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

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

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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

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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. that the investigation of blood Unger (2001: 95) notes that “a large and growing mass of types does “not permit the data from physical anthropology and molecular genetics” assumption that migrants from shows that “the Jōmon, Ainu, and Ryukyu populations were South Korea whose influence was genetically remote from the population of the Yayoi-period made manifest in Yayoi culture and present-day main-island Japan.” According to Imamura came in any great numbers or (1996: 209), “from skeletal morphology, the similarity of the exterminated the aboriginal past Jōmon population to the present Ainu and to the population.” A modest number of Ryukyuans is closer than to the mainland Japanese. The rice farmers from Kaya could mainland Japanese are more similar to the peoples on the simply have reproduced much Northeast Asian continent.” Japanese scholars prefer to use the more rapidly than the Jōmon expression “Northeast Asian continent” in place of “Korean hunter-gatherers, eventually peninsula” whenever possible. Phylogenetic analysis revealed greatly outnumbering them. the closest genetic affinity between the mainland Japanese and According to Hudson (1999: 81), Koreans, suggesting that about 65 percent of the gene pool of although the Jōmon people were the former was derived from the latter gene flow.10 not totally replaced by the Jōmon and Yayoi skeletons are readily distinguishable.11 incoming Yayoi migrants from the According to Barnes (1993: 171, 176), “physical Korean peninsula, their genetic anthropological studies of modern Japanese show that contribution to the later Japanese continental effects on skeletal genetics rapidly diminish as one was probably less than one travels eastwards from Kyūshū – except for the Kinai region, quarter. THE TIMING OF YAYOI WAVE Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. 5

11 Barnes notes that Yayoi which received many peninsular immigrants directly in the fifth excavations in western Japan have century AD.” revealed two distinct skeletal types, Unger (2001: 81, 96) states that: “Proto-Japanese was i.e., the indigenous Jōmon skeletal not spoken in Japan during the Jōmon period,” “proto-Korean- genotype and the Korean skeletal type. Jōmon-type people were Japanese accompanied the introduction of Yayoi techniques,” shorter with longer forearms, and “the earliest plausible date for a Tungusic or, more lower legs, wider-faces, and precisely, a Marco-Tungusic language in Japan is therefore the pronounced facial topography, start of the Yayoi period.” while the people from the Korean The proto-type of the Japanese race sharing the proto- peninsula were taller, gracile and Japanese language was formed during the Yayoi period, going long-faced with close-set eyes and through a relatively peaceful process of genetic mixture over an flat browridges and noses. 12 See also Hudson (1999: 68) extended period of time. Both Korean and Japanese belong to the Macro-Tungusic branch of Altaic language, but lexically 12 Janhunen (1996: 201, 210) notes and phonologically, the Japanese language seems to have been that “the Altaicization of Japanic heavily influenced by the languages of Ainu and Malayo- may well have been induced by Polynesian. the structural impact of some early form of Koreanic.” See also Horai TIMING OF “YAYOI WAVE”: WHY DID THEY MOVE CA. 300 BC? and Omoto (1998: 40-42), and The people in the Korean peninsula began cultivating Hudson (1999: 59-81). millet in the north and rice in the south before 2,000 BC. They started using bronze some time between 1,500-1,000 BC, and 13 See K W. B, ed., “Climate iron around 400 BC. These facts prompt Diamond (1998: 7) to Variations and Change,” The New raise another question. With all these developments going on Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: for thousands of years just across the Korea Strait, doesn’t it Encyclopedia Britannica, 1986), seem astonishing that the Japanese islands were still occupied Vol. 16, p. 534; P. A. Mayewski by stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers? How did the Jomon and F. White, The Ice Chronicles: the culture survive so long? Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Hanover: University Press On a clear day, one can see Tsu-shima island with the of New England, 2002), p. 121; naked eye from the Pusan area, a southeastern corner of the and H. H. Lamb, Climate, History Korean peninsula. From the southern part of Tsu-shima, one and the Modern World (London: can in turn clearly see Iki island, only a short distance from Routledge, 1995), p. 150. Kyūshū. People, it is said, are naturally lazy like most animals, and this explains why the peninsular people simply watched the 14 The commencement of glacial scene over the horizon. What, however, made them stop advance also coincided with the watching around 300 BC and decide to cross the sea? fall of the well-irrigated Persian empire (525-330 BC), followed by There occurred a Little Ice Age ca. 400 BC, with the disintegration of the cooler conditions persisting until 300 AD.13 The sudden ephemeral empire of Alexander commencement of a glacial advance coincided with the Warring the Great (336-323 BC) in the States period (403-221 BC) in mainland China and the rise of western world. nomadic Xiong-nu, as manifested by the building of the first wall

