crucial elements of Japanese geography has been the size of the Korea Strait (known in Japan as the Tsushima Strait, so named for the island in its middle) that separates it from mainland Asia. With a width of 200 kilometers (124.5 miles) at its narrowest point, this body of water arguably keeps Japan at a perfect “Goldilocks” distance—not so far as to make it impossible to trade and communicate, but far enough to prevent most large-scale military operations. The crossing was safe enough for a premodern ship that could afford to wait out storms in a safe harbor, but famously deadly to an armada of hostile enemies with no safe port.
Humans first arrived before the strait was formed. At the end of the last Ice Age, southern Japan was linked to Korea first by a land bridge and then, for some time, by a strait narrow enough to make the opposite shore tantalizingly visible. In the far north, Japan was linked to Siberia by a similar land bridge that connected Hokkaidō to Sakhalin and the Russian coast. To the south, the Ryūkyū Islands were larger, and mostly within sight of each other, all the way from proto-Taiwan to the edges of the Japanese mainland. Settlers hence approached the region from both north and south.
Somewhere off the Japanese coast, no doubt, there are multiple archaeological sites that were once home to these forgotten peoples, now drowned beneath the waters that rose at the end of the Ice Age. Unfortunately, these areas also formed much of the flat plains that afforded hunting opportunities for big game: the grasslands where the ancient Jōmon people once hunted bison, for example, are now beneath the sea.
Their descendants wandered inland, into the river valleys and the coasts. In the far north of Honshū, Aomori Bay offered a vast foraging area for crustaceans, fish, and seaweed. In the south, the straits between the islands of Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū formed an idyllic Inland Sea, protected from storms but rich in marine life. The currents forced through these passages sometimes created treacherous whirlpools—in Japanese, naruto—but otherwise the Inland Sea was, and still remains, a beautiful patch of gentle water, scattered with green islands.
This protected waterway has had a powerful influence on the development of the Japanese state, encouraging marine commerce and transport links. Where there are fishermen there are fishing boats, and where there are boats there are easy links to transport produce and goods to the next island and across the horizon.
Excavations of ancient graves find bodies dusted with red ochre (an adornment mentioned in some Chinese sources), and an aristocratic class of women wearing single-piece shell bracelets too tight to be removed and too delicate to allow for the possibility of manual labor. Whoever these women were, they presumably donned their bracelets in childhood and left them on permanently thereafter, suggesting a class of priestesses or shamans who were not expected to hunt or gather.
Many of the adult bodies seem to have had certain teeth removed—four lower incisors and two lower canines, possibly at the time of marriage or at several ritual occasions in maturity. Others had forked incisions in their teeth, seemingly filed in particular patterns to denote a tribal association or relationship.
Ceramics remain one of the main means of examining a prehistoric society; although complete artifacts rarely survive, their shards are remarkably hard-wearing. The early Japanese left astonishingly beautiful pots and figurines marked with rope-like patterns or multiple string-like rows of rolled clay. In 1877, the archaeologist Edward Morse described his findings of such prehistoric Japanese pottery as “cord-marked”—translated into Japanese as “Jōmon,” this became the standard term use for the dominant culture of the Japanese islands from the end of the last Ice Age until around 300 BCE.
These pots may have flourished among the Jōmon people because of the climate, as the cooler conditions of the Younger Dryas of around 10,000 BCE forced them to store large quantities of acorns, nuts, and berries for winter food. By the later Jōmon period, there is evidence of trade between isolated communities. Commodities traveled far from their place of origin, at first in long, thin dugout canoes—examples have been found that were three meters (10 feet) long and barely half a meter (1.5 feet) wide. A fashion for chunky jade beads spread across the north, while multiple tribes began using obsidian arrowheads and scrapers, gaining the sharp volcanic glass from three main sites in the south, central, and northern regions. Tribes far inland were found to have dined occasionally on swordfish. The remains of bears have also been found in Jōmon sites—Jōmon archers are believed to have used arrows poisoned with aconite to bring down larger prey.
Today’s Japanese archaeologists twitch at the term “hunter-gatherer.” They don’t like the implication of rootless foraging that the phrase inevitably evokes, arguing instead that even the early Jōmon appear to have been far more organized. Living in a realm of relative abundance, they enjoyed a semi-sedentary existence in villages, but headed outward on “collecting” expeditions in multiple directions, depending on the time of year and the food that was in season. These goods were then stored in their distinctive pots. The Jōmon people appear to have undertaken limited horticulture, but nothing so serious or widespread as to be called farming.
It is said that the First Emperor of China had heard stories of legendary isles of the immortals found somewhere to the east of his realm. According to several courtiers and self-appointed experts, the secret of eternal life was waiting somewhere in that direction. However, only qualified wizards, pure youths, and maidens could approach these hallowed lands.
Determined to grab the elixir of eternal life for himself, the First Emperor ordered the oddest of colonial enterprises—a flotilla crewed by a thousand virgins, which sailed away from the Chinese coast sometime around 212 BCE. They were turned back by sea monsters—or so claimed their untrustworthy leader, Xufu. When the First Emperor eventually heard this excuse, he sailed for a while along the Chinese coast, standing at the prow of his ship with a crossbow, presumably hoping to harpoon any unlucky whales. Xufu’s virgin fleet set off again two years later, sailing into the sunrise, never to be seen again.
There is no direct evidence that the sailors of the virgin fleet—if it even ever existed—reached Japan. If they did, they would have cut a strange dash amid the tribes of the later Jōmon period. But the story of the First Emperor’s venture has often excited Asian novelists and poets, who have wondered if one of the many tribes that made up ancient Japan was really a Chinese colony.
Sometime after the era of the First Emperor, the gazetteer known as The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing) made what may have been the first written reference to the land of Wa, somewhere out in the northeastern sea beyond what is now known as Korea. This claim sits amid a bunch of “here-be-dragons”-type suppositions, including giant crabs, a salamander with a human face, and a tribe of mer-people that apparently lived in the ocean nearby. However, the term Wa would come to be used to refer to the Japanese islands for the next few centuries.
There has been much speculation about the origins of this name, including some fanciful ideas: that it was a mistranslation of Japanese attempts to say “our country” (wa ga kuni); that it is a mangling of the name of Duke Ngwa, a legendary chieftain sent from what is now the Shanghai region to colonize the seas; or that it is perhaps intended to mean “vassal.” However, the most likely interpretation is that the Chinese intended “Wa” to mean the land of “dwarves”—a reference to the small stature of the indigenous people, particularly from the lofty perspective of their newly arrived rulers.
Beyond the archaeological record, our understanding of the Japanese past largely drops out of the sky in the early 700s CE, when courtiers collaborated on two documents designed to replace lost archives—the Kojiki (Account of Ancient Matters), and the Nihongi or Nihon-shoki (Chronicles of Japan). There were earlier histories, but they were burned during a palace coup, and these more recent books were attempts to both reconstruct the lost information and redact the parts of it that did not serve the rulers’ agenda. We deal with their annalistic materials—lists of rulers, wars, and real-world events—in the next chapter, but their accounts of Japan’s mythical
