Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives on Insular East Asia

by Keiji Imamura

In the past few years, there has been a growing appreciation by Western scholars of the vast scale, great achievements, and methodological originality of Japanese archaeologists. However, an understanding of the results of their work has been hampered in the West by a lack of up-to-date and authoritative texts in English. This book provides Western readers for the first time with a uniquely East Asian perspective of Japanese archaeology.

Prehistoric Japan is organized into 16 chapters covering the environment, the history of the Japanese investigations of their past, the peculiarities of Japanese scholars' interests and methodologies, the organization and material culture of previous Japanese societies, economic trade and the question of immigration, the political unification of Japan, and the relationships between the core islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu to Hokkaido in the north and the Ryukyu Islands to the south.

Genres: Japan, History, Archaeology, Nonfiction, Prehistory, Asia

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is written by a Japanese researcher specifically for Anglophone foreigners without previous knowledge of Japanese archaeology. It was a perfect match for my level, and exceptionally systematic, concise, and clear. After a little bit about Ice Age inhabitants of Japan, mostly on the evidence of stone tools, the largest part of the book is about the Jomon period, which lasted through almost all the time since the Ice Age ended. It started with the invention of pottery - Japanese pottery may be the oldest in the whole world. Pretty soon, people all over Japan were living in sedentary but egalitarian villages eating mostly wild land plants and sea animals. There seem to have been major increases and collapses in population during the Jomon period, but no major discontinuities in culture. Then immigrants from Korea introduced highly productive wet-rice cultivation and iron technology around 500 BCE, which touched off one of the biggest social upheavals in world history. In only a thousand years, the egalitarian villages transformed into a unified and stratified empire controlling most of the area that the modern nation-state does. The coverage in this book trails off around there, except for a few comments on Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islands, which didn't adopt agriculture. This book could be out of date by now, but I couldn't find any more recent equivalent.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare look at Japanese archaeology that needs updating big-time. Still, it can help the reader develop a narrative of what the heck went down in the Jomon times and in the Yayoi era. Did a technologically advanced society violently replace the original Japanese beginning in 1000BC, or did the original Japanese run with the technology that was introduced, while easing the immigrants into their society? Well, to answer that question, you will still have to use your imagination, but at least you will get a better picture of what their weapons looked like.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall an excellent introduction to prehistory Japan archaeological research.

In an ideal world I'd love to see this text with color photos of the topics being discussed. But as far as providing the needed information in a scholarly text, this book is more than adequate.

Some information is dated at this point. Further studies have located examples of pottery in Russia and China which predate Japanese sites. The Fujimura hoax materials are also included, though treated as an odd outlier.

[Mike Perrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book is useful on some micro-scales (it's in English, it presents a good generalised introduction to the Japanese Paleolithic, it has an extensive bibliography), it is unfortunately out of date and has poorly compiled graphic data.

[ruby]

very cool to learn about