Subsistence

Jomon resource procurement strategies included hunting, gathering, fishing, and some food production. Food production was not as intensive as it was in cultures contemporary with the Jomon in China but may resemble that of the earliest agricultural peoples in northeastern China. Despite similar Upper Palaeolithic and Epi-Palaeolithic heritages on the mainland and on the Japanese archipelago, cultures in the two regions diverged dramatically by 7000 BC when people in what is now China were making a commitment to agriculture. The Jomon made no similar commitment. However, to call Jomon people strictly hunter-gatherers does not adequately characterize their economic system that lies partway along a continuum of hunting-gathering through agriculture. That is, they had a mixed economy of low-level resource production, hunting, gathering, and fishing. Some archaeologists believe that the Jomon were indeed agricultural. Nevertheless, Jomon people were able to call upon a variety of strategies to subsist depending on the habitats in which they were living. Identifying the specifics through time and region in Japan is difficult because most archaeology in Japan is a civil service endeavor meant to rescue ancient material ahead of modern development projects.

In regions where techniques such as flotation have been carried out to recover charred plant remains, a rich plant resource procurement regime is evident. In Hokkaido, for example, flotation has been conducted since the mid-1970s. Nuts are prevalent in the Initial Jomon subsistence but Early Jomon people collected fewer nuts. Instead small-grained seeds of grasses and annual plants were utilized, much as in Early Neolithic cultures in China and elsewhere. Several plants such as barnyard millet were planted in gardens. Bottle gourd, buckwheat, and azuki bean may also have been crops. By 1000 BC millets and rice from China were present as far north as northern Honshu at the Kazahari site. Most important plants for the Jomon flourished in human impacted and modified habitats by the Early Jomon period. Familiarity with plant management and gardening likely facilitated the adoption of Chinese cultigens and their rapid incorporation into the economy. The Satsumon and their descendents, the Ainu, had a substantially agricultural economy that was derived from the Tohoku Yayoi agricultural system. Similar interdisciplinary research in Okinawa, at the extreme southernmost end of the Japanese archipelago, shows that the island was first successfully colonized by people through the latter part of the Middle and Late Jomon periods. Archaeo-botanical data so far indicate that they succeeded there with a strictly hunting-gathering-fishing economy. It is quite rare for people to colonize small islands such as Okinawa without agriculture. They were able to adapt successfully by exploiting coral reef fish and probably nuts. This subsistence economy lasted for at least three thousand years.

See also: Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures; Chinese Civilization; Early Holocene Foragers; Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures.