Japan without rice? It's hard to imagine such a thing, but it is true. This episode we talk about how rice came to Japan and the culture that was created at about the same time.  This is the Yayoi culture, and it will be the subject of our next several episodes, moving forward. The Yayoi culture is a blend of continental and indigenous culture that creates its own mark on the archipelago and beyond. But why the change? How did this new culture come to the islands? We'll discuss all of this this episode.

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Rough Transcript

(Auto-transcription courtesy of listener, Zach)

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 7, Rice Comes to the Islands. For ten thousand years, Japan had been a land of hunter-gatherers, living in small, sparse settlements throughout the archipelago. Life was rough, but predictable. At coastal sites, they would gather nuts and other vegetables in the fall, hunting and processing in the wintertime, and fishing in the late spring and summer. In between hunting and gathering, they were making their distinctive pottery, lacquerware, and holding communal rituals. Traders would occasionally bring foreign goods from the mainland, and fishermen in the south would meet with their counterparts and trade fishing stories and gear, but for the most part the islands were on their own. And then... they came. A new group of people on the islands, who turned the land from forests into rectangular squares, tilling the land with new tools made of iron, from which they also made new weapons. These people swelled in numbers, absorbing or conquering nearby groups. Some of the original inhabitants tried to stave off this new foreign culture, doubling down on their own rituals and way of life, but it was no use. Eventually it would expand throughout the archipelago, stopping only when it reached the northernmost tip of Honshu. These were the Yayoi. So this episode we start to look at the Yayoi period in Japan. This is considered by many to be the period where we really start to see what would become Japanese culture, as the Jomon culture of the archipelago met with influences from the continent. We see full-scale rice paddy field agriculture, which will make rice a mainstay of Japanese economics as well as a staple food source. We also see both iron and bronze entering the archipelago. Interestingly, unlike in other areas of the world, iron appears to have arrived first to the archipelago, arriving just shortly before the advent of bronze. This means that Japan effectively skipped a Bronze Age, with bronze almost immediately taking a ceremonial role. All of this comes with a new unique culture that blends aspects of the continent with the indigenous Jomon. This new culture also brought social stratification, with obvious distinctions between the elites and commoners, and it grew. With the addition of full-scale agriculture, we now see a population boom in the islands, which contributes to the formation of larger states, most of which eventually would aggregate under a single sovereign. During this period, increased communication with the continent also means that we start to see Japan appearing in the historical records over there. So in this period, we will see the move from prehistory to history, or, well, at least proto-history. Towards the end, we will see the great kings and queens, buried in large keyhole-shaped tombs. These old tombs, or kofun, will give the next period its name. For now, let's turn our attention back to the beginning of this period. Now the name Yayoi really has nothing to do with this period, other than it was the location in Tokyo where archaeologists first found a new style of pottery, clearly distinct from the Jomon period. However, since we don't have a name from the people themselves, this is the name we tend to use for this period. There is evidence later that they may have eventually referred to themselves as the "wa people", but we'll get into that. The pottery itself shows a blend of elements from late southwestern Jomon and Korean plain-style pottery, and it was initially assumed to have arrived sometime around 300 BCE. Early dating put the Yayoi period from about 300 BCE to 300 CE, a convenient date range to remember, but research has consistently pushed back on this. This is also brought into question the definition of what is Yayoi, and where the final Jomon ends and the Yayoi begins. For our purposes, we won't worry too much about the debate, which mostly consists of how we are labeling things, and we'll focus instead on the actual technical and cultural transitions and what we know about them. Now the big thing about the start of the Yayoi is, as I've mentioned, rice. And really, can you imagine Japanese culture without rice? The basic meal in Japan is gohan, or cooked rice, and whether it's sushi, sake, onigiri, donburi, or even mochi, it all requires rice. Rice was so central that it was the chief measure of wealth during most of Japan's history, with land being measured and how many koku of rice it could produce. Japan without rice is like, well, it's like France without bread, or Italy without pasta. It is that ingrained in our perception of the country and culture. And yet, there was a time when rice was new. So where did rice come from, and how did it make such a splash? Well our earliest evidence of rice cultivation in the islands comes from burnt grains found in pottery that have