Chronicle

The National Museum of Japanese History treats the period after about 37,000 years ago as an important beginning for the Late Paleolithic in the islands. Modern humans were active in many regions, making chipped-stone tools, hunting animals such as deer and wild boar, and moving in response to seasonal resources. The discovery of the Iwajuku site overturned the former claim that Japan had no Paleolithic past. Obsidian found at Shirataki in Hokkaido, in Nagano, and on the Izu Islands shows that communities obtained and exchanged stone across considerable distances. Materials originating on islands also indicate some capacity to cross open water. These journeys should not be imagined as effortless migrations; they required knowledge of landscapes, shorelines, weather, and resources.

Paleolithic life cannot be reduced to the familiar image of people hunting mammoths. Climate, animal populations, and tool traditions differed greatly between northern and southern regions. Human remains from Okinawa also suggest that people may have entered the archipelago by more than one route. Around 16,000 years ago, pottery began to appear. By roughly 12,000 years ago, a warming climate and rising seas were helping create the coastline of the modern archipelago. Expanding forests and changing coastal resources established new possibilities that contributed to later Jōmon lifeways. These shifts did not produce an abrupt replacement of one population by another; they altered the environments within which communities adapted.

This history must avoid projecting a completed “Japanese people” into deep prehistory. The present population of the islands emerged through Paleolithic settlement, Jōmon communities, and many later movements and mixtures of people. Stone tools and human remains displayed at the Iwajuku Museum, the Shirataki sites, or the Okinawa Prefectural Museum are evidence of adaptation, resource seeking, technical skill, and crossings of difficult waters. They are not proof of a single ethnic origin. The deeper story is about how varied human groups learned to inhabit environments repeatedly transformed by climate and the sea—and how archaeology reconstructs those lives without the aid of written testimony.

The Jōmon period is conventionally dated from the appearance of the earliest pottery, roughly 16,000 years ago, to the gradual spread of wet-rice agriculture across the western archipelago. Its end did not occur everywhere at the same time. Even the name, derived from the cord-marked surfaces of pottery, can be misleading if it suggests a single, unchanging culture lasting more than ten millennia. Jōmon history is better understood as the history of many regional societies that repeatedly adjusted to different environments and changing conditions.

As the climate warmed, deciduous and evergreen forests and extensive coastlines offered nuts, fish, shellfish, deer, wild boar, and other resources. Communities combined hunting, gathering, fishing, and some management of useful plants, employing bows, polished stone tools, fishhooks, net sinkers, and dugout canoes. Pit dwellings, storage pits, cemeteries, and shell middens show that some groups maintained settlements for long periods. Settlement, however, did not mean isolation or an end to movement. Seasonal travel, marriage networks, and exchange remained essential. Jade from Niigata, obsidian from Hokkaido and Nagano, and shell ornaments from coastal areas circulated over considerable distances, revealing broad networks of communication across the islands.

The use of chestnut, lacquer, and other plants also shows that Jōmon communities did not simply accept whatever nature provided. They selected, cultivated, and managed resources. Clay figurines, stone rods, stone circles, unusual burials, and tooth-removal practices point toward ritual activity and forms of group identity, but their meanings must remain uncertain because they are inferred largely from archaeological evidence. They should not be assembled into a single, fixed “Jōmon religion.” Differences in age, skill, family affiliation, and ritual responsibility probably shaped social life, yet the evidence does not indicate a stable ruling class comparable to those of later states.

Environmental change was equally complex. A simple formula in which warmth produced prosperity and cooling caused decline cannot explain the variety of local responses. Communities changed their diets, movements, and settlement patterns as circumstances shifted. Hokkaido later developed Epi-Jōmon traditions, while the Ryukyu Islands followed their own cultural sequence. The endurance of Jōmon societies therefore did not depend on timeless harmony or complete separation from the outside world. It rested on flexible combinations of settlement and mobility, local knowledge and long-distance exchange, and the continuing ability to reorganize life without cities or a centralized state. Its complexity lay precisely in the ability to maintain enduring communities while continuing to move, exchange, experiment, and adapt.

