Confessions of a Very Serious and Diligent Japanese Office Worker (Japanese Edition)

You might think Japanese people are too strict with time and they should be big-hearted, but as you are staying in Japan, you had better adapt to this culture. However, this thinking is getting conservative because the tasks we have to do are increasing, there are some co-workers who want to do everything by themselves, and it might make them annoyed; or you might spoil them and have to do everything for them even it is super easy. If you want to know they need your help or not, you should ask other co-workers who you can trust.

Despite the 2 elements attire and punctuality mentioned above, you may also have to follow the office regulations, which you will learn about it from your boss or personnel management officer when go to the office on the first day for work. Do you wonder why do companies need regulations even most of them has already come to manhood?

The regulations are basically enacted to make employees behave properly as member of the office, however, they also include rules about compliance. Though these are much less than school regulations, some rules could be unwritten it means they should be understood and kept in mind without guidance. For example, you should prefer call to e-mail if you need to be absent from work on urgent business or sick even some offices accept absence notification by e-mail or SMS.

In the first place, they are established not only to do the right thing as employees, but also to work in a lively manner. Some Japanese co-workers might be shy, but they probably are eager to get along well with you. Be cheerful, and help each other. Guidable Japan is a platform that offers guidance to Non-Japanese people who want to visit or are living in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Public services in Japan are known to be very efficient, but sometimes the language and cultural barrier gets in the way of taking advantage of them. We do this by sharing interesting articles about society, lifestyle, culture, and everyday life in Japan. We want everyone to live comfortably in the Land of the Rising Sun.

There are three main islands and a large number of small ones. One ancient name for the country was "the 88 islands". The biggest island is Honshu which means mainland , the next in size is Kyushu which means 9 provinces , and the third is Shikoku which means 4 provinces. When the country was first unified politically, the government laid out a series of routes it would be stretching it to call them roads which, because of the mountains, established natural regions. It is well to get familiar with these because you will see these names all of the time.

The Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku side of Honshu was called the Sanyodo route on the sunny side of the mountains and the Japan Sea route on the other side of Honshu was the Sanindo the shady side. The mountains between these are particularly rough, so these really are almost different worlds. Honshu north and east of the ancient capital area modern Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara is wider, and so there were three routes, one on the Japan Sea coast, Hokurikudo northern route , and two on the Pacific Ocean side of the main mountains, the Tokaido eastern ocean route and the Tosando eastern mountain route , which meet each other north of Mt Fuji and near the future location of Tokyo.

Other terms that are widely used are Tohoku meaning northeast for the far northeastern part of the country, Kanto east of the barrier for the large plain surrounding modern Tokyo, Kansai west of the barrier for the capital area, which is also called Kinai inner region or Kinki near by region. The area between the Kanto and the Kansai is often called Chubu middle part. There are three different schemes for dividing Japan into administrative units. In the late 7th and early 8th centuries the government set up a system that created what we conventionally refer to as provinces.

When the system was finalized there were 66 of them. A province was given a local government structure that included a governor who was sent out from the capital. Even after that system collapsed the feudal regimes of the medieval period continued to use the province as a convenient geographical descriptor, and the system was not formally abolished until the 19th century. Then the government established a new system with different units that we have agreed to call prefectures in English.

There are 47 prefectures, so they are bigger than the old provinces, and their names and boundaries ignore the province system completely. In between, the Tokugawa Shogunate had its own system which was entirely different. It is hard to describe briefly because it was constantly changing with the ebb and flow of politics.

There was no formal division of this area into units. The rest of the country was assigned to quasi-feudal vassals as privately held domains called han. The larger han were directly administered by their owners who collected their own taxes and maintained their own military forces. The smaller han were usually fictional in that the central government ran them and the owner was entitled to a fixed annual revenue paid out of the government treasury. The biggest han were all located on the periphery of the country and might be as big as a prefecture, but many were quite small.

The government liked to keep the vassals who had han nervous and obedient. Han were constantly being enlarged or shrunk. Many were abolished and many new ones were established over the years. Han lords daimyo were not infrequently forced to give up one han and move to another on the other side of the country. It is therefore not really possible to create a map of han. It would require a large book of maps to show all of the changes in the system.

There is also a "List of Han" that is self-described as incomplete. However, it includes the major ones. I strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in historical topics should buy a modern tourist guidebook to Japan as a source of good maps and geographical information, although everything will be shown and described in terms of the modern prefectures. A large proportion of the tourist highlights are things that have survived from earlier historical periods and these will be described and pictured.