been dated to about 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists are estimating that about 900-800 BCE is when rice cultivation probably came over for the first time. Now rice, as most of us know it, that is the indica and japonica varieties, all comes from around the same area of the world and was originally a tropical crop. Even with the cultivation in the Yellow River Basin, which coincided with the culture that the Chinese identify with the ancient Xia dynasty, that seems to have been about the northern extent of rice for quite some time. As for the varieties, if you aren't familiar with them, you can probably get an idea from the name. Indica, as the name suggests, became popular in India and is the species used in, say, basmati or jasmine rice. Japonica, on the other hand, is the variety found in Japan and much of East Asia. A shorter-grained rice, which is the kind you will mostly find in Chinese and Japanese cuisine today. In China and Southeast Asia, they actually grow and use both kinds of rice. Of course, since it's a tropical plant, one may understand that it took a while for rice to make it to the islands. Despite our current image of rice in Japan going together like Han Solo and Chewbacca, it came to the islands relatively late. After all, north of Kyushu, the climate in Japan is much more temperate than tropical, especially in the northern regions. In addition, with all the other work going on just to keep yourself fed, who had time to mess around and experiment with all the work that rice paddy agriculture involved? And so it was likely something else that brought it to the islands. Or perhaps someone else. If you remember from the last episode, the start of the 10th century BCE had caused quite a disruption on the mainland, and bronze and other technologies had started to move outward from the Chinese heartland to various cultures on the periphery. Bronze weapons provided a significant advantage over stone-age neighbors in war, and rice paddy field agriculture gave many the ability to expand their populations. It is at this point that there are several thoughts as to what might have happened next. Now one theory says that rice agriculture may have come up from the south, specifically from south China, hopping over to Taiwan and up the archipelago. This is not dissimilar from one of the routes people believe may have been taken to get to the archipelago in the first place. In fact, some people tend to believe that the people in the Ryukyu Islands and southwest Japan were of Malayo-Polynesian descent, or at least spoke a Malayo-Polynesian language. We'll discuss language in a later episode, but as for descent, there is some genetic evidence that the Paleolithic inhabitants of the Ryukyu were related to the people of Southeast Asia. However, we have no direct evidence of rice agriculture in the islands until much later. So for this theory to be true, rice farmers would have had to leave southern China and travel pretty much straight to Kyushu to settle, which seems unlikely. In addition, as I mentioned before, southern China had both japonica and indica rice, so why would they only have brought one of them to Japan? Another theory suggests that Chinese migrants from the easternmost edge of the Zhou empire sailed over to Japan, perhaps because of trade or because they wanted to escape a turbulent situation on the mainland. Similar to the southern theory, this seems to be based primarily on similarities between certain aspects of Japanese and Chinese culture. For my part, I am not convinced that such a connection is necessary to explain what we see in the islands. Instead, the theory that I tend to subscribe to is that the majority of influence came over from the southern Korean peninsula. Humans are adventurous, no doubt. For example, check out the transoceanic voyages of the ancient Polynesians, traveling from places like Tahiti or Samoa all the way to the Hawaiian islands. But Occam's razor would still seem to apply here. The Korean origin is supported by a myriad of evidence that appears to dwarf the evidence for the other theories. First, the earliest evidence of rice being cultivated in the archipelago is in northern Kyushu, specifically the areas near Hakata and Karatsu Bays. Hakata Bay in particular is noted time and again throughout history as the chief port for missions to or from the mainland, so why would that have been any different in this era? After all, from Hakata Bay one can swing up to Tsushima Island and then on to the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, and vice versa. It also seems more than coincidence that this area is part of the Korea Strait Zones, where similar fishing gear has been found both in the Japanese islands and the Korean peninsula. It would make sense then that the earliest continental influences would come to the islands through this channel. Furthermore, as we'll discuss later, Yayoi pottery, settlements, and burial practices all reflect similar developments in the Korean peninsula. The only real question seems to be with just when things came over. As I mentioned earlier, current archaeological research indicates that rice came over sometime between 900 and 800 BCE. It's been assumed that rice cultivation arrived along with iron and bronze tools, the oldest of which, at least in the archipelago, appear to be from the Imakawa and Magarita settlement sites. Now, if rice came over with iron tools, then