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 past most likely reflect distant and garbled retellings of the beliefs of the earliest inhabitants.
“Thus,” wrote the compilers of the Kojiki, “though the world’s beginnings are far-off and distant, early sages speak of an age where spirits were born and people first established.”
In the beginning, they say, there was formless chaos, from which the two opposing principles, Heaven and Earth, separated. Some unexplained interaction of these primordial forces created the first gods. There is a reed-like line between them, implied by the rotation of the Pole Star about its axis, and from this line came shadowy early super-beings. From them, somehow, comes a brother-sister pairing of the gods Izanagi (the Beckoner) and Izanami (the Beckoness). Standing on the bridge between Heaven and Earth, they churn the waters of the sea with the tip of their jewelled spear. The first islands form from the sacred waters that drop from the tip, and the couple descends to live there.
Very quickly, they realize that their bodies are different, and seek to cancel out these differences by sleeping together. They arrange a marriage ceremony in which they approach each other in a circle around the pillar of heaven (central roof-posts being a feature of Yayoi-period architecture) and greet each other.
Their first two children are deformed and disowned. They burn bones to attract the advice of their divine ancestors, and are told that Izanami has botched the ceremony by speaking first—something a woman should never do. They restage the ritual, this time with Izanagi speaking first, and the happy couple’s union produces a set of islands, seemingly a prehistoric rundown of Kyūshū and its environs, the Inland Sea and the lower part of Honshū. In addition to their brood of geographical features, they also spawn a number of gods (kami). The last is the personification of fire, which kills Izanami in childbirth.
Death in the time of the gods is not necessarily a permanent condition, however. Even Chinese chroniclers in the Dark Ages noticed the odd Japanese custom of leaving a body in state for ten days on the off chance that it might spring back to life. Resolving to retrieve his wife from Yomi, the land of the dead, Izanagi travels there, only for her to tell him that he is too late. (The name Yomi, meaning “Yellow Springs,” suggests perhaps a volcanic region of sulfurous pools, but is also a cognate with a similar Chinese name for the underworld, and so may be a mainland import.) The dead may only be retrieved from Yomi if they have never eaten its food, but Izanami has already dined. Refusing to take her word for it, Izanagi lights a magical torch, which reveals his wife’s body already crawling with maggots, and her flesh peeling off to create the eight deities of thunder.
Izanagi flees, pursued first by hags sent by his wife, then by warriors of the undead, then by the eight gods of thunder, and finally by Izanami herself. He flings away his clothes and possessions, creating many new landmarks in what are now forgotten or disappeared places. At the gateway to the underworld, he rolls a boulder in front of the entrance, shutting his wife within and leading to an unholy spousal row.
She threatens that if he blocks her path, she will curse a thousand mortals to die every day. He counters that he will arrange fifteen hundred