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There is also a list of Prefectures on the page "Japan Today". In the 19th century a system was devised for rendering Japanese syllabic script into our alphabet by a missionary named Hepburn. This became widely used and you will find it in many older books.

There is a description in Wikipedia under "Hepburn Romanization" It was replaced almost universally in the English speaking world by a new system that makes it particularly easy for English speaking people to pronounce Japanese, at the cost of leaving certain things out. This is confusingly called the "Modified Hepburn System," though it is very different from the original.

I believe that it was mainly created by E. Reischauer, historian and sometime US ambassador to Japan. There is a similar system, nearly identical, in fact, which was officially adopted by the Japanese government.

However, the Japanese do not romanize Japanese often, roman letters romaji in Japanese being normally used only for foreign words and phrases, so you will see the American "modified Hepburn" system more often than anything else. There are no sounds in Japanese that are not also in English and the spelling is regular. All consonants are the same as ours. The letter "i" is pronounced as it would be in Italian or Spanish, which is to say like the "e" in me. The "e" is pronounced as in merry. The sound we mostly use "i" for is spelled "ai" in Japanese. The letter "o" is always the "o" in row a boat , and the "u" is always like shoe.

The letter "a" by itself is as in father. If you should listen to the way that Japanese pronounce things, you will hear them pronounce the same vowels in two different ways. One variant is short and quick, in the other the sound is held much longer than we ever do in English. Tokyo sounds more like To-o-kyo-o. Technically, one is supposed to indicate this by using a macron over "o" and "u" when they are lengthened, but this causes so much trouble in practice, especially with computers searching and sorting are both messed up , that it is almost never done.

That is about the only thing that is different. For those who know Japanese it is relatively easy to know when to use long and when to use short vowels. That is because this issue came into the language with the adoption of many Chinese loanwords. There are a lot more sounds in Chinese than in Japanese. The word that the Japanese represent as "chu" with a long "uu," for example, is pronounced as "jung" in modern Chinese. The Japanese can't handle the "ng" sound and the long "u" is the result. The Japanese actually spell this out in their syllabary, writing the equivalent of "Toukyou" or "chuu".

The original Hepburn notation captured this distinction. However, it has many annoying features and the new system is better. I should perhaps mention that I am only talking about systems intended for English speakers. There are many others in the world, and since they are designed with the spelling conventions of a different language in mind, they often look strange to our eyes. I have seen the French and German ones.

In Chapter 9 of the first volume of the Cambridge History of Japan Edwin Cranston observes that the modern Japanese have what is probably the most complicated writing system in the world. Fortunately, it is not really necessary to know anything about it in order to explore Japanese history. There is an article on it in Wikipedia, and a wikibook for learners at Japanese. The main complicating factor is that in nearly all cases Chinese characters are used for the very large number of Chinese loan words in Japanese. These are pronounced according to Japanese renderings of the original Chinese.

Nearly every character also has one or more additional readings which are native Japanese words, and characters are routinely used in normal writing with these readings also. Since Japanese is an inflected language one in which words are changed to reflect differences in grammatical usage and Chinese characters don't inflect, an inflected word is written using a Chinese character to establish the main meaning and then the inflected ending is spelled out using Japanese-developed characters that represent one of 51 different syllables.

There are two independent versions of this "syllabary", one with "curvy" characters hiragana and one with angular ones katakana. The first is used most commonly, these days, with the second used in ways similar to the ways we use bold-face or italic characters, or for spelling foreign words. Both can therefore be used in the same block of text. Often foreign words are converted to sounds that the Japanese can say and are spelled out using katakana, but it is also not uncommon to simply plug in the original roman letters. One block of text can therefore use four different writing systems.

Complicated indeed, you don't need to know this but it is good to understand the difficulties the translator faces. Both Korea and Japan adopted the Chinese calendar system and retained it until they switched to the western system in recent times.

The Chinese system was a complex one that was a mixture of lunar and solar elements. There are good articles on this in Wikipedia, including details of both the Chinese and Japanese variants. The everyday calendar was a lunar one which would inevitably fall out of synchronization with the solar calendar. This was handled by making adjustments on the same general principle as our "leap year".

An extra month was added whenever necessary to prevent new year's day from deviating too much from its "home position" in the solar calendar. This is because the lunar month was set at 30 days, which means days to the year. An extra month was not added every year, and the rules for deciding when to do it are the main difference between the Chinese and Japanese versions of the system. Most people will be aware that the Chinese lunar new year occurs later than our modern new year, and that it occurs on different dates from year to year.