From the Middle Yayoi period, long rows of jar burials and the northern burial mound reveal organized relationships between the living, the dead, and community space. Some graves contained bronze swords, glass tubular beads, and other goods, suggesting growing differences of status and efforts to preserve ancestral memory. Later remains include extensive defensive ditches, structures interpreted as watchtowers, and the compounds known as the Northern and Southern Inner Enclosures. Together, they suggest that Yoshinogari may have served as an important center of a regional kuni, coordinating defense, meetings, ritual, storage, and political activity. “Kuni” in this setting should not be treated as a modern sovereign state, but it points to political organization extending beyond an ordinary household or hamlet.

The raised-floor buildings, towers, and scenes of human activity visible in today’s archaeological park are reconstructions based on postholes, ethnographic comparison, and scholarly interpretation. They help visitors experience scale and movement through the settlement, but they are not original buildings preserved intact. Their hypothetical elements must remain visible. Yoshinogari is also popularly linked with Yamatai in the Chinese Account of the People of Wa. No inscription identifying the site as Yamatai has been excavated, however, and the association cannot prove that the disputed polity stood here.

The site’s greater value is that it turns the abstract idea of increasing Yayoi social complexity into a landscape that can be walked. Ditches separated inside from outside; granaries reveal the management of surplus; cemeteries materialized ancestry and rank; weapons and defenses register the possibility of conflict; and nonlocal objects trace networks of exchange. Yoshinogari also warns against imagining that a “state” appeared suddenly through the act of one heroic founder. Regional political centers developed as village alliances, ritual authority, agricultural production, defensive needs, and material exchange became joined over time. By following ditches and graves from different phases, visitors can see how a small settlement grew into a regional center over centuries—and how it later declined as the political networks around it changed.

The geographical treatise of the Book of Han is a crucial entry point into the earliest written references to the people called Wa. It states that beyond the sea from Lelang lived the people of Wa, divided into more than a hundred “countries,” whose representatives periodically came to offer tribute or appear at the commandery. These “countries” should not be equated with modern sovereign states. They were more likely political communities organized around leaders, settlements, and exchange networks. The number “more than a hundred” may likewise be a broad characterization by Chinese historians rather than a precise census.

The Book of Han was compiled by Ban Gu and others during the Eastern Han period, while part of the information it preserves was understood to concern the earlier Western Han. This was not a record written by inhabitants of the archipelago. It was an outside view assembled through imperial commanderies, envoys, frontier traffic, and layers of reported information. After Emperor Wu conquered Wiman Joseon and established Lelang and other commanderies in 108 BCE, northern Korea became an important point through which island communities encountered the Han imperial world. Leaders in the archipelago could obtain bronze mirrors, iron objects, coins, and prestigious gifts through routes crossing the peninsula. Appearing before officials or offering tribute may have provided titles, material rewards, and access to trade.

Several later episodes must be kept distinct from the Book of Han passage. The record of the gold seal inscribed “King of Na of Wa under Han,” dated to 57 CE, comes from the later Book of the Later Han; the seal itself was found on Shikanoshima in Fukuoka. It should not be merged with the Book of Han reference to more than a hundred polities as though the two described one event. The mission of the Wa king Suishō and others in 107 CE, including the presentation of enslaved people, also belongs to the later chronicle. Read together, these sources suggest gradual change from numerous small communities toward larger political alliances. They also expose a harsher dimension of diplomacy in which human beings could be offered as tribute and treated as political resources.

Chinese dynastic histories used terms such as Wa within their own systems for classifying peoples and ordering the world. The label cannot automatically be treated as the self-designation of every community in the islands. The deeper importance of the Book of Han is that the archipelago enters a written record that can be compared with archaeology. The text offers clues about maritime routes, political fragmentation, tribute, and exchange, but it also requires constant questions: Who was observing? Through how many intermediaries did the information pass? Which interests shaped the account? And where are the ordinary people whose lives remained outside the written archive? The beginning of written history is therefore not the end of uncertainty; it introduces a new kind of evidence with its own silences.

