This episode will be our final look at the Jomon Period in Japan.  Specifically we are focusing on the northern Jomon, in Tohoku and Hokkaido.  We'll take a brief overview of this northern area throughout the Jomon period, and then focus on the transition from the Middle to Late and Final Jomon periods.

We also have a treat this episode--we are getting our best glimpse yet of the people through the DNA of one of the women from Funadomari.  We'll take a look at what we know about her, including what is up with the whole "wet earwax" thing.

If you enjoy this episode, please feel free to reach out and Tweet or email us with comments.  How is it going and what would you like more or less of?

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-5

Rough Transcript

(Auto-transcript courtesy of listener, Zach)

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 5, Goggle Eyes and Wet Earwax, part 4 of our continuing series on the Jomon Period. So thank you everyone for sticking with me through the series. I know it's a lot of information on a time that is still technically prehistorical. To be honest, I thought this was going to be a quick hop, skip, and a jump through the Jomon and Yayoi myself. It wasn't until I really started digging into it that I realized there was so much here to talk about, and I knew I couldn't get through it quickly. I hope you're enjoying it. If you are, comment or drop us a line at @SengokuPodcast, the Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page, or email the [email protected]. We've now moved through most of the Jomon Period and are coming to the end. Today we are going to look at just what was going on in the northernmost reaches of the Japanese archipelago. We'll start with a brief outline of the northern Jomon culture through the previous eras, and then pay particular attention to the transition from the middle to late and final periods. We'll end with a look at an actual Jomon woman through her DNA. So shall we get started? When the Jomon culture first moved north, it largely focused on the areas of northeast Honshu, around Tohoku region in places like modern Iwate and Aomori. Over time, it expanded into Hokkaido, and eventually up into the Kuril Islands. The later Okhotsk Sea cultures and the Ainu would eventually come to inhabit both the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands, as well as Hokkaido and northern Honshu. The northern part of Japan has always had a cooler climate than the south. I mean, north-south. It's pretty explanatory. Even today, the Sapporo Snow Festival is a huge draw for tourists every winter. So whereas the Kyushu forests are largely broadleaf evergreens, Tohoku and Hokkaido forests tend to be mixed coniferous and deciduous trees. Pines, oak, maple, chestnut, etc. The colder waters also make for more productive salmon runs, just as we see across the Pacific. This isn't just a north-south distinction. The Japan seaside of the islands, for instance, also tends to have a much greater snowfall when compared to the Pacific side of the islands, so there's an east-west divide as well. The first Jomon settlements in Tohoku and Hokkaido appear quite similar to those in the rest of Japan, though the nut trees that we talked about as being crucial to the growth and spread of the Jomon culture didn't arrive in Hokkaido until about 6-7,000 BCE, just at the end of the incipient Jomon period. Despite this, our oldest example of pottery in the archipelago comes from Oda-Yamamoto in about 14,500 BCE, back when people were still living a predominantly nomadic existence. Then, in the initial Jomon period, we find the earliest examples of lacquerware at Kakinoshima in Hokkaido around 5000 BCE. In the early to middle period, we see a proliferation of sites in both Hokkaido and Tohoku. The diet of the people in this region is varied, with hunting, fishing, and foraging all helping to sustain the communities that spring up. Artists only further perfected and developed their craft in both lacquerware and ceramics. By the late Jomon period in 2000 BCE, the climate took a turn. Down south, the dense Kanto plains population was declining, and the situation seemed dire. Up in Tohoku and Hokkaido, however, there was very little evidence of impact, at least in comparison. Perhaps this is because they were already used to living in a cold climate, or their food sources were diversified enough so that no one thing had such a dramatic effect on them. Whatever the reason, they were able to continue and thrive, even as the Kanto plains system failed. That doesn't mean that nothing changed during this time. Settlements at this time moved closer to sources of fresh water. Some of these settlements also built specific structures to direct the water to help leach the tannins out of their acorns, indicating that this was still an important food source, and that maybe they still had to change their lifestyle to accommodate the changing climate. We also have evidence of bamboo fishweirs from this time. These are traps set in the river to catch fish and make them easier to harvest. This is something that they may have had much earlier, but due to the nature of the materials and locations, very few are found. And of course, there is plenty of evidence of canoes being used to go out into the deep sea to hunt and fish, and probably go across the sea to the mainland for trade. Along with other changes, we find more and more spices from this time, for instance, Sancho pepper showing up in the record, and we also find vessels specifically designed for boiling salt water to get salt. This is important, since for all that is surrounded by ocean, Japan has no source of rock salt, and therefore all of its salt comes from the sea. Later Heian poets would make