There are names for the months in Japanese but they are not used in official documents, even today. It is simply first month, second month, and so on. It is possible to convert dates from the lunar calendar to the modern calendar, but it would be a lot of trouble and no one bothers. If you see a date in historical writing that says 15th day of the 3rd month, it will be a lunar calendar date and it will probably not fall in March.

After the Japanese changed to the modern calendar, authors will usually write March 15th though the Japanese still say 3rd month. The exact date is not really so important unless you want to organize a celebration of the thousandth anniversary of some famous event. A more serious matter for the reader of history is counting years. The Romans dated everything by the names of the two consuls for the year. You would need to have a complete list one was on display in the Forum in order to arrange things in their proper order. The Chinese were not quite as bad, but almost.

They very early developed the custom of proclaiming an auspicious "reign title," something like "perfect harmony" and then dating things in terms of that. If "perfect harmony" then suffered some catastrophe, like a dangerous rebellion, the court might very well decide to change its luck by coming up with a new name. This could happen at any time during the year. So, the 14th day of the 5th month of the 6th year of "perfect harmony" could be followed by the 15th day of the 5th month of the first year of "glorious dawn. And, as in the Roman case, you need to have a list of all the reign names to keep track.

This system was started by the Han dynasty in BC. Every dynasty used its own titles often recycling names already used one or more times. Taking only important dynasties, there are just under of them. Initially the Korean kingdoms simply used the Chinese titles, but they soon enough started inventing their own, as did the Japanese. This is where the January problem comes in. In Japan the first year of Kansei "lenient government" corresponds approximately to If I write Kansei first year, first month, first day, that is a purely Japanese date.

If I try to make things clearer by saying , first month, first day, you might now be thinking something very different.

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What I will do in my essays is use most of the time because it should not be necessary for a reader to have a list of all of the year names. However, this will be a lunar date and the first day of the year would not be January first, but sometime in the spring. If I should have some reason to use more precise dates, then I will say Kansei 1 Should it ever come up, there is a program on the Web called "nengocalc". Nengocalc permits you to reliably convert back and forth from traditional dates to modern dates. The Japanese still use reign titles, by the way, but they now follow the convention started by the Chinese in the Ming dynasty where each emperor uses only one.

If I have counted correctly the official Japanese total is now , including a period in the 14th century when there were rival emperors using different titles simultaneously. There were also "unofficial" titles used at various times in the past. The reign title associated with the current emperor is Heisei. Heisei 1 was After his death the emperor will be known as "the Heisei Emperor. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese names are always written family name first. Writers in English frequently reverse them, but this opens the way to confusion and I prefer to keep the proper order at all times.

Mao is the family name and Tse-tung the personal name. In China the Ch'in dynasty began a convention that continued down to the end of the dynastic system whereby an emperor was given a reign name that had no relation to the name he had borne previously to his enthronement. This name was usually awarded only after his death, and it was often descriptive. For example, the most militaristic of the Han emperors is named Han Wu-ti, meaning "the martial emperor of the Han dynasty. For the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties the emperor's posthumous name was the same as the reign title used when he was alive.

That has also become the rule in Japan but applies only to the last four emperors, the Meiji Emperor, the Taisho Emperor, the Showa Emperor, and the reigning Heisei Emperor. Prior to that each emperor was given a posthumous name separately from the system of reign titles. This custom was started late in the 8th century but all earlier emperors were given reign names at that point and historians routinely use them because they are short and simple and at no time is it considered proper to identify the living emperor by using his ordinary name.

Incipient 16,, years ago , Initial 10, , Early , , Middle 5,, , Late 4,, and Final 3,, , with the phases getting progressively shorter. There were definitely modern humans, Homo Sapiens, in Japan during the latter parts of the Pleistocene period, the great ice ages. Japan was connected to the mainland at several periods during that era, both to the southern end of Korea and to Siberia, and the animal and plant and human populations seem to have been identical to those in the adjacent parts of the mainland.

The sea levels were very much lower than in our age hundreds of feet lower and it is likely that most human remains in this area are under deep water. When the islands were disconnected from Asia for the final time things inevitably changed. The megafauna elephants, tigers, and giant deer died out, the plant life began to change radically, and the sea levels rose rapidly. The people trapped on the islands had to change their way of life.