we really have a question here because we don't see much evidence of iron tools in the southern end of the Korean peninsula until much later. Does that mean that Japan had iron well before the Korean peninsula had it? Well, I don't really think so, and there are a few possible answers to this apparent conundrum. For example, it is possible that there are just still some things on the Korean peninsula we haven't found. After all, we used to think that Japan had the oldest pottery anywhere in the world, and then finds were made in China that pushed that date back further. And even in Japan, our oldest pottery came from up in the northeast, while we have good evidence that the Jomon culture actually started down in Kyushu. So it's likely that there are still plenty of discoveries hidden in the earth. And even more so than pottery, iron is pretty rare in the archaeological record. For one thing, it deteriorates quickly, as anyone who has left their tools out in the rain can attest. And so unless it is kept in good condition, where the metal is protected from rust, a lot of the evidence will just disintegrate. But on top of that, we humans are a thrifty lot, and recycling is nothing new. This seems to be especially true of iron, or at least at an early stage. In Japan, iron has always been relatively scarce, requiring specialized processes to smelt the raw iron from the iron sand deposits where it can be found. We have yet to find any smelting technology in at least the early Yayoi period, and if you don't smelt your own iron, then you are reliant on trade to get the base materials you need to make iron tools. Of course, once you have iron, you can always melt down the iron you have and make something new, so at least in the archipelago, it's rare to find actual iron tools, and instead we tend to find the wood handles and components that the iron was attached to. Perhaps there was something similar going on across the straits? Of course, this all misses one other possibility, that the iron we have came much later. We've been making an assumption based on earlier narratives that rice, iron, and bronze all came over as a single cultural package, but even Imamura Keiji suggested that iron and bronze came over after rice agriculture had gained a foothold and as other changes began to take place in the culture. This brings me to some recent scholarship by Miyamoto Kazuo, who posits that we don't see a single introduction of rice to Japan, but instead we actually see two separate introductions. Huh, so why would rice be introduced twice? Well, remember how we said that rice is a tropical plant? Well, you know, tropical plants don't tend to do so well in temperate climates, unless and until they've been bred to handle the cold weather. As rice-growing cultures and their cultural influences spread north, they reached the northernmost limits for growing rice easily. That doesn't seem to have stopped anyone, and when nature stopped accommodating rice farming, did humans give up? Of course not! That's not what we do! Instead, farmers found the hardiest strains of rice, those that survived the cold winters and harsher conditions, and selectively bred them again and again until they had a strain of rice that was able to withstand the cooler, more temperate climate. Now for whatever reason, this seems to have been what happened to japonica rice, but not indica. It may be that japonica was just more popular in the northern reaches of China, or it was naturally more suited for cooler climates. Or it could just be the luck of the draw in which one adapted earlier. Regardless, it seems that japonica was a species of rice that made the leap. This whole process appears to have occurred up in the north, and these hardier strains had to make their way around the Bohai Sea, over past the Liaodong Peninsula, and then make its way down the Korean Peninsula. That all took time, but Miyamoto Kazuo points out that the earliest grains of rice that we find in northern Kyushu appear to be the tropical variant of japonica, not the temperate variety. This means that while this rice would have grown in Kyushu, it would be a challenge to grow it much further north. This is corroborated with the material culture we find with the earliest rice growing areas in Karatsu and Itoshima plains, which includes polished stone daggers and tools along with dolmens, a type of burial monument where large stone slabs are deliberately placed on top of one another. These are all familiar to the Namgang River basin area, near modern day Jinju in the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and, perhaps coincidentally, an area that would later be part of the Gaya Confederacy, an area with close ties to Japan, which we'll discuss more in later centuries. Now it isn't until a couple of centuries after this, between the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, that we see what appears to be temperate japonica arriving in the archipelago, along with new cultural artifacts that appear to be part of the extensive peninsular culture known as the Songguk-ri culture. This culture had started in the central Korean Peninsula during Korea's Middle Bronze Period, roughly 800-400 BCE, south of the area identified as Gojoseon. This Songguk-ri culture appears to have eventually spread from about the Han River, the defining feature on the western edge of the current DMZ between South and North Korea, south to Jeju Island, and then across