The islands of Honshu and Hokkaido were again separated, and Japan was once more isolated geographically. The land bridges that had provided walkways for such Paleolithic inhabitants of Japan as giant woolly mammoths, deer and humans were submerged for the final time. As the climate warmed, the polar ice caps melted and the sea levels rose. 300 BC)Ībout 20,000 years ago, the world’s fourth (and most recent) ice age ended. In perpetuating his fraud, in other words, Fujimura was catering to the sense of Japanese narcissism and exceptionalism (nihonjin-ron) that is not very far beneath the surface of contemporary Japanese public opinion.Ģ. All this helps to explain why neither the media (at first) nor archeological specialists saw through the fraud. Fujimura’s “discoveries” thus fueled a rapidly developing “early Paleolithic” boom that sold newspapers and books and created a self-satisfied stir among ordinary people. In Japan, the emphasis is on “the older the better,” especially if Japanese origins in any field predate Chinese or Korean developments. Fujimura’s crime reflected not only his own desire to become famous, but also a Japanese fascination with the origins of the Japanese people and Japanese society. Research in this period has been complicated by the fact that an amateur archeologist named Fujimura Shin’ichi was caught “salting” various sites with alleged very old Paleolithic artifacts. This helps distinguish its inhabitants from those of the following eras. Since no pottery has yet been discovered, on the other hand, the Paleolithic Period in Japan is also sometimes referred to as the “pre-ceramic” (sendoki) period. While the tools prior to that time are so crude that there is some debate over whether they were made by humans, surviving late Paleolithic artifacts include finely made blade tools similar to groups in Siberia and the rest of Eurasia, and axes made from ground stone. While many believe that they came earlier, we know for certain that these hunters arrived in Japan at least as early as 35,000 BC. Traveling in small groups and using stone-tipped weapons, they followed herds of wild animals including mammoths, elephants and deer across land bridges to Japan that had formed when the seas receded during the ice ages. The first human beings to inhabit the islands we know as Japan appear to have been stone-age hunters from northeast Asia. While the dating of these periods is complex (see accompanying chart) and the cultures in any case tended to overlap, it is clear that early Japan underwent profound changes in each of these important periods.ġ. Some of this material has been adapted from the author’s previous work in Martin Collcutt, Marius Jansen and Isao Kumakura, The Cultural Atlas of Japan, Facts on File, New York, 1988.Įarly Japanese history is traditionally divided into five major eras: the Paleolithic (c. Editor's Note: This article was originally written for Japan Society's previous site for educator's, Journey through Japan," in 2003.
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