Ancient & classical Japan

The Jomon: ten thousand years without agriculture

The oldest pottery in Japan is roughly sixteen thousand years old, which makes the Jomon tradition one of the earliest anywhere. That fact alone upends the tidy sequence most of us were taught — farming, then settlement, then pots. Here the pots came first, by a very long way, and the farming did not arrive for another ten millennia.

The name 縄文 means cord-marked, after the twisted rope pressed into the wet clay. The style runs from severe early vessels to the exuberant “flame-rimmed” pots of the middle period, whose rims writhe upward in shapes no cooking pot needs. What made a settled life possible without crops was the coastline: salmon runs, shellfish beds, deer and boar in the oak and chestnut forest, and nuts that could be stored through the winter. The shell middens left behind are so large that nineteenth-century surveyors mistook them for natural features.

The Yayoi: rice, metal and inequality

From around 300 BCE, migrants from the Korean peninsula and the Chinese mainland brought wet-rice paddy agriculture, bronze and iron into Kyushu, and the population began to climb steeply. Rice is the pivot of the whole story. A paddy field is a capital asset: it must be built, irrigated and defended, and it produces a storable surplus. Within a few centuries the archaeological record fills with moated settlements, weapons showing use, and burials that are conspicuously unequal.

The first written description of Japan comes from outside. A third-century Chinese chronicle, the Wei zhi, describes a land of Wa divided among scores of chiefdoms and dominated by a queen named Himiko, who ruled through “the way of the spirits” and lived attended by a thousand women. Where her domain of Yamatai actually was — northern Kyushu or the Nara basin — has been argued over for three hundred years and is not settled.

Kofun: the tomb builders and the Yamato state

From about 300 CE the elite began building enormous keyhole-shaped burial mounds — kofun. The largest, the Daisen Kofun at Sakai near Osaka, is around 486 metres long and sits inside a triple moat; by footprint it is one of the biggest tombs on earth, comfortably larger than the base of the Great Pyramid. Building it required organised labour on a scale that implies a state.

That state was Yamato, centred on the Nara basin, and it spent the Kofun centuries absorbing or subordinating rival chiefdoms. Its rulers claimed descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu — a claim later formalised in the eighth-century chronicles and still, in a much attenuated form, the basis of the imperial line's mystique.

Asuka: Buddhism, and a state assembled from Chinese parts

Buddhism arrived from the Korean kingdom of Baekje in the mid-sixth century — traditionally 538, sometimes given as 552 — and immediately became a proxy for a factional fight at court between the Soga, who backed it, and the Mononobe and Nakatomi, who did not. The Soga won, and with them won the whole apparatus that Buddhism carried: Chinese writing, continental architecture, calendars, medicine, and a model of centralised government.

Prince Shotoku (574–622) is the figure traditionally credited with the synthesis — the Seventeen-Article Constitution, the twelve court ranks, the embassies to Sui China, the founding of Horyu-ji. Modern historians treat much of the Shotoku legend as a later construction, but the direction of travel is not in doubt. It continued through the Taika Reform of 645 and culminated in the Taiho Code of 701, which laid out a Chinese-style ritsuryo state: land nationalised in principle, redistributed on a census, taxed in rice, cloth and labour.

It never worked as written. Powerful families and large temples secured tax-exempt estates — shoen — and over the next four centuries those estates quietly ate the public land system from the inside. That slow leak is the mechanism by which the classical state hollowed out.

Nara: a capital on a grid, and a very large Buddha

In 710 the court settled at Heijo-kyo, modern Nara, laid out on the grid plan of the Tang capital Chang'an. The eighty-four years that follow are short but dense. The Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720) put the imperial origin myths into writing. The Man'yoshu, an anthology of more than four thousand poems, collects verse from emperors and frontier conscripts alike.

And in 752 the court dedicated the Great Buddha of Todai-ji, a bronze figure some fifteen metres high whose casting consumed a significant part of the country's copper and, by the chronicles' own account, came close to bankrupting the state. The hall built to house it is still, after two reconstructions at reduced scale, one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. The project was explicitly political: a national network of provincial temples with Todai-ji at its head, and Buddhism as the ideological cement of a centralising state.

It worked rather too well. By the 780s the Nara clergy had become a political force in their own right, and the court's response was simply to leave — first briefly to Nagaoka, then permanently to a new site to the north.

Heian: four hundred years of exquisite paralysis

Heian-kyo, founded 794, is Kyoto. The court would remain there until 1868. The early Heian centuries saw the rise of the Fujiwara, who perfected a method of rule that required no throne at all: marry daughters to emperors, ensure the heir is your grandson, and govern as regent while the emperor is a child — then encourage him to abdicate young and repeat. Fujiwara no Michinaga, at the peak in the early eleventh century, was grandfather to three emperors.

Cut off from the continent after the embassies to Tang China lapsed in 894, the aristocracy turned inward and produced something remarkable. The invention of kana — a phonetic script that could write Japanese as it was actually spoken, rather than forcing it through Chinese characters — opened prose to writers who had not been trained in the Chinese classics. Which is to say: to women.

In spring, the dawn — when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book, opening lines (c. 1002)

Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, written around 1008, runs to fifty-four chapters and several hundred characters, and has a serious claim to be the first novel in any language — not merely a long story but a sustained study of interior life, memory and the passage of time. Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, from the same court and the same decade, is its opposite in temperament: sharp, snobbish, list-making, extremely funny.

Underneath the poetry competitions, the state was failing. Tax revenue kept vanishing into private estates. The court had no standing army and had abolished conscription in 792. Provincial security devolved onto armed landholders, who organised themselves into fighting households — and by the eleventh century two of those, the Taira and the Minamoto, were strong enough that the court could not settle its own succession disputes without hiring them.

In 1156 and 1160 it did exactly that. The Taira came out on top and, under Kiyomori, took over the capital and married into the imperial house in the approved Fujiwara style. The Minamoto regrouped in the east. The Genpei War of 1180–85 ended with the Taira destroyed at the sea battle of Dan-no-ura, the child emperor Antoku drowned by his grandmother rather than captured, and Minamoto no Yoritomo holding military power outright.

The court survived. It simply stopped mattering in the way it had. That is where the next chapter begins.

Visiting this period today

• Nara. Todai-ji, Kasuga Taisha's stone lanterns, and the Shosoin treasures — eighth-century objects from as far as Persia, shown in a short annual exhibition at the Nara National Museum each autumn.
• Horyu-ji and Asuka. Half a day from Nara; the Asuka countryside is best on a rented bicycle, with tomb mounds in the rice fields.
• Kyoto's older layer. Byodo-in at Uji — the Phoenix Hall on the ten-yen coin — is the surviving fragment of Fujiwara taste. Daigo-ji and To-ji hold early esoteric Buddhist sculpture.
• Hiraizumi, in Iwate: the Konjikido, a small hall sheathed entirely in gold leaf, built by a northern branch of the Fujiwara who were destroyed by Yoritomo in 1189.
• Sannai-Maruyama, Aomori, for the Jomon — and the Sakai kofun cluster near Osaka for the tomb-building age, best appreciated from the observation deck of the city hall, since you cannot get inside them.