Japan is a chain of islands stretching about 3,000 kilometers from the cold seas near Russia to the subtropical waters near Taiwan. Four main islands, Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, hold most of the people. About three quarters of the land is mountain or steep hillside, so people have always crowded onto narrow plains along the coasts and rivers. The islands sit where several plates of the Earth's crust meet, which brings volcanoes, hot springs, earthquakes and tsunamis. The sea worked as both a moat and a road. At its narrowest point, the strait between Kyushu and Korea is roughly 200 kilometers wide, with the island of Tsushima in the middle, close enough for boats to carry people, goods and ideas, but far enough to keep invaders away most of the time.
The Jomon: pottery before farming
The first long era of settled life is called Jomon, meaning "cord marked," after the patterns pressed into its clay vessels. Jomon pottery is among the oldest known anywhere: fragments from a site in Aomori have been dated to more than 15,000 years ago. This surprised archaeologists, who long assumed that pottery came after farming. Yet the Jomon people lived mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering, harvesting nuts, shellfish, deer and salmon from rich forests and coasts. Some settled in large villages. At Sannai-Maruyama in northern Honshu, a community lasted for over a thousand years, roughly 3900 to 2200 BCE, and raised a great structure on wooden posts a meter thick.
The Yayoi: rice, bronze and iron
Starting in northern Kyushu, perhaps around 900 BCE (older textbooks said 300 BCE, but radiocarbon dates pushed it back), a new way of life spread east. Migrants from the Korean peninsula brought wet-rice farming, along with bronze and iron. This Yayoi culture cleared land for flooded paddies, stored grain and built moated villages. Rice meant surplus, and surplus meant inequality and war: skeletons with arrowheads lodged in them and ditched settlements such as Yoshinogari in Kyushu show a more violent world. Genetic studies suggest that most people in Japan today descend from a mix of Jomon ancestors and later migrants from the mainland. The Ainu of the north and the people of Okinawa carry a larger share of Jomon ancestry.
Japan in Chinese eyes
Japan had no writing of its own yet, so its first written history comes from Chinese officials, who called the islands Wa. In 57 CE a Chinese emperor gave a gold seal to an envoy from Wa; a seal matching that description was found by a farmer in Kyushu in 1784. Far richer is a passage in the Wei zhi, a Chinese chronicle compiled in the late third century, which describes a queen named Himiko. She ruled a land called Yamatai, the chronicle says, practiced a form of sorcery that held the people in awe, stayed unmarried and was rarely seen, while a younger brother handled government. In 239 she sent envoys to the Wei court in northern China, and Himiko received a royal title and a gift of bronze mirrors. Where Yamatai lay has been argued over for three centuries. One camp places it in northern Kyushu, near the route to the mainland; another in the Nara basin, where a large early site called Makimuku has been excavated. Its location is still unsettled.
The age of great tombs
From the middle of the third century to around the seventh, rulers were buried in vast mounds, giving the Kofun ("old tomb") period its name. The most distinctive are keyhole-shaped mounds, square at the front and round at the back, often ringed with moats and lined with clay figures called haniwa. The largest, the Daisen tomb in Sakai near Osaka, is about 486 meters long. Tradition assigns it to Emperor Nintoku, but nobody can test the claim, because imperial authorities restrict access to tombs they class as royal, and digging inside is forbidden. The spread of the keyhole form across much of Japan suggests a network of chiefs allied to a dominant power in the Yamato region around Nara. Swords inscribed in the late fifth century, one found near Tokyo and one in Kyushu, name the same great king, showing how far Yamato's reach extended.
Worked example: reading the Wei zhi on Himiko
How should a historian treat the only written description of Japan's first named ruler? Start with who wrote it. The Wei zhi was compiled by Chinese scholars who may never have visited the islands; they relied on envoys' reports and fitted what they heard into Chinese ideas about distant peoples, whom they ranked by how politely they paid tribute. Its directions to Yamatai, taken literally, would place it in the ocean far south of Kyushu. So details of custom and geography need caution. Other parts hold up better. The dates of the embassies match Chinese court records, and bronze mirrors of Chinese style have been dug up in large numbers in Japan, though experts dispute whether some were made in Japan to look Chinese. A careful reader concludes that a female ruler with religious authority probably led a powerful alliance in the third century, while admitting that her kingdom's map is lost. The lesson reaches beyond Japan: early peoples without writing often enter history through the eyes of strangers, and reading those strangers well means asking what they could see and what they wanted to see.