Jomon Roots of Japanese Culture and Religious Beliefs

What are the origins of the Japanese people, and how far back can we trace the roots of Japanese culture?  

From the Meiji Restoration until the end of the Pacific War, great stress was placed on the supposed homogeneity of the Japanese. However, suffice it to say that the genetic makeup of the Japanese is complex, with significant regional differences.

No one knows for sure when the first human beings reached Japan. Scientists believe it may have been as long as 40,000 years ago during the Paleolithic Period. The oldest human remains found to date in Japan were recovered from the Shiraho-Saonetabaru Cave on Ishigaki Island in Okinawa Prefecture. One nearly complete skeleton found there is believed to be around 27,000 years old. 

DNA research has made great strides in recent years, but it is still unclear whether the Paleolithic remains found throughout the Ryukyu Islands were direct ancestors of today's Japanese. The last ice age in Japan ended around 12.000 years ago. At the time, Japan was connected to the Asian mainland. 

Where the Japanese Came From

There was undoubtedly some ice age migration from the continent into Kyushu, as well as through Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in the north. 

We know considerably more about the Jomon period, which began around 14,000 years ago. Jomon people had facial and body features not found anywhere else and distinct funeral customs. Their era is renowned worldwide for its unique pottery. 

Jomon was followed by the Yayoi culture, which began around 3,000 BCE. It is especially notable for the introduction of wet field rice cultivation into Kyushu. There was considerable migration from the Korean Peninsula and perhaps China during this period. Another smaller wave of immigration appears to have taken place during the Kofun "burial mound culture" (3rd to 7th centuries CE). The Asuka Period (538-710) saw the creation of a centralized state in Japan, which borrowed extensively from the Tang Empire.

In the past, it was assumed that the Yayoi people had pushed the Jomon populations to peripheral areas. That was certainly true for the Ainu indigenous people, who were gradually driven north over many centuries. 

It was likewise assumed that Japanese culture, especially religious practices that came to be known collectively as Shinto, largely developed during the Yayoi period. Some foreign observers, therefore, concluded that Japanese culture is basically an interesting offshoot of Chinese culture. 

But the core Japanese culture may in fact be far older. The Jomon period lasted for roughly 10,000 years. In that time, the Japanese people were largely isolated and developed their culture independently. 

Before the Introduction of Buddhism

Toshio Shimao (1917-1986) was an important postwar novelist. A Catholic convert, he was most famous for his novel Shi no Toge (The Sting of Death), published in 1977. Before that, Shimao was the commander of a unit of 188 men on the island of Kakeromajima in the last year of the Pacific War. They were all on "ready alert" status, waiting to head out on suicide missions aboard Shinyo ("Sea Quake") motorboats. (Each boat carried shaped explosive charges of up to 300 kilograms.) Then, as they waited, the Emperor announced Japan's surrender.

While based in the Nansei Islands, which include Amami Oshima and Okinawa, Shimao became fascinated by Japan's cultural diversity, especially the influence of southern island culture. Therefore, when he was ordered to Kakeromajima, Shimao brought with him a paperback copy of the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters). Many ancient Japanese myths, legends, and oral traditions are preserved in the volume. 

Shimao came to feel that there, in the Amami islands, he was surrounded by a mythical world similar to that of the Kojiki. Society there had not yet been radically transformed by the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism. 

The experience led to the publication of his landmark 1961 essay Yaponeshia no Nekko (The Roots of Yaponeshia). In this literary essay, Shimao found many commonalities between what he believed was the root Japanese culture and cultures of the South Pacific and Indonesia. 

In short, he concluded that Japan's history and culture were more closely connected to the Pacific than the Asian mainland. Shimao thus applied the term Yaponeshia to the Japanese Archipelago as well as this wider area. 

Enduring Jomon Influences

Shimao's idea was not a science-based concept. Nevertheless, his four-page essay outlined a cultural theory that ultimately had enormous influence on many Japanese writers and artists. His theory also influenced various academic fields, especially folklore studies and genetics. It has since been reinterpreted in many different ways. 

Some writers argue that the core culture found in southernmost Japan represents an earlier stage of the culture that eventually developed on Japan's main islands. Others believe it is fundamentally different and not as diluted by influences from mainland Asia.

Like the Jomon people (and the Ainu, who are among their descendants), inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands often tattooed their faces and buried their dead in caves. It should be noted, though, that the Yayoi people did not simply drive out the Jomon people. Instead, there was considerable racial and cultural fusion among the two through a complex process that gave birth to a distinctively Japanese culture. 

The development of Yayoi agricultural society introduced new myths. However, it did not eliminate the substratum passed on from the Jomon period. In fact, the archaeologist Takuro Segawa, a foremost authority on Ainu culture, recently argued in an article titled "Jomon Kami and Thinking which Have Survived into the Modern Era" (Gendai ni Nokoru Jomon no Kamigami to Shiso), that Japanese mythology, as expressed in the Kojiki and local myths, is largely a product of the Jomon world view and practices.

For example, he points to the interplay in what became Shinto between mountain deities and ocean deities and between this world and the takai (otherworld). There is also the belief that mountaintops offer entrance into the world of the kami and ancestors. 

Continuity Into Today's Traditions

Every summer, Kyoto enacts the ritual burning of Daimonji bonfires on hills surrounding the city. These act as beacons to guide the spirits of the ancestors home at the end of the Obon festival. Although this is routinely described as a purely Buddhist tradition, Segawa's explanation makes me wonder if it is not something more besides.

While he was in the Amami Islands, Shimao certainly noted the "spirit paths" or kami michi in many local villages. These were routes that the gods were believed to pass along during festivals. 

There was also a kami michi at the Izumo Taisha shrine, which today remains among the most important of all shrines in Japan. In ancient times, this path led from the ocean to the shinden, the most sacred building at Izumo. Records claim it was built on a towering 96-meter-high platform perched on giant logs, reached by a long stairway. 

Segawa believes this shrine gave concrete expression to the worldview and religious beliefs of Jomon people living near the ocean.

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Author: John Carroll