The adoption of similar tomb forms, bronze mirrors, and ritual practices by leaders in different regions suggests the growth of a political network centered on Yamato. It does not demonstrate that a clearly bounded unified state issued effective commands across the entire archipelago in the 4th century. Shared forms could express participation in an alliance without eliminating local power. Haniwa developed from simple cylinders into representations of houses, people, animals, weapons, and other subjects. They marked ritual space while preserving evidence about clothing, buildings, equipment, and ideals of status. Grave goods also changed. Mirrors, beads, and weapons were increasingly joined or replaced by armor, horse gear, and varied metal objects, reflecting shifts in warfare, identity, and continental connections.

During the 5th and 6th centuries, political change on the Korean Peninsula intensified the movement of technology, people, and institutions across the sea. Migrants participated in pottery production, ironworking, horse breeding, civil engineering, and the use of writing. Developments such as Sue ware and corridor-style stone chambers should not be reduced to a one-way “importation of culture.” They emerged through interaction among mobile communities and local patrons. Knowledge changed as it was applied in new settings.

The Mozu-Furuichi tomb groups near Osaka present a hierarchical landscape of enormous royal monuments surrounded by smaller subsidiary mounds. Many tombs designated as imperial mausoleums are managed by the Imperial Household Agency and cannot be comprehensively excavated, so identifications of particular occupants must remain cautious. From the 6th century onward, regional construction of keyhole tombs gradually ended. Royal burial shifted toward square, round, and octagonal forms, while Buddhist temples became new stages for displaying authority. The period cannot be explained by a formula in which the largest tomb automatically belonged to the strongest state. Its deeper subject is how rituals of death connected local leaders, technical networks, organized labor, and an emerging center of royal power.

The History of the Song records repeated missions during the 5th century from rulers of Wa known as San, Chin, Sai, Kō, and Bu—the later “Five Kings of Wa.” They requested or accepted titles from the Liu Song court, including General Who Pacifies the East and King of Wa, along with military designations claiming authority in relation to Wa, Baekje, Silla, Mimana, Gaya, and other regions. Recognition from a Chinese emperor could strengthen a ruler’s standing in diplomacy around the Korean Peninsula and within the growing political network of the archipelago.

In 478, King Bu submitted a memorial describing how his ancestors had crossed mountains and seas, conquered lands in the east and west, and prepared campaigns overseas. He reported that the deaths of his father and elder brother had interrupted those plans and asked the Song court to confirm a higher military title. The memorial is unusually important as a statement made in the name of the Wa kings themselves. It is not, however, an objective map of actual conquest. Diplomatic memorials were designed to magnify achievement in order to secure rank, and Bu’s claims must be read within that strategy.

Scholars have proposed several identifications linking the Five Kings to rulers known from later Japanese chronicles. Bu is often associated with Emperor Yūryaku, but none of these equations is certain. Inscriptions on an iron sword from the Inariyama tomb in Saitama and an iron blade from the Eta Funayama tomb in Kumamoto contain a royal name commonly read as Wakatakeru and possibly connected with Yūryaku. The great distance between the two finds, together with their shared written language of service to a great king, suggests an expanding network of royal authority in the later 5th century. The inscriptions also record genealogy and office, showing that writing was beginning to preserve status and memory within the islands, not only diplomacy with China.

This activity unfolded amid competition among Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla, and Gaya. Warfare, alliances, migrants, craftspeople, and material goods moved across the straits. Modern borders cannot be projected backward, and the titles do not prove that Japan ruled the entire Korean Peninsula. The developing Yamato court did not grow in isolation. It learned within an East Asian diplomatic order how to name itself, request recognition, and convert authority granted abroad into a resource for rule at home. The unresolved question is precisely why a court expanding within the archipelago still found a distant emperor’s title so politically useful.