the Korean Straits to the Japanese archipelago. And so perhaps this helps explain some of what we are seeing. Rather than a single wave from the Korean Peninsula crossing all at once, we have successive waves of Korean immigrants coming over and settling in northern Kyushu. Initially, I suspect, Korean immigrants would have assimilated into the local Jomon settlements, bringing with them their culture and technology, but likely fitting into Jomon cultural ways. Eventually, some farmers made the journey for what reasons we can only guess at. Perhaps they came over to join families that had already been living with the Jomon, or they were just adventurous types. Perhaps a changing climate had made their way of life even more difficult, with even the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula already at the northern edge of the range for tropical japonica rice, and they decided to move south to an area that would be even more hospitable to their crop. Whatever their reasons, they made the treacherous journey to the islands, and once there, they convinced their Jomon neighbors to let them start farming rice. Now, as I mentioned before, it's unclear whether or not the Jomon people of Kyushu had any kind of agriculture. But they were certainly familiar with harvesting wild crops, and likely had at least some form of horticulture to supplement the rest of their diet with. They clearly were familiar with the kinds of communal activities required in planting and cultivating crops, whether in forming hunting parties, or gathering and processing the acorns and the otherwise poisonous nuts like the horse chestnut. Still, why would the locals have risked their time and resources on a new food source? Especially an unproven one. Well, Mizoguchi Koji appears to have a suggestion here, looking at the likely seasonal activities of a hunter-gatherer society such as the Jomon. First of all, it's important to note that the Jomon, as we've already discussed, already lived in largely settled communities. If they moved about throughout the seasons, it was still from a stable core settlement with only temporary sites or camps, but coming back to their permanent settlement throughout the year. Along with that, based on the types of shells found in the Jomon shell mounds, along with other evidence and what we know about various wild crops, he suggests that the Jomon year was largely focused around different types of food acquisition. From fishing in the summer and harvesting various plants and nuts in the autumn, winter and early spring would be focused on hunting and processing food harvested in the fall, then performing other such tasks such as woodworking, etc. Any new agriculture would need to fit into this model, at least until it proved itself more viable. In this case, rice agriculture seemed to fit, with planting and preparation taking place largely in the spring, minimal work during the summer months, and then harvest time in the fall, along with other traditionally harvested crops. All of this would allow an early form of rice agriculture to fit into the pre-existing Jomon seasonal activities. Of course, this early form of agriculture was also not nearly as intensive as later methods. In fact, the earliest rice cultivation on the southern tip of the peninsula and in the archipelago appears to have been reliant on naturally marshy land and areas. This would limit the initial spread of rice agriculture as well as its potential output, but also would not require the same kind of intensive farming and management that we would see later. This would come with the Songguk-ri culture, who brought wet rice paddy cultivation techniques. For now, it's easy to see how a less intensive agricultural activity would fit in well with existing activities without being overly disruptive, at least initially. Over time, several things likely happened based on similar examples in other parts of the world. First, as the peninsular immigrants found a welcome home in the archipelago, they likely sent word back to their friends and family. More and more people would start to come over. At the same time, after a few years of successful rice harvests, it's also likely that those communities hosting peninsular immigrants found that this rice crop was providing more and more of a bounty. After all, it was predictable. It provided a lot of food energy in the form of carbohydrates, and it could be stored for long periods of time, providing a reliable food source when there were disruptions in other areas of food acquisition. As local people came to see the benefits of rice, they would have chipped in more and more, and in those areas that had it, rice cultivation no doubt became more and more important to their way of life. When the Songguk-ri material culture started to make its way down the Korean peninsula, it brought wet rice paddy cultivation, which was a means of controlled flooding through elaborate irrigation. Prior to this, most of the rice farming was still at risk of over-flooding in particularly wet years or possible drought years when even the marshy areas where rice would grow would become too dry for a good crop. With a series of dikes and irrigation projects, previously unusable land could be turned into areas for planting and growing rice. Not only that, but it cut down the number of weeds and undesirable secondary plants that would pop up in and amongst the rice crop, since rice plants were initially