The Warrior: Jōmon period

The Jōmon period (縄文時代 Jōmon jidai) is the time in Japanese prehistory from about 14,000 BC to 300 BCE.

The term jōmon means "cord-patterned" in Japanese. This refers to the pottery style characteristic of the Jōmon culture, and which has markings made using sticks with cords wrapped around them. Recent Y-DNA haplotype testing has found that the Jōmon are the genetic ancestors of the Ainu and partly of modern Japanese people.

Incipient and initial Jōmon (8,000 – 4000 BCE)

The Japanese are considered today to be descended from a mixture of the ancient hunter-gatherer Jōmon culture and the later rice agriculture Yayoi culture. These two major ancestral groups came to Japan over different routes at different times. The Jōmon ancestors were an Ice Age culture that may have come to the Northern and Southern Japanese archipelago around 20,000 BCE, when there was an ice bridge connecting Siberia and Northern Japan. The Yayoi people are thought to have arrived about 1000 BCE from the Korean peninsula and Asian mainland.

Early pottery


Incipient Jōmon Pottery (14,000–8000 BCE)
Tokyo National Museum, Japan.

According to archaeological evidence, the Jōmon people created some of the oldest known pottery vessels in the world, known as Jōmon Pottery, dated to the 14th millennium BCE. The antiquity of this pottery was first identified after the Second World War, through radiocarbon dating methods.

Archaeologist Junko Habu claims that "The majority of Japanese scholars believed, and still believe, that pottery production was first invented in mainland Asia and subsequently introduced into the Japanese archipelago," and explains that "A series of excavations in the Amur River Basin in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that pottery in this region may be as old as, if not older than, Fukui Cave pottery"

The Jōmon era pottery was called "Jōmon doki", the first word meaning "rope pattern" and indicating the decoration on most Jōmon earthenware that resembles designs made by rope. The pots were mostly used to eat out of or store food. The Jōmon people also made clay figures and vessels decorated with patterns of a growing sophistication made by impressing the wet clay with braided or unbraided cord and sticks.

Neolithic traits

The manufacturing of pottery typically implies some form of sedentary life due to the fact that pottery is highly breakable and thus generally useless to hunter-gatherers who are constantly on the move. The Jōmon people were therefore probably some of the earliest sedentary or at least semi-sedentary people in the world. They used chipped stone tools, ground stone tools, traps, and bows, and were probably semi-sedentary hunters-gatherers and skillful coastal and deep-water fishermen. They practiced a rudimentary form of agriculture and lived in caves and later in groups of either shallow pit dwellings or above-ground houses, leaving rich middens for modern archaeological study.

Population expansion

This semi-sedentary culture led to important population increases, so that the Jōmon exhibit some of the highest densities known for foraging populations. Genetic mapping studies by Cavalli-Sforza have shown a pattern of genetic expansion from the area of the Sea of Japan towards the rest of eastern Asia. This appears as the third most important genetic movement in Eastern Asia (after the "Great expansion" from the African continent, and a second expansion from the area of Northern Siberia), which suggests geographical expansion during the early Jōmon period. These studies also suggest that the Jōmon demographic expansion may have reached America along a path following the Pacific coast.