History of Japan Traditionally The Yayoi Period

 Yayoi period

The Yayoi period (弥生時代, Yayoi jidai?) is an era in the history of Japan traditionally dated 300 BC to 300 AD. It is named after the neighbourhood of Tokyo where archaeologists first uncovered artifacts and features from that era.

Distinguishing characteristics of the Yayoi period include the appearance of new pottery styles and the start of an intensive rice agriculture in paddy fields. The Yayoi followed the Jōmon period (14,000 BC to 300 BC) and Yayoi culture flourished in a geographic area from southern Kyūshū to northern Honshū.

A new study used the Accelerator mass spectrometry method to analyze carbonized remains on pottery and wooden stakes, and discovered that these were dated back to 900 BC–800 BC, 500 years earlier than previously believed.

Yayoi Building

Origin of the Yayoi people The earliest archaeological sites are Itazuke site or Nabata site in the northern part of Kyūshū. The origin of Yayoi culture has long been debated. Chinese influence was obvious in the bronze and copper weapons, dōkyō, dōtaku, as well as irrigated paddy rice cultivation. Three major symbols of the Yayoi Culture are the bronze mirror, the bronze sword, and the royal seal stone.

In recent years, more archaeological and genetic evidence has been found in both eastern China and western Japan to lend credibility to this argument. Between 1996 and 1999, a team led by Satoshi Yamaguchi, a researcher at Japan's National Science Museum, compared Yayoi remains found in Japan's Yamaguchi and Fukuoka prefectures with those from early Han Dynasty (202 BC-8) in China's coastal Jiangsu province, and found many similarities between the skulls and limbs of Yayoi people and the Jiangsu remains. Two Jiangsu skulls showed spots where the front teeth had been pulled, a practice common in Japan in the Yayoi and preceding Jōmon period. The genetic samples from three of the 36 Jiangsu skeletons also matched part of the DNA base arrangements of samples from the Yayoi remains.

Emergence of Wa in Chinese history texts The earliest written records about people in Japan are from Chinese sources from this period. Wa, the Japanese pronunciation of an early Chinese name for Japan, was mentioned in 57 AD; the Na state of Wa received a golden seal from the Emperor Guangwu of the Later Han Dynasty. This event was recorded in the Hou Han Shu compiled by Fan Ye in the 5th century. The seal itself was discovered in northern Kyūshū in the 18th century. Wa was also mentioned in 257 in the Wei zhi, a section of the San Guo Zhi compiled by the 3rd century scholar Chen Shou.

Yayoi Farming

Early Chinese historians described Wa as a land of hundreds of scattered tribal communities, not the unified land with a 700-year tradition as laid out in the 8th-century work Nihon Shoki, a part-mythical, part-historical account of Japan which dates the foundation of the country at 660 BC. Archaeological evidences also suggest that frequent conflicts between settlements or statelets broke out in the period. Many excavated settlements were moated or built at the tops of hills. Headless buried human bones discovered in Yoshinogari site are regarded as the typical example of the presumption. In the coastal area of the Inland Sea, stone tips of arrows were often included in the burial goods.