Similar things happened almost everywhere in the temperate zones of the world. In Europe the change is often identified as a transition from paleolithic to mesolithic, from a life hunting large animals that roamed in large herds on open lands, to a life hunting smaller animals that lived alone or in small groups hidden in thick forests. In Japan, this is the transition to Jomon.

The name "mesolithic" is not used in Japan, because in Europe it refers to particular types of stone tools that do not occur in Japan. The name Jomon is a translation to Japanese of the English term "cord marked" which was applied to describe the general appearance of Jomon pottery by its original American discoverer. The Jomon culture is old. The oldest radiocarbon dates are presently about 10, BC and older, undated, sites are known.

When this was realized in the 's there was considerable excitement, because even the earliest Jomon sites show the use of pottery. It was then and still remains today after many discoveries of early pottery elsewhere in the world the oldest pottery known. The initial discoveries were of a relatively late phase BC or so when the Jomon people were living in villages and making art pottery as well as useful items, and because of the pottery and the nature of the stone tools that were being made, it was first announced that the Jomon culture was "neolithic".

However, in the world at large neolithic usually is taken to refer to agricultural societies, and the Jomon people were not farmers. They were among a quite small number of pre-agricultural peoples who lived in an environment that was rich enough that people could settle in permanent villages without farming. As a result, Japanese archaeologists prefer to avoid the use of the term neolithic and simply use Jomon. Jomon culture lasted for a long time, isolated on the Japanese islands.

Books in English will tell you that the transition to the subsequent Yayoi culture occurred sometime around or BC. The actual date is more like or BC a very recent discovery discussed later. From the Jomon perspective this is an insignificant change. This was a culture that lasted for about 10, years.

During that time the ecology of the Japanese islands was constantly changing and the Jomon people had to change with it. At any particular time there was only a relatively small portion of the country that could support a population dense enough for villages, and in different periods this portion was not always in the same place. This extremely long life tells us that conditions in Japan were not good for the independent development of farming.

The forests were heavy and there were no native edible plants with revolutionary potential. The most important single plant food source throughout Jomon was nuts gathered in the forests. The total population has been estimated based on counting house sites at from 50, to , people, the overwhelming majority of whom were concentrated in eastern Japan in modern Tokyo and regions extending westward into nearby hills where hunting appears to have been particularly successful, mainly for Japanese "shika" deer and wild pigs. Shell mounds are common, and fishing, including deep sea fishing, was important.

After BC the climate changed considerably getting colder which affected the makeup of the trees of the forest, ending the Middle Jomon. The population crashed and moved to new areas in the Late Jomon. Many different kinds of nuts were relied upon at different times as the climate varied. Some types of nuts are "ready to eat" and others require processing to remove tannins, and this greatly affected the density of the population at different times.

The east now lost easy to handle acorns and had to shift to difficult to handle horse chestnuts. A coastal area northeast of Tokyo received a culture which clearly continued the traditions of middle Jomon. It is this culture that provides the most spectacular Jomon pottery, the "Kamegaoka style", and other art, justifiably popular in museums.

A significantly different culture emerged in Kyushu with a quite different kind of pottery, a plain, black ware. This culture has attracted a great deal of attention because many archaeologists see signs of incipient agriculture, though it definitely continued to rely on gathered wild nuts as the primary source of plant food. The total population was quite small. I have seen estimates of 5, or 6, people for Kyushu, with maybe twice as many in the northeast.

Large parts of Kyushu are covered by volcanic rocks and cannot support the density of forests that existed elsewhere and this restricted the population. The transition from Jomon to Yayoi occurred in northern Kyushu. The Yayoi culture named after a neighborhood in Tokyo where the first remains were recognized was made up of rice farmers using an already mature technology involving irrigation. By the end of the period they were making bronze objects of sufficient quality that it is possible to argue about whether certain ones were made in Japan or China, and also iron tools and weapons.

The biggest topic of discussion is whether the Jomon people acquired these new technologies from Korea and converted themselves into Yayoi people, or whether the Yayoi people were immigrants. I will explore the arguments, but it is pretty certain that the Yayoi people were immigrants. The Jomon population of Kyushu was very small and the early Yayoi population was comparatively large. There is evidence that Yayoi practices spread rapidly eastward as far as the area of modern Nagoya, where there was a pause.