grown in a flooded field and then replanted one at a time in the fields where they would eventually grow. This is still the way they do it today. Now if this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Wet rice agriculture is extremely labor intensive, but it has some major advantages. First of all, it drastically expands the amount of arable land for a region, greatly increasing the food production capabilities of any given settlement. Furthermore, it increases the production per acre of that land, meaning less land produces even more food. Finally, it is much more predictable, since the water is much more controlled and not nearly as reliant on the seasonal variations. So when the Songguk-ri culture made contact with the burgeoning rice farmers in Japan, they were bringing improvements to a system that had likely already caught on, at least among some communities, most of whom likely had connections to the continent already and so they would have been receptive to the latest innovations. And this then forms the core of what we come to see as the Yayoi culture. It is a mix of Jomon and peninsular cultures that come together to form something new. This is confirmed through DNA analysis of some Yayoi skeletons, which show a paternal link to the original Jomon people, but a maternal link to people from the continent. We also see it in the material culture, where we see a mix of pottery, some forms quite clearly based on the existing Jomon pottery, while others are almost directly taken from the Korean plain pottery. We also see a mix of house types, with square and round pit dwellings that developed in the archipelago, but also a round style that was familiar to the Songguk-ri culture. We also see more above ground structures, again similar to what we see on the peninsula, with specific examples of above ground storehouses, complete with guards on their posts to prevent pests from climbing up and into the storehouse. Oh, and of course it wasn't just rice agriculture that came over at this time, though that is the focus of most discussions as the staple food, but there were also other foods that could be cultivated as well, mostly via dry field cultivation once the infrastructure and technology was in place. Another thing that we see in this transformation, at least with the coming of the Songguk-ri cultural influences, are moats that start appearing around the Yayoi settlements. On the peninsula, walled and moated settlements appear to have been a necessary way of life, given the relatively constant conflict, but in the archipelago they appear to have been more of a cultural habit rather than a response to rising tensions. We suspect this because very soon after they were constructed, many of the moats were allowed to silt up and were used more as garbage pits than the defensive structure that they were initially designed as. So we can imagine the immigrants spending a lot of time digging moats because, well, that's just what you do when you build a settlement, but quickly realizing that those moats weren't going to see a lot of use in warfare and finding better uses for all those holes in the ground. Now, not all Jomon settlements were initially absorbed into this new Yayoi culture. In fact, we seem to see some Jomon settlements resist the cultural intrusion of elements from the continent, with an increase in Jomon ritual items. Still, this cultural trend would be hard to resist. When the Yayoi culture was getting started, there were only about 75,000 people in the entire archipelago, and only 20% of the late Jomon population was in southwest Japan. So that's about 25,000 people in all of Kyushu, Shikoku, and Kinki regions. And yet, with all of the benefits of rice agriculture, along with the immigration from the continent, we start to see a population boom that puts the middle Jomon period to shame. Over the course of the next couple millennia, in spite of wars and other conflicts, the total population of the archipelago would expand to more than 5 million people. And this is consistent what we see on the continent regarding the population increases that occur with the advent of full-scale rice agriculture. In this initial period, Yayoi culture was importing the material culture of the continent, but there is no immediate evidence of the social stratification we mentioned earlier. This would make sense if, as we are assuming here, the Yayoi culture was not so much a foreign culture, but rather a combination of a small number of immigrants from the Korean Peninsula who are impacting and changing existing Jomon settlements into something new. And yet, as agriculture becomes more and more important, we do start to see a change in the social structures as well. For the clearest example here, we can look at burial patterns. You see, in the Jomon period, we see cemeteries that seem fairly egalitarian. And early on, a common form is a linear cemetery where all graves are situated in two lines, with a path in between them similar to the burial patterns we see up at San Nai Maruyama. In this instance, there is no clear distinction from one grave to the next. Nothing is bigger or smaller. We can even estimate when individuals were buried, and it appears there was no clear grouping or preference given to any one individual. While there may be some burial goods, they are pretty rare and often things that the person would have likely used when they were alive. Now in the Yayoi period, we see