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by Han Chinese (in 356 BC), in the eastern world, and the great Celtic migrations in the western world. In 390 BC, the fierce Celtic warriors known as Gauls had besieged Rome itself.14 According to the Dongyi-zhuan, after the disintegration of the Eastern Zhou dynasty in 403 BC, the hitherto vassal state (Old) Yan claimed kingship, and then the ruler of (Old) Chosun also declared himself king, and these two states started warring with one another. The armed conflicts between the Yan and Chosun peaked circa 300 BC. The advent of global cooling and drying seems to have been associated with the Malthusian warfare, giving ascendancy to the nomadic force over the suddenly disrupted sedentary empire. Such a sudden change in climate may also have prompted the inhabitants in the eastern extremity of the Eurasian continent at the southern shore of the Korean peninsula to cross the Korea Strait in search of warmer and moister land. Human populations tend to multiply rapidly when living conditions become favorable. Even with a primitive technique of cultivating rice on or near swampy fields relying on rainfall, populations can double with each new generation. More than a millennium after starting rice cultivation in the southern peninsula, the population may have reached a sort of saturation density. A sudden drying and cooling at this juncture would surely destroy the ecological balance and communal equilibrium. The rainfall abruptly fell below the level needed to sustain the primitive rice-farming technique, and this sudden change forced those rice farmers to search for new land, a more enticing endeavor than urgently and therefore rapidly improvising an innovation in agricultural technology. And here is the answer to the timing of the peninsular people’s decision to cross the sea. A hazy but familiar image of islands on the horizon in the south would likely have recalled to the mind of 3. Kaya Tombs on hilltops those desperate rice farmers, collectively, a warmer and wet at Ji-san-dong, Ko-ryeong dreamland. The shock of draught and cooling made them see of the Tomb Period and pay attention to what had been before their very eyes for a long time. According to Barnes (1993: 171, 176), the transition from Jōmon to Yayoi was an entire restructuring of the material economy on the Japanese islands, and “North Kyūshū THE EARLY TOMB CULTURE Vol. 2. No. 8. 2005. 5. 28. 7

15 See Egami (1992: 11). acted a an incubator for the formation of the Yayoi culture.” In the early period tombs, one usually finds various symbolic and YAYOI CULTURE AND THE EARLY TOMB CULTURE shamanistic ceremonial The 600-year Yayoi period was followed by the Tomb instruments as well as bronze period (circa 300-650 or 700). The culture of the Early Tomb mirrors, bronze arrow heads, Period (circa 300-375) retained many elements of Yayoi origin, bronze tube-like ornaments, jade such as high esteem for bronze swords, mirrors, and jewels as bracelets, stone replicas of ritual objects rather than for practical utility. 15 Egami (1964) bracelets, stone engravings, stone contends that there is chronological continuity between the bangles, hoe-shaped stones, stone later Yayoi culture and the early tomb culture, and that the whorls, comma-shaped jade beads, change which took place can be understood as a result of the and bronze knives. increasing social stratification in the late Yayoi period and the associated social evolution. 16 16 During the 600-year Yayoi The tombs of the early period were relatively small. period, society became in due However, since a tomb was usually located on top of a natural course stratified into elite and hill or along a ridge overlooking paddy fields, a large imposing commoner classes. In the Early tomb could be constructed with a relatively small labor force. Tomb Period, although there People usually dug a hole on top of a hill, placed a wooden appeared a more marked social coffin in the hole, surrounded the coffin with stones, and then stratification as attested by the capped the top with stone panels. large tomb mounds, those buried Tombs of the late period (circa 375-650 or 700), however, in tombs were still the relatively were usually on level plains, enormous in size, and either in a peaceful and religious Yayoi keyhole shape or round shape. They put grave-goods such as people. The formation of a horse-trappings, iron weapons, gold crowns, jade or gilt-bronze unified state had to wait until the earrings, belt buckles, iron farming tools, and sue pottery in and subsequent Late Tomb Period. around the coffin. The most important fact may be the sudden appearance of horse bones and various artifacts related to horses.

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