Its spread from there to the northeast appears to have been accomplished in large part by converting Jomon people to the new way of life. The pottery of the early Yayoi culture in the northeast shows characteristic Jomon decorative elements that are completely unknown in the west. Probably the most important fact in this context is that there was a widespread culture in southern Korea, known as "Mumun", after its characteristic pottery, that was extremely similar to Yayoi, so much so that in the early period it is sometimes very difficult to tell them apart.

This has become much better known in recent years as South Korea is now rich enough to spend significant money on archaeology, and it is pretty clear that the arrival of Yayoi in Japan was the result of immigration of people from Mumun Korea. It was formerly thought that the two were about the same age so that both might have arrived together from somewhere on the Chinese coast though no one could suggest where , but it is now clear that Mumun is significantly older than Yayoi.

The above is not intended to attempt a real description of Jomon culture or trace its evolution through multiple phases. For a good, not excessively long, treatment in English the following is recommended:. Imamura Keiji , Prehistoric Japan: University of Hawai'i Press.

This book also covers Yayoi and the beginnings of the following Kofun period. It was written before the recent revolution in dating referred to above, for which you must look in the chapter on the Yayoi period. When considering the Late Jomon period the first thing that leaps to my attention is the fact that the two main centers in the Tohoku and in Kyushu were radically different in important ways.

The Tohoku culture continued the general Jomon tendency to ever more complicated pottery styles, whereas the Kyushu culture gradually eliminated nearly all ornament, ending up with simple black burnished wares. The large zone between them was thinly inhabited so far as house sites are concerned, and one must think that they had scarcely any contact with each other. Also, the Tohoku culture continued a general multi-faceted type of subsistence culture, with emphasis on both hunting and fishing plus the gathering and preservation of horse chestnuts.

In Kyushu there was some fishing along the northern coast, but the culture seems to have focused on exploiting plant food sources to the maximum extent possible, so much so that many archaeologists feel that they were verging upon agriculture, or what is sometimes called horticulture, meaning the cultivation of things like legumes rather than grain crops. However, it has to be noted that lately some sites that were formerly called "Final Jomon" have been reclassified as "Early Yayoi," taking with them much of the evidence like a couple of rice grains stuck to a pot for incipient agriculture.

It certainly seems fair to speculate that the people in Kyushu were now in contact with whoever lived in Korea at the time and had become a separate culture that should no longer be considered typically Jomon. I don't know of any archaeologist who has gone quite that far.

The main plant food source was a type of warm climate acorn that was not available elsewhere in Japan at the time. These were preserved in pits dug into bogs so that the acorns were under water. This doesn't sound promising, but it apparently works very well. In an acorn was germinated that had been preserved this way for over years. According to Imamura Keiji this technique goes back all the way to early Jomon in Kyushu and continued to be used into historical times.

Now we have to look at the revolution in dates. Every book that I know of in English is based on a scheme of dating which was challenged in and is now considered to be completely overthrown. This happened because of the introduction of a new method of dating based on carbon isotope ratios. Radiocarbon dating became important in the study of prehistory starting in , but the method used was based on relatively crude measurements by recording radioactive decay using essentially a Geiger counter.

This required a large sample of material which is often difficult to find, especially given that the sample of biological material must be securely tied to the overall date of the archaeological site, which is often not easy to do. The new technique is called "accelerator mass spectrometry" or AMS and it is based on actually counting individual atoms of carbon. The sample required is small. In the case of Jomon and Yayoi period sites in Japan, the most common source of a sample for AMS testing is soot adhering to the surface of a pot.

This is securely tied to the age of the pot, unlike a pile of charcoal that might be found somewhere in the deposits and could easily be an intrusion from some different time. My understanding is that this determination was purely an estimate based on the fact that stylistically Yayoi could be broken into three main phases, the last two of which can be dated reasonably accurately because of objects imported from China or Korea. On the assumption that each of the three phases lasted approximately the same amount of time, you get the presumed starting date of about or BC.

Then, in a piece of iron that looked like it might be part of an ax turned up in a shell mound in Kyushu. The excavator assigned it "early" Yayoi. In a second iron object was discovered, this time at the site of Magarita on the north Kyushu coast. This was a complete iron ax which had evidently been made in China in the "Warring States" period, roughly or BC.

Magarita has a layer that has been considered one of the oldest Yayoi sites.

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This certainly supported the dating of the start of Yayoi because of the fact that the smelting of iron was only discovered in China around BC and spread slowly enough that it was not until about BC that stone tools disappeared there. In it was announced at an academic conference in Japan that recently conducted AMS dates for late Jomon and early Yayoi sites showed that the transition occurred in approximately BC, hundreds of years earlier than previously believed, and also hundreds of years before the beginning of iron casting in China.