a transition to more complex cemeteries, where a few early burials begin a pattern, as later burials seem to be deliberately grouped around particular graves. So what, you might be thinking. How is that any different? Well it indicates that people were remembering who was buried where, or at least had some notion they were important, beyond their death, and then they were making deliberate choices to group people with them in death. This indicates bonds that go beyond the human connections we have with the living, and could be the start of some type of ancestor worship, or at least some understanding of ancestral connections. And then we start to see the mounds. Funkyubo are an early type of tomb mound, typically with a central burial, thought to be of somewhat of import, and then with secondary burials around, possibly relatives, or people are connected to them in some way. These mounded burials are only found at larger core settlements, and we'll discuss them more in a future episode. For now, just realize that we are seeing the start of social stratification on the archipelago. Why? I mean, is this just an overlay of some peninsular cultural construct? Possibly, but Mizoguchi has another suggestion. You see, under the Jomon system of food acquisition, there may have been some leaders, I mean people are still people, but there is no indication of any kind of elite group or class. Individual leadership would have been based most likely on one's expertise, and with a diverse landscape of food acquisition and preparation, there were probably experts in different areas. Some would have been expert fishermen, while others would have been expert hunters. Some were experts at crafting, or at the secret of finding and preparing certain plants and plant materials. We know there were specialists in various areas. The value of one's expertise, though, would fluctuate throughout the year, depending on the given situation. With full-scale rice agriculture, though, especially with wet rice agriculture, the "agricultural" experts became more and more central. After all, they were directing the creation of new paddings and irrigation, directing the planting, the harvesting. Even after the harvest, they would likely be responsible for overseeing the storage of the communal rice stores necessary in times of famine. It would become natural for people to look to these experts throughout the year, and they would have had a certain measure of control and responsibility over how the rice stores were allocated to various individuals in the community, providing an actual lever of power within the community. And it's in this that we see sown the seeds of inequality within the society. Someone like Karl Marx would likely point out how these leaders had taken control of the means of production, but that language may unfairly taint what was, in all likelihood, the organic growth of a system that, at least initially, proved itself to be an efficient means of directing the labor of the community. Over time, however, as these "agricultural" experts passed down their knowledge and perpetuated their expertise in their own lineages, one can see how dynastic lineages could develop. In here we can see the birth of chieftains and, eventually, of the kings referenced in the Chinese chronicles of the Middle and Late Yayoi periods. For now, it's sufficient to realize that what we are looking at is the emergence of stratification within the society, something that will only build over the next few centuries. So that's where we'll leave it for right now. To recap, we looked at the introduction of rice agriculture, most likely from the Korean Peninsula and most likely in more than one phase, and the mingling of Jomon and peninsular cultures that would create the basis of the Yayoi culture in Japan. We saw how this new agriculture would fit into the existing Jomon lifeways, becoming more and more important. For now, this culture is largely relegated to northern Kyushu, and already there are some tensions between the new Yayoi settlements and those that have remained purely Jomon. We also are taking a look at the start of apparent social stratification that comes along with the dominance of agriculture as a means of food acquisition. Next episode we'll talk about the role of bronze and iron, both how they arrive and what it means for the Yayoi society. From there we start to get into the proto-historical periods where we can start to combine information from the Chinese histories with the information from the archaeological records, even some of the early Japanese histories. We'll look at the initial formation on the archipelago of numerous states, which are eventually consolidated into one. Eventually touching on one of the most intriguing mysteries of the Yayoi and early Kofun periods, Queen Himiko and the formation of the Kingdom of Yamatai. Until then, thank you for all of your support. We've noticed more and more people coming to listen and we are glad that people appreciate this podcast. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and 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 Kofai site over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/podcasts, where we'll have some photos of various artifacts from the periods we've 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 Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. That's all for now. Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.