Formation of the Proto-Japanese People

EAST ASIAN HISTORY: A KOREAN PERSPECTIVE Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. 1 IC-10.S-1.5-0528 Formation of the Proto-Japanese People THE YAYOI WAVE Wontack Hong Professor, Seoul University 1. Jōmon Pottery THE NEOLITHIC JŌMON CULTURE OF AINU AND MALAYO- POLYNESIAN PEOPLE 1 The skeletal remains of The Ainu people from Siberia came by foot to the Hokkaido Ainu share Sakhalin-Hokkaidō area toward the end of the glacial period morphologically close relations and then spread over the whole archipelago, commencing the with northern Mongoloid people. pre-pottery Palaeolithic life. Before the end of the glacial An analysis of mitochondrial period, the Malayo-Polynesian people also came from DNA found no shared types Southeast Asia via the sea route of the Philippines-Taiwan- between the Ainu and Okinawans. Ryūkyū Islands, settling mostly in the Kyūshū area and some of See Hudson (1999: 64-67, 71-72 them moving into the western mainland. and 76-78). Genetic studies show that the Ainu are much closer to northern Mongoloid than to Southeast Asian populations.1 2 Diamond (1998: 11). Many place-names in Hokkaidō and northern main land include the Ainu words, but such Ainu-like names never occur 3 See Imamura (1996: 112). in the southwestern area and Kyūshū.2 It may account for the Ainu and Malayo-Polynesians are contrast in Jōmon pottery traditions between southwestern and not genetically close. northeastern Japan, the boundary being located around the See Nei Masatoshi, “The Origins Nagoya region.3 of Human Populations: Genetic, With the advent of the Neolithic Jōmon period (10,000 – Linguistic, and Archeological 300 BC), people on the Japanese islands began fishing with ” Data, in The Origin and Past of harpoons and fishhooks, hunting and gathering with stones Modern Humans as Viewed from DNA, ed. By Sydney Brenner and and bone implements, and boiling foods in cord-marked pottery. Amazingly enough, the Jōmon people commenced the 2 THE RICE-CULTIVATING CULTURE FROM PYUN-HAN Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. Neolithic era with the simultaneous manufacturing of pottery. 4 Kazuro Hanihara, Singapore: The Jōmon pottery, built by hand and fired at a low World Scientific Publishing, 1995, temperature in an open space, is claimed to have been the pp. 71-91; Omoto Keiichi, Genetic Diversity and the Origins world’s earliest-known earthenware at 10,000 BC. of the Mongoloids, in ibid., pp. 92- Neither the Ainu nor the Malayo-Polynesian people seem 109 and Omoto Keiichi and to have been closely related with the Ye-maek Tungus Saitou Naruya, Genetic Origins of the inhabiting the Korean peninsula in those Neolithic days. Japanese: A Partial Support for the According to Nelson (1993: 107), “each region seems to have Dual Structure Hypothesis, American been basically self-sufficient, with little need to interact.” Journal of Physical Anthropology, 102, 1997, pp. 437-446. THE RICE-CULTIVATING YAYOI CULTURE 4 See Diamond (1998: 5) and Rice, be it aquatic or dry land, does not originate from the Barnes (1993: 27). Japanese islands. In the Neolithic Jōmon period, there was no Agriculture would not reach the primitive variety of wild rice growing. Japanese archipelago for another Circa 300 BC, people from the southern part of the 9,700 years. In the Middle East, Korean peninsula, who had been cultivating rice in paddy fields pottery appeared about 1,000 and using pottery fabricated on potters’ wheels, began to cross years after the invention of the sea to the northern Kyūshū coastal plain.5 They were from farming in 8,000. It is usually the Three Han states (Ma-han, Chin-han and Pyon-han), but sedentary societies that own mostly from the Kaya (Karak) area of Pyon-han. In due pottery. The Japanese islands were, course, they started to move into the western extremity of however, so rich in food resources Honshū and then kept moving east and north. They joined the that even hunter-gatherers could Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian people on the Japanese settle down and make pottery; the archipelago to commence the 600-year Yayoi period (300 BC – Japanese forests were abundant in 300 AD). An ethnic bridge was at last formed between the edible nuts, and the rivers and Korean peninsula and the Japanese islands.6 surrounding seas were teeming The beginning of agriculture in the Japanese islands was with fish, shellfish and seaweeds. much later than that in mainland China or Korea proper and, They were sedentary, rather than consequently, a relatively advanced form of agriculture arrived mobile, hunter-gatherers. rather suddenly in the Neolithic Japanese islands. The rice- cultivating Yayoi culture, including the Korean-style pit- 5 See Barnes (1993: 170). dwelling and storage pits, gradually spread over the mainland. Yayoi pottery was manufactured The tradition of Jōmon culture, however, persisted until fairly by shaping fine clay on a revolving late, especially in eastern and northern Japan. According to wheel and then baking it at a Imamura (1996: 149), chipped stone tools of the Yayoi period relatively high temperature. It were undoubtedly a continuation of the Jōmon stone tool carries a more refined look, tinged tradition, “because the production of chipped stone tools had with reddish brown or yellowish become extinct in China and Korea by the beginning of the white. Yayoi period.” 