It is easy to imagine how this would have started a big fight, as a great many archaeologists considered that such a date had to be impossible. There must be something wrong with the AMS dating method. All radiocarbon dates require "calibration" due to the fact that the mix of the two isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere changes over time. Calibration tables were put together years ago for the original technique which forced a lot of redating and big fights in European archaeology a few decades ago , and when AMS appeared people immediately went to work to calibrate it.

This was relatively easy to do because there now exist well worked out sequences of tree ring dates in many places. A selection of wood samples of known age were run through the AMS process leading directly to a calibration table. This was completed in It was done on the basis of European and North American wood, however, and many people argued that there must be something different about Japan. However, as time has passed it has become clear that there is nothing different about Japan.

Chinese scholars performed their own evaluation of the technique by using it to date the tombs of the successive kings of the Western Chou dynasty, the dates of whose deaths are accurately known. The results matched perfectly. There is one problem with the method for archeology.

The calibration required for the period from BC to BC is such that dates in this period are ambiguous, meaning that you can say that a sample comes "between BC and BC" but nothing more. This is called in Japan anyway the year problem because it kicks in years ago. In an archaeologist named Harunori Hideji who had originally opposed the new dates decided that it was necessary to go back and reexamine the two announced finds of early Yayoi iron. It is noteworthy that in the hundred years of study of Yayoi culture there were actually only two cases of "early Yayoi" iron.

He went back to the original site reports and was able to demonstrate that the attributions to the early period were shaky at best. Since then there have been more than AMS measurements of late Jomon and early Yayoi sites and the results are clear. There are quite a lot of books and articles on this in Japanese.

Imamura Keiji mentions claims of Jomon farming as far back as BC for beans, perilla, gourd, rape, burdock, and hemp, with rice and barley coming in around BC, which he takes to be the end of Late Jomon and the beginning of Final Jomon. However, he notes that few if any archaeologists argue that this can be counted as "agriculture" because whatever gardening was done did not increase the food supply sufficiently to allow an increase of the population or the formation of more complex social structures.

Imamura also notes that whatever was done did not inspire the creation of any new types of tools. All of the evidence that can be found can be just as easily interpreted as merely the intense exploitation of wild plants. The citations for rice and barley are associated with the appearance of one or two grains stuck to the side of a pot. There is no sign whatever of the technology associated with leveling and plowing fields, weeding them, irrigating them, harvesting them, or storing the resulting harvest. It is likely that small amounts of grain were brought back from Korea by fishermen or acquired from Yayoi pioneers.

Everyone agrees that rice farming, bronze technology, and iron technology were brought to Japan from the mainland. There is no trace in Jomon archeology of the early stages in the evolution of any of these technologies. The debate is over whether these technologies were brought in by immigrants or whether they were picked up by the Jomon people through cultural contacts with Korea.

Every aspect of the Yayoi culture is different from Jomon culture. It is especially noteworthy that Jomon and Yayoi pots were assembled from raw clay in entirely different ways, their differences are not merely a matter of the style of decoration. Also, it is evident from burial practices the Yayoi people brought in a new religion. Jomon style ritual items are not used and entirely new types of ritual items appear. Above all is the fact that rice farming in irrigated paddies is a mature technology that evolved over a long period in China.

In Japan it suddenly appeared in an advanced form. Rice farming began in the Yangtze River area of China as early as BC, and was well developed by the time of the Yayoi people. Korean and Japanese rice farming mostly relies on a subspecies Oriza sativa japonica, which is the type of rice most suited to their cold by rice standards climates. This variety is not much grown in China in modern times, but was important in ancient times and is probably native to the Yangtze valley. It is almost certain that the rice farmed by the Yayoi people originated in China as opposed to some other place in tropical Asia, where the "japonica" variety is unknown.

China had also been using bronze for a long time already when the Yayoi culture began in Japan. Before the AMS dates it was thought that the Yayoi people must have come from the Yangtze region during the "Warring States" period of great violence and turmoil as the Chinese empire was being assembled. However, now it appears that they left the mainland sometime during the Western Chou period, or, if they spent a couple of hundred years in Korea first, even the Shang period. This opens up many more possibilities, because in that time Chinese civilization was composed of city states that occupied restricted zones where the forests were lighter and could be easily turned into farmland using stone tools.

