’ were inscribed as a World Cultural Heritage site, and as a settled society from before the start of agriculture, they drew attention from around the world as well. This is the so-called ‘Jomon boom.’

Why is this boom occurring? A view often voiced is that it may be the flip side of a vague weariness and unease toward modern society. We who keep chasing efficiency and growth, who feel as if we are always being pursued by something, may be projecting a kind of longing and ease onto a way of life said to have lasted ten thousand years without great war or upheaval — so some point out. A life that coexists with nature and circulates without taking surely resonates well with the ideal of sustainability so frequently spoken of in recent years.

Interest in Jomon is, while being interest in the past itself, also a question to ourselves about how we wish to live now.

Not idealizing

That is precisely why, at the end, I would like to confirm once more the attitude this series has repeated. It is that we should not idealize Jomon too much.

The stability said to have lasted ten thousand years is indeed astonishing. Yet that life had its shadows as well. The average lifespan is thought to have been far shorter than now, and infant deaths are thought to have been many. Climatic change and poor harvests must at times have driven settlements toward famine. The wearing of teeth and the marks left on bones tell of how hard it was to survive within harsh nature. Nor was conflict entirely absent. Behind the attractive words ‘not taking, circulating,’ such harshness, unmistakably, existed.

This is not to say that, because there were shadows, there is nothing to learn from Jomon. What matters is to gaze at both as they are — neither extracting and adorning only the light, nor lining up and discarding only the shadow. A way of life that was no paradise nonetheless lasted ten thousand years. The weight of that fact, it seems to me, comes into clearer view precisely when we stop beautifying.

If there is something to receive, what is it

Even so, if there is something we can receive from Jomon, it may not be a concrete ‘correct answer.’ We cannot apply their way of life directly to today’s society, and we ought not try. We have no choice but to live our own age with our own hands.

If there is something to receive, it may rather be the question itself. Is having much the only richness? Hoarding, and circulating. Taking, and sharing. Do we rule nature, or place ourselves within its cycle? The life that the Jomon people, as a result, carried on over ten thousand years, sets these questions before us not as answers but in the form of questions.

Here is one thing at which I would like to pause. We tend to speak of ‘the Jomon people thought this way,’ but almost no means of knowing their inner lives directly remains. They had no writing and did not record their lives in their own words. What remains is shards of pottery, the traces of dwellings, bones returned to the earth, and the shells of food piled up in shell mounds. Much of what we call ‘the Jomon heart’ is no more than an interpretation that we of later ages have tried — carefully, at times boldly — to read from such mute things.

Seen this way, to learn about Jomon may be, rather than to obtain an answer, a practice in setting aside our own measuring stick for a moment. Values we now take for granted — growth, efficiency, possession — are, within the long history of humankind, no more than one quite recent way of being. The fact that there was another way of life that lasted ten thousand years relativizes our ‘taken for granted,’ just a little.

I cannot think that the Jomon people regarded their own lives as ‘sustainable.’ They were surely just living one day to the next, turning with the seasons before them, in time with the rhythms of sea and mountain and forest. As a result, it lasted ten thousand years. That we now dig up the traces of that life, which lasted long without intent, and receive its questions — that very fact may itself be a small circulation across time.

Thank you for accompanying this long journey of all ten chapters this far. Before a span of time like ten thousand years, an answer is always provisional. What this series could hold out, too, was not a firm conclusion but only a few facts and a few questions. Yet if you carry just a little of those questions home with you, there is no greater joy than this. With heartfelt gratitude that you lent an ear, for a while, to the ten-thousand-year silence sleeping beneath the earth, I lay down my pen.

【The Wisdom of Jomon: A Sustainable Society That Lasted Ten Millennia — End】