6 The earliest Yayoi pottery, including the narrow-necked See Hudson (1999: 59-81). NO YAYOI IRON SMELTING SITES DISCOVERED Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. 3 7 Imamura (1996: 164-5) points storage jars, wide-mouthed cooking pots and pedestalled out the quantity of the Yayoi dishes, was excavated in northern Kyūshū together with the pottery discovered at the southern Final Jōmon pottery, and its appearance reveals some influence extremity of the Korean of the latter. Much of the latter-day Yayoi pottery is, however, peninsula: “At one Korean site, virtually indistinguishable from the plain red-burnished Korean Neokdo, Yayoi pottery accounted Mumun pottery.7 for 8 percent of all the pottery [… The bronze and iron were introduced to the Japanese and] at the Yesoeng site (Pusan islands at the same time with agriculture.8 Quite a few bronze City) as much as 94 per cent of all daggers, halberds, mirrors and bells of the Yayoi period were pottery was Yayoi.” excavated. Not only the bronze mirrors and bells, but also the bronze daggers and halberds seem to have been mostly religious ceremonial objects rather than functional weapons. According to Imamura (1996: 171), “weapons were transformed from the thick and narrow original forms into thin and wide forms at the expense of their actual functionality.” Weapons were too thin to have been functional. Although bronze artifacts have been discovered in sizable quantities, there is a scarcity of iron tools found in Yayoi sites. Yayoi people made hand-axes by grinding stones, and cut trees with the same stone axes. They also manufactured wooden farming tools such as plows, hoes, knives and shovels, as well as wooden instruments such as vessels, shoes and mortars. Virtually all of the Yayoi farming tools that have been excavated were made of wood, but it is very likely that iron instruments were used for the production of such wooden tools. By 475-221 BC, the Han Chinese were already mass producing iron artifacts, using huge blast furnaces and casting iron. The inhabitants of the Korean peninsula, however, seem to have smelted iron ore in small bloomeries and done smith work on anvils just like the nomadic Scythians. According to Imamura (1996: 169), “as of yet there has been no positive discovery of Yayoi iron smelting sites that would provide 2. Yayoi pottery excavated from the Fukuoka Area evidence of the domestic production of raw iron” in the Japanese islands. 8 The raw materials for bronze According to the Dongyi-zhuan, the Pyon-han people casting were brought from the supplied iron ores to the Wa people (i.e., to the Kaya cousins Korean peninsula, but the who had crossed over the sea to settle in Kyūshū). It further magnitude was small and the records that the transactions in the Pyon-han (Kaya) markets were conducted using iron ore (bars) as the medium of 4 PROTO-JAPANESE PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. exchange, just like coins were used in the Chinese markets. In source of supply was rather modern Japanese, “kane” means iron ore as well as money.9 A precarious. Bronze was called few iron smelting sites were indeed discovered in the southern “Kara kane,” implying “Korean Korea. metal.” Kojiki and Nihongi refer The Yayoi people did not cut the lower part of the rice to Korea as Kara, likely because stalk with a sickle, but cut the ear of rice with a semicircular the first arrivals from the Korean stone knife with a string running through a small hole. Rice peninsula were mostly the Kaya harvesting with ear-cropping stone knives must have taken (Karak) people. In 708, a copper enormous time and effort. The level of rice-cultivating mine was for the first time technology of the Yayoi farmers must have reflected that of discovered in the Musashi area, the contemporary southern peninsular rice farmers. commencing the so-called Wa-dō The Yayoi culture seems to have been the product of a era on the Japanese islands. gradual fusion (among the people from the Korean peninsula, Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian) rather than the product of war 9 三國志魏書東夷傳弁辰… and conquest. 國出鐵韓濊倭皆從取之諸市買皆用鐵如中國用錢 PROTO-JAPANESE PEOPLE AND PROTO-JAPANESE LANGUAGE By the 1990s, modern biological anthropology has 10 Horai and Omoto (1998) shattered the transformation theories whereby Jōmon Ono (1962: 21) has contended populations evolved into the Yayoi and then modern Japanese.

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