These states were all surrounded by various types of "barbarians" who lived simpler lives in the thicker forest areas. Chinese civilization had not penetrated the Yangtze area at all this early. AMS dating also shows that the Mumun pottery culture of southern Korea, which was the Korean equivalent of Yayoi, began to move in as early as BC and was well established by BC. This makes it likely that the Yayoi arrived in Japan from Korea, as opposed to crossing directly from the mainland, and that it was in Korea that the details of farming rice in a new, colder, climate were worked out.

Archaeologists had long noted that in Yayoi Japan "japonica" was the only type of rice grown, so that the selection down to just this one type must have occurred somewhere other than the Yangtze region. This timing also fits in with the period in which rice farming first reached the Shantung Peninsula of China. Shantung had always been a popular staging point except that with the old dates for Yayoi it was hard to explain why farming took so long to make the short jump to Korea and how it could happen with a non-Chinese people in an era when Shantung was thoroughly Chinese the Warring States period.

Now it seems much more natural. Shantung was barbarian territory during the Shang and early Chou periods. It is difficult to say anything about the ethnicity of the Yayoi people. Japanese and Korean are members of the Altaic group of languages, which firmly points to Manchuria, Mongolia, and Central Asia, not to China or southeast Asia. It would seem impossible that early rice farmers could have been Altaic speakers.

The Chinese don't tell us anything useful about the language of the Wa their name for the early Japanese. The only hint I have seen mentioned is a 3rd century AD book that says that the language of the Wa "sounds like the language of Wu. The later Chinese dynasty was named after the old kingdom dynasties were routinely named after ancient kingdoms or earlier dynasties. However, we don't know anything about the language of ancient Wu, though it was most likely a Sino-Tibetan type language like Chinese, but also like Vietnamese, Lao, and many others, living and extinct.

There is no doubt at all that Yayoi first appeared on the north coast of Kyushu, where Japan is closest to Korea. There is no evidence at any time during the Yayoi period of iron mining in Japan. The Chinese more than once mention that there was an active business exporting iron ingots from Korea to Japan and there are finds of forges in Yayoi sites. There is ample evidence that the Yayoi Japanese made bronze items themselves because many molds have been found and there are many distinctively Japanese types of item. Even there, however, it appears that nearly all of the bronze metal was imported, either as ingots or as manufactured items that were melted down and reused.

It is possible to tell exactly where bronze comes from because of isotope ratios in tin. Japanese, Korean, northern Chinese, and southern Chinese bronze are all different, and Yayoi bronzes are always made of Korean or Chinese material. In historical times making bronze items in Japan was always difficult because copper is rare in Japan. Every time a new copper deposit was found there was general rejoicing and an upsurge in bronze statuary.

The Yayoi culture soon replaced Jomon in most of Kyushu there were probable Jomon survivals in south Kyushu and the island chains to the south and spread rapidly eastward up the Inland Sea and also up the Japan Sea coast.

Recall that during the Late Jomon much of this land was essentially uninhabited. There is good land for farming in the Kinai area and again in a large area around modern Nagoya. Expansion continued, though much more slowly, into the east and the northeast, even briefly extending rice farming further north than its northern limit in early historical times. It was originally thought that it took about years to take over the entire area where rice farming was possible at the time, but with the new, early, dates, it may turn out that this process went a bit slower than that.

The earliest AMS dates in the Kanto and northeast are not spectacularly early, so far. North of that there remained for a time a late Jomon culture sometimes called Epi-Jomon that acquired iron objects from the Yayoi Japanese and learned to farm plants that would grow in the climate. When the Japanese began to move into Hokkaido in a serious way in the 18th century it was mostly inhabited by a non-Japanese people called Ainu.

When the Jomon archaeological culture was discovered there was immediate speculation that the Jomon people were Ainu. The ethnographic history of the north is complicated, but I believe that it is fair to say that most authorities now think that this is not true and that the Ainu entered the area from Siberia considerably later, though I think that there is not much agreement on which of the succession of archaeological cultures that existed marks their arrival.

Imamura Keiji has a discussion of this in his book. In early historical times the Japanese state dealt with "barbarians" from the northeast that they called Ebisu or Emeshi. There was much fighting before they were finally brought under the control of the Japanese state. At least one battle that occurred appears to have been with people that the locals reported to have only recently arrived by boat.

