If Charles Dawson of Piltdown fame was the ‘‘Wizard of Sussex’’, a title earned for his spectacular luck at finding important geological, palaeontological, and archaeological specimens, he surely was trumped by Shinichi Fujimura upon whom was bestowed by his colleagues the sobriquet ‘‘the hand of God’’.
Fujimura was the ostensible archetype of the amateur who makes a significant contribution to scientific knowledge, not because of formal, university training, but as the simple result of his great inborn love for science. Fujimura had no particular background in archaeology but, instead, worked in the 1970s for an electronics manufacturer in Japan. Fujimura, however, had a passionate amateur interest in the human past in general and that of his home country, Japan, in particular and began to participate as a volunteer in digs in the 1970s. He quickly garnered the respect of many professional archaeologists and established a reputation for having an uncanny, some called it divine, ability to find important and surprisingly ancient specimens.
When Fujimura began his amateur quest in the 1970s, the prehistory of his nation was comparatively shallow, its oldest sites dating to about 30 000 and, at most, 35 000 years ago. Compare this with the much deeper record on the Asian mainland, where fossil hominid sites dating to more than 500 000 years ago had been known since the early 1930s (the oldest sites in China now may date to more than 1.5 million years ago). In the 1970s, Japanese prehistory appeared to be a mere afterthought.
Fujimura changed all that. Following his spectacular discovery in 1981 of the then oldest artifacts ever found in Japan, dating to more than 40 000 years ago, Fujimura was able to devote his time entirely to Japanese archaeology when grateful colleagues acknowledged his contribution by appointing him to the important post of Deputy Director of the Tohoku Paleolithic Institute.
Fujimura appeared to use his time well. Between 1981 and 2000, almost yearly, Fujimura or archaeologists working under or alongside him found successively older archaeological sites in Japan. Student and professional archaeologists from across Japan and, in fact, from all over the world, came to excavate with the man who had the ‘‘hand of God’’, and they rarely were disappointed. In this period, Fujimura worked on upward of 180 ancient sites and, by 2000, he had nearly single-handedly expanded Japanese prehistory more than tenfold, from a relatively shallow 30 000 years to an impressive and expansive 400 000 years. Fujimura had become a respected member of the scientific community and a well-known, even revered, public figure.
An undercurrent of rumor and innuendo, admittedly some of it based on resentment of Fujimura’s incredible luck, but some based on reasonable doubts about his remarkable and singular ability to find old sites, swirled around his work. Skepticism about his uncanny abilities to find ever older sites was generally ascribed to little more than professional jealousy. Nevertheless, in late October 2000, in an attempt to address these rumors, a Japanese daily newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun, took the extreme step of setting up a hidden camera at a site on which Fujimura was working. In an extraordinarily dramatic turn of events, that camera caught Fujimura actually planting artifacts in an ancient stratigraphic layer. Within 24 h, Fujimura ‘‘discovered’’ those same artifacts in his excavation of the site.
Investigators held back with their damning evidence of fraud, hoping to see what Fujimura would do next. They did not have to wait long. Unaware entirely that he had been caught, Fujimura called a press conference the next day to announce his spectacular ‘‘discovery’’, asserting that he found the stone tools under a geological layer firmly dated to 570 000 years ago, making them, by far, the oldest human-made objects yet found in Japan.
Less than a week after the press conference, in the 5 November edition of Mainichi Shimbun, still images from the hidden video revealed the terrible truth to Japanese prehistorians, a Japanese public fascinated by their own prehistory, and the world at large.
A shaken, contrite, and clearly devastated Fujimura, his head down and shoulders slumped, made a public confession, apologizing profusely and piteously to his countrymen and to archaeologists everywhere, initially admitting to fraud in only two instances, the taped incident and at one additional site. Fujimura complained that he was a victim of his own success. His ability to find progressively older sites, he explained, had led to the expectation on the part of his colleagues that he would continue to find sites older still. His moral and ethical lapse, he rationalized, were the result of this enormous pressure.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be another lie in Fujimura’s web of deceit. Mainichi Shimbun continued its investigation and determined that Fujimura planted artifacts, not at two sites, but at more than 42 sites, leading textbook publishers in Japan to announce that new editions of works detailing Japanese prehistory would be published, retracting the claims of great antiquity based on Fujimura’s fakes.
A combination of a longing for the respect of and acceptance by the archaeological community and a desire to provide his nation with a depth of antiquity the equal to any led to Shinichi Fujimura’s deceit and, ultimately, his disgrace. With the exposure of Fujimura’s fakery, Japan’s deep time has evaporated. Japanese prehistorians are faced with the difficult task of untangling Fujimura’s frauds from legitimate finds tainted by his association with them as Deputy Director of the Tohoku Paleolithic Institute. Only in this way can the damage wrought by Fujimura be addressed, and only in this way can it be determined if Japanese prehistory is back where it was more than 30 years ago before Fujimura began his career of fakery, with a time depth of no more than about 30 000 years.
World History