a special note of the scent of the salt fires, where they would burn large piles of seaweed to extract the salt, a tradition that may go back to this era or even earlier. The cultures of the Tohoku and Hokkaido region also developed their own ritual traditions, similar to the traditions of their southern neighbors, but with their own spin. Remember the figurines or dogū that we mentioned before, where people would break off pieces? Well, the North saw their own versions, and one of the most striking is the quote-unquote goggle type or Shakōkidogū. If you see a picture of one, you'll probably recognize it. Unlike some of the more realistic figurines, the large eyes and ovoid head look much more alien than human. Like something you'd expect to find in a science fiction movie, coming out from a strange metallic craft and asking us to take them to our leaders. Some have suggested that the weird eyes and elaborate markings were representative of some type of mask and clothing. Perhaps the large eyes on a comparably large oval-shaped head actually do represent goggles, like the snow goggles found in the Arctic regions. The most likely explanation, though? Just a continuation of the gradual abstraction that we've seen so far. Many of the features can be explained as exaggeration of earlier models. Over time, it simply reached inhuman proportions. And that is one other possible explanation. Maybe these weren't meant to represent human beings anymore. Maybe they were some kind of spirit, and the exaggerated features were meant to demonstrate the otherworldly nature. Well, who knows for sure. Regardless, they are some of the most beautiful figurines from the entire Jomon period, at least in my opinion. Now it shouldn't be surprising that most of the Jomon figurines found in the islands have been found in the northern half of Honshu. After all, that is where 80% of the Jomon sites have been discovered. But the sheer numbers are still incredible. We discussed the Shakado site in the Kofu Basin, but a single site in Iwate contained 2,000 figurines, more than even in the Yamanashi and Nagano regions. There were also large numbers found in Ibaragi and Chiba, as well as in Aomori. In addition to being more numerous, they are larger as well. There is at least one figurine from this period that is 42 cm tall, compared to most of those that are about maybe 10 cm or so. In addition to the figurines, we see a continued increase in the use and complexity of other ritual constructions. We see sword-like objects and even wooden "totem poles" from this period. The stone circles become larger and more regular. In Oyu, in modern Akira near the northern tip of Honshu, there are two circles with diameters of 40 and 45 meters. If you look up Oyu Stone Circle on Google, you should be able to find photos of the site. The circles are a collection of flat and vertical stones with houses around the perimeter. In addition, they are also doubling as a type of cemetery, with graves found under the stones of the circles. This appears to be an evolution of the overall stone circle idea. In Hokkaido, it appears they may have moved away from stone circles to using dirt earthworks instead. So what are some of the Jomon settlements in this region? First off, let's take a look at Sannai-Maruyama. This is a great example of a middle Jomon period settlement in the Tohoku region, and you can go visit the reconstructed settlement in Aomori City if you get the chance. The main settlement, which covers about 40 hectares, seems to have been a hub with multiple smaller, probably temporary sites elsewhere in the area. So far, archaeologists have found 500 pit dwellings, with up to 100 in use at any given time during its history. More than 20 of the buildings are huge for their time, over 10 meters long, about twice the size of most pit dwellings. And the longest building? It's about 30 meters long. It's unclear whether these are just larger houses, or if they had some other purpose, like a gathering space. Amongst the buildings, we also find evidence of some strange, rectangular, above-ground structures. All we find are the pillars, about 6 per structure, and those pillars themselves are almost a full meter in diameter. Now, that's much larger than you would need for any simple house or storeroom. Whatever they were, it appears they were rebuilt time and again, as there are some hundred such buildings found, most on top of older ones, with about 5 to 6 in existence at any given time. The ends of the posts, which are all we have of these structures, were singed to prevent them from rotting. Based on their depth and the condition of the earth, it's likely that the posts and the structures they supported were pretty high. It's thought that maybe they were something like a watchtower, which is how they've been reconstructed, but we don't really know. As we continue the transition from the Middle to Late Jomon Period, now even after the San Nai Maruyama site was abandoned in about 2000 BCE, the area of Aomori continued to be a place of settlement, with sites in Korekawa near modern Hachinohe City, about 100 kilometers east of Aomori on the Pacific Ocean, and Kamegaoka, about 40 miles west on the Japan Sea Coast. Both of these sites show similar physical artifacts and so are considered part of the common Kamegaoka culture, named for where the distinctive pottery was first found, and not necessarily indicating that this was any kind of societal center. These late Jomon sites, from at least 1000 BCE on, demonstrate an evolution from Sannai Maruyama. For instance, the figurines, or Dogū, take on remarkable qualities. In fact, if you look up Dogū online, you'll probably find a picture of one of the ones from Kamegaoka, a bulbous form with a large oval-shaped head, most of which is taken up by the two humongous eyes that we talked about earlier. These are, as we said before, the shakōki, or goggle-type figurines. Though today we only get to see the relief designs, back in the day, it would have been something to see. The complex designs would have been accentuated with red paint, causing the figures to really stand out. Color and form coming together to create something otherworldly. Why they were so abstract is hard to tell. It was likely just the evolution of the form. Still though, some things remain the same, and it appears that limbs were still being broken off of the figurines as part of the ritual procedures. Besides the figurines, we also find a variety of objects that look like they could be toys, and there's another tradition that I think will really speak to a lot of us. They took impression of children's hands and feet. That's right, they made small ceramic plaques of the hands and feet of children, presumably their own, pressed into soft clay, and then fired with the rest of the pottery. Not only did they make these little amulet-like impressions, which show no other practical use, but we also find some of them with holes in the top, as though they were made to be suspended from a cord as a type of pendant. You know, I can't help but imagine a Jomon hunter out on the sea with his hunting buddies, pulling out a string of three or four of these hand and footprints around his neck and saying to his buddies, "Hey Joe, have you seen my kids?" It is just such a human thing, and it is found throughout Hokkaido and Tohoku. Now this Kamegaoka culture is considered by many to be the most prosperous Jomon culture, even if it wasn't the most populous. There's not only a great diversity of the types of ceramic vessels and pottery from this time, but it gets even more elaborate. In fact, the beautiful pottery was so coveted that the early Kamegaoka style is found as far south as Nara and Kobe in the late Jomon period, and newer styles made their way down to the Kanto. It is also interesting to see just the diversity of shapes that we find in this period. I mean, if you think about it, you only really need a few basic shapes for cooking and eating - plates, bowls, cups, jars. And yet we see many more kinds of shapes, and so it is thought that there must have been many different uses, just like a fancy dinner today with all of the specialized plates, serving ware, etc. Heck, for anyone looking at our rituals of drinking alcohol, think about our glassware and the difference between a snifter, a flute, a highball, a lowball, and a goblet. Not to mention different glasses for white or red wine. And while people can certainly argue whether or not these glass shapes improve the drinking experience, do you really need anything more than a basic cup to convey liquid from the bottle or tap to your mouth? And yet here we are. Just as most people today don't have all of these types of glassware, in the Jomon period it wasn't the case that everyone was using all of these different shaped vessels. Instead, we see a kind of plain, utilitarian pottery that seems to have been for daily use and we find the more elaborate pottery congregated in certain sites around the settlement. This could indicate some kind of ritual center, or maybe it was just where the elite happened to hang their hats. In fact, it has been argued that this uneven distribution may indicate some kind of early social stratification in the Jomon culture. We do know that there was at least specialization with sites around Tohoku and Hokkaido showing signs that they were dedicated to the production of specific items or artistic crafts. Even in the earlier periods we see differences in the size of buildings, which could also indicate something about relative wealth or status of the inhabitants. We just can't be certain. What seems clear though, is that there was some division between the people based at least on what a person's role was in society. Where it breaks with more modern ideas of social division, however, is that there is no evidence that status was necessarily hereditary, particularly not in the burial patterns. Graves do have grave goods, but there's no clear distinction outside of that. There is something we find in the graves that can tell us more about the people though. It won't tell us about their social organization, but it could be just as important to understanding the people of this time. That's DNA. You see, it was just earlier this year, 2019, that scientists were able to sequence the DNA of two Jomon individuals, a man and a woman, who had been buried in a shell mound at Funadomari, and their DNA is telling us a lot that we can't just get from the material record. Not only do we have DNA, but their remains pretty much match what we see, physically, in other remains throughout the archipelago, so we have some idea that they aren't complete outliers, but likely a part of the same group of people that have settled the entire island chain. Now, we still have to be careful. DNA are the building blocks, but it isn't like you can just program in a person's DNA to a computer and it will spit out everything about them. There is so much we are still learning, and environment is definitely a key factor in determining the specifics about how a person develops over time. There are also the problems of samples and deterioration, as can be seen by the fact that of the 27 remains at the site, only two were considered to be in good enough condition to extract DNA, and of those two, only the woman's DNA provided information of all 300 million pairs in the base sequence. That said, we can still get a lot of information that we couldn't know before. Bones might provide information about