Jōmon Erotic

The Jōmon were the foragers, hunters and fishers of the Japanese archipelago from about 14,000 BCE until rice farmers from the continent spread through most of the islands in the first millennium BCE, and their ancestry lives on in the Ainu, the Okinawans and, to a smaller degree, most Japanese today. Nobody knows what they called themselves. The name comes from their pottery. In 1877 the American zoologist Edward Morse excavated the Ōmori shell mound near Tokyo and described its vessels as cord marked, and a Japanese translation of that phrase, jōmon, eventually named the whole era.

That pottery is among the oldest in the world, with fragments from northern Honshu dated to more than 15,000 years ago. It also points to what set the Jōmon apart: they cooked in clay and settled into lasting villages without relying on grain farming. They built sunken pit houses, heaped up shell middens along the coasts, managed chestnut groves, worked red lacquer and green jade, and buried their dogs with care. At Sannai-Maruyama in Aomori, a village lived in for well over a thousand years put up a structure on six huge chestnut posts, and people still argue about what it was for. Most people lived in the east and north, where nut forests and fish-filled rivers were generous, and their numbers fell sharply as the climate cooled in the later periods.

They left no writing, so their languages are lost. Some scholars look for traces in Ainu or in old place names, but nothing is settled, and the Japonic languages are generally thought to have arrived later with migrants from the Korean peninsula. What they believed has to be read from objects. Clay figurines called dogū are often female and are often found deliberately broken. They are usually linked to fertility, healing or renewal. Stone circles like those at Ōyu in Akita point to shared ceremony and burial. In the Late and Final periods, many young adults had healthy canines or incisors pulled, and some had their incisors filed into forked shapes, apparently to mark adulthood or marriage.

The Jōmon did not vanish so much as blend in. On Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu, Yayoi newcomers with wet rice and metal absorbed them. In Hokkaido, foraging carried on for centuries longer and fed into Ainu culture. Genetics tells the same story: the Ainu carry the most Jōmon ancestry, Okinawans a good deal, and mainland Japanese less. The artist Tarō Okamoto championed the flame-rimmed Middle Jōmon pots as art in the early 1950s, and since 2021 a group of northern Jōmon sites has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List.