height, muscle mass, etc. DNA can tell you the likely melanin content, hair color, eye color, and more. So who was this woman from Funadomari, and what do we know about her? Well to start with, she was one of the Funadomari people living on the modern-day Rebun Island northwest of Hokkaido around 3500-3800 years ago, or somewhere between 1850 BCE to 1550 BCE. Her remains are designated simply as F23 or Funadomari 23. For our purposes here though, let's give her a name, say Mariko. Based on Mariko's DNA, she had thin, dark hair and eyes, and was prone to freckles and sunspots. She was probably shorter than most people today. She also had a particular genetic trait that helped her metabolize fat, something found in the Arctic regions, but not in modern Japanese populations. This would have been extremely helpful for someone in a hunter-gatherer culture though, and it is complemented by other tests conducted on the remains that indicated she likely did eat a lot of marine and land animals as part of her diet. So this short woman with dark hair and eyes was living in a village on a small island, only about 29km long and 8km wide. Whether she went hunting herself, or just helped with the catch as it was brought in, she was living off the bounty of the land and sea, probably more of the latter. Now there is another thing we know about her. She had a higher than average alcohol tolerance. You heard that right. Apparently Mariko could drink up with the best of them. Not that it is positive evidence of a drinking culture, though there is evidence in other parts of the archipelago that alcohol was being made from a variety of different sources. We still don't have rice though, so sorry folks, you aren't going to find any sake. However, it is quite possible that they were making something from local fruit, like the native Japanese grapes. Not exactly a Chateauneuf-de-Pape, but it does lend credence to the idea that people have been finding ways to ferment things since time immemorial. Oh, and one other thing you might see if you look up info on Mariko is her earwax. I know, right? I mean, who would think that anyone would care about earwax? Like, what could earwax tell you anyway? Well, let me explain. Now before we get too far into this, we are going to be talking about earwax. So if that makes you queasy, you may want to skip ahead in the podcast about a minute and a half, 90 seconds or so. Just saying. All right, now here's one of those trivia facts that you can spring on your friends, because I bet most people don't realize this, but humans have one of two different types of earwax. Either wet or dry. Most people generally grow up just figuring that everyone has the same type of earwax they do, and for most geographic regions, they're probably right. Earwax is controlled by a single gene, and at some point there was a mutation in Northeast Asia that results in dry earwax, and this recessive gene started to make its way through the human population. Today, nearly 95% of the people living in Asia and many indigenous people of the Americas have dry earwax, while most people of African and European descent have wet earwax. And here's the kicker. The gene does more than just control earwax. Studies have shown that people with dry earwax have fewer problems with body odor. That's right, their sweat isn't as aromatic. Turns out that earwax is produced in a type of sweat gland, similar to the ones under your armpits and elsewhere on your body. Therefore, if you have dry earwax, that will also affect how you sweat. That said, when you spend a hot day out hauling in the day's catch, then gutting, cleaning, and preparing the fish for preservation, trust me, it isn't the sweat that people are smelling. Now, there is one other question that the DNA is helping to illuminate, but it's a bit of a sticky one. And that question is, is Mariko Ainu? Now, I've mentioned the Ainu before. They are the indigenous people of Hokkaido as well as Sakhalin and Kuril islands, and they speak their own language, which is considered a linguistic isolate, separate even from the Japonic languages spoken from Honshu down through the Ryukyu island chain. One of these days I really will do an episode on them, but for now we are going to have to settle with the bare bones explanation. They are a people that, until colonization by the nation of Japan, lived a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle in their islands. The questions of where the Ainu come from has long been a subject of discussion and debate, often by Japanese scholars trying to figure out where they fit in the story of Japan. One popular theory has remained since the earliest examination of the various pottery types throughout the archipelago, that the Jomon people were chased out of Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu by the Yayoi who came over from the mainland, and by successive waves of Japanese who saw them as the Emishi or hairy barbarians. Eventually, according to the theory, the Yayoi would become the modern Japanese and the Jomon would become the Ainu. Unfortunately, despite the intriguing simplicity of such a theory, things just aren't that cut and dry. Mariko, our Funadomari maiden, was compared with another Jomon sample, Ikawazu II, a woman from southeast Honshu living around the 6th century BCE. They were both Jomon showing a similar genetic distance to most other Asian groups, but they both showed affinity with the people of the archipelago, the Japanese, Ryukyuan, and Ainu people. Of those, Mariko was significantly closer in relations with the Ainu than was our woman from Ikawazu, no surprise given their relative geographic positions. Still, when you control for DNA from the Korean peninsula, about 66% of Ainu DNA matches up with what we know of Jomon DNA, but there is still 27% in the Ryukyuan people and 13% in the modern Japanese population. So what does that tell us? Well, first off, there does appear to be a connection between the Jomon people of Tohoku and Hokkaido and the Ainu. However, it isn't simply a one-for-one type of thing. They also appear to have mingled and interbred with people from the Okhotsk Sea cultures, and this is supported by the archaeological record. Furthermore, the Jomon to the south weren't simply supplanted by the Yayoi, but were likely absorbed into it. We'll see more evidence of this as we dig into that period more. So we've looked at the DNA and we've looked at the archaeological record. There's one other stone I'd like to overturn here, and it's one we don't always think of. Language. Ok, you might be thinking, they weren't writing anything down, so how do we know anything about their language? Well, you're right to ask the question. And the truth is, we don't. Not exactly. But we have some clues left for us in our modern language. You see, the archipelago supports two language groups, Japonic, including modern Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, and Ainu, or Ainu Itak, a language isolate, meaning there are no identified relatives. In contrast, English, for instance, flows from the Germanic languages, which are part of the larger Indo-European language family, and we know how it is all connected. For these languages in the archipelago, we don't have anything nearly so clear cut, and they've been isolated long enough that they have developed their own characteristics that haven't been linked to any other language families. So what, right? I mean, they have different languages. It isn't like they left an imprint on the land, except they did just that, in their own way. You see, the archipelago is littered with people and place names that make almost no sense in modern Japanese. In some cases, these can be traced back to old Japonic languages or dialects that are just no longer extant. But in others, you can't trace the place name back to any clear Japonic root, but there does appear to be a logical Ainu root word, and linguists have identified Ainu roots that appear to have connections with place names as far as eastern and central Honshu. Coincidentally about the border area between the northern and southern Jomon cultures. Could these cultures have been speaking different languages? Well, in all likelihood, yeah, absolutely. And if you think that's so strange, just look at Europe and all the different languages there. Yet there are many pieces of shared culture across the European landmass. Even within a given language, there was a lot of variation. It is said that before radio and TV helped to stabilize accents, pronunciation, and even word usage, there would often be communication challenges even when two people were speaking the same quote-unquote "language" as part of the same culture. Village A might be able to talk to Village B, Village B could talk with Village C, but villages A and C were mutually unintelligible to each other without learning the other's dialects. And of course, we are primarily looking at the physical culture of this time on the archipelago, and we see a lot of shared techniques and designs. But there are also plenty of similarities, and it puts me in mind once again of the Pacific Northwest. I mean, if you went and took a look at the formline design and cultural artifacts of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people, for example, and had no other context to go on, it would be quite easy to class them all together as a single unit. And yet their languages, Tlingit, X̱aat Kíl, and Sm'algya̱x, are quite different from one another, and they have their own cultural distinctions. I have little doubt that this was similar for the Jomon people, and it is quite probable that despite their long trade routes, there was still an amount of cultural and linguistic diversity that we just can't see in the archaeological record, nor in DNA. Whatever diversity was there, there was soon to be another element. From south on the archipelago came a new culture, marching up north. Known to us as the Yayoi, the new culture and technology would sweep through the archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture all the way north to Aomori Prefecture by 200 BCE, and eventually encompassing all of Honshu, but never jumping the strait to Hokkaido. Eventually it even receded from the north like a fad come before its time. Wet rice agriculture retreated back south, stopping at a line around the Akita and Iwate prefectures. Below that line, the Yayoi culture was going strong. But above it, northern Tohoku and Hokkaido continued from where the Jomon had left off, in what is termed by some as the "epi-jomon" or "zokujomon". It would eventually evolve into its own thing, but for now we will turn our focus back south and take a look at the rise of the Yayoi. So that concludes our overview of the Jomon period. Thank you so much for listening. From here on we will still be dealing with a lot of archaeology, but we should start to get more written sources at least. So until next time, feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, we have information about our Ko-Fi site over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/podcast, where we will also have some photos of various artifacts that we have discussed, as well as references and other material used for this episode. Questions or comments? Feel free to tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our SengokuDaimyo Facebook page or email us at [email protected]. That's all for now. Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on SengokuDaimyo's Chronicles of Japan.