It is probable that most Ebisu were merely Yayoi people who lived outside of the Japanese political structure of the Kofun peiod and early historical times. The early frontier was well within the rice growing zone so that the Jomon people had departed long before. There were "barbarians" in Kyushu also, known variously as Kumaso, Hayato, and Tsuchigumo. It is probable that these also were Yayoi people who resisted inclusion in the Japanese state structure of the Kofun period.

Their strong point was not in the remote south, but in the original heartland of Yayoi culture in northern Kyushu. There are presumed archaeological remains from this kingdom in the form of elite tombs, all empty of anything interesting. This kingdom was situated north of the zone where the Mumun culture of rice farmers lived. Choson provides the normal Japanese name for Korea, Chosen, and Choson is the name used by the country we call North Korea. A distinction is made between "Old Choson" and "Wiman Choson", due to the fact that, according to Chinese sources, a Chinese adventurer whose name becomes Wiman in Korean overthrew the king of Old Choson and established a dynasty about years before the Han dynasty invasion of BC.

The Han dynasty and its successors the Wei and Chin dynasties treated the conquered area as an integral part of the Chinese Empire. The Han originally set up four "chun" administrative units that presumably were spread along the coast from southern Manchuria down to Pyongyang or, possibly, the area of the South Korean capital of Seoul.

Rather soon after the conquest two of the districts were abandoned and not too long after that a third was suppressed as well. The surviving district was called Lo-lang and its capital was located on the other side of the Taedong river from modern Pyongyang. Japanese archaeologists excavated several elite tombs in the s, finding high quality Chinese goods of all kinds.

Before the recent explosion of archeology in China, these excavations were almost the only source for Han dynasty art. It is assumed that there was no secure land connection to the small part of Manchuria controlled by China and that communication was by boat via the Shantung Peninsula. Lo-lang remained Chinese for over years until its destruction in AD traditional date, disputed by some. It is assumed that there is a close connection between Yayoi Japan and Mumun Korea. The contents of elite tombs on the two sides are almost indistinguishable, extending to the presence of Yayoi pottery in Korean tombs and Korean pottery in Japanese ones.

However, the Chinese put the population of southern Korea into a different ethnic category called Han. This is a potentially confusing name. In modern times we have the habit of referring to the main Chinese ethnic group as Han Chinese to distinguish them from the large number of different minority groups living in the Chinese political entity. South Korea is Hanguo in Chinese, Hanguk in Korean and Kankoku in Japanese, but they are all the same words, just pronounced differently. According to the Han dynasty Chinese the Wa were divided into many different "countries".

They say but this probably simply means "a lot" in this context. These Wa countries individually dealt with the Chinese authorities in Lo-lang. The leading "country" in the embassy was called "Na" or "Nu". In 57 AD the "king" of Na was awarded a gold seal. In a seal exactly matching the description was found by a peasant at Hakata bay in northern Kyushu.

For a long time it was not known whether it was authentic or a forgery, but since then two similar seals have been found in good archaeological contexts in China, and it is clear that a the Han were in the habit of handing these out to barbarian rulers, and b a forger of could never have seen an authentic one to copy. There is a place called Nanotsu, which means "the port of Na," in the vicinity of the find, and it is believed that this is the location of the Yayoi country of Na.

The Eastern Han dynasty was overthrown by one of its generals in AD. He proclaimed a new dynasty called Wei. He also lost control of southern China which spawned two rival dynasties. The period is known as the "three kingdoms. There was a family based in Manchuria named Kung-sun who actually ran things until when their leader made the mistake of proclaiming himself King of Yen an ancient Chinese kingdom in the area. At some time between and Lo-lang had been abandoned and a new administrative capital had been established at T'ai-fang, which is thought to have been closer to modern Seoul, perhaps at Inchon, perhaps further north.

The Wei sent in a large army that went as far as T'ai-fang and restablished direct Chinese authority. This impressed the Wa and in an embassy went to T'ai-fang and asked to be allowed to go to China, which was permitted. As a follow up the Chinese sent an official to visit the Wa ruler and bring some promised presents in , and a second Chinese embassy went to the Wa some time soon after There was a final Wa embassy to China in by which time the Wei had been overthrown by a general who proclaimed the Chin dynasty and temporarily reunified China.

The official history of the Wei, which was written during the Chin period and completed sometime before , when its author is known to have died, includes a lengthy account of all of this.

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It is the first detailed historical information about Japan. The article about the Wa includes transcriptions into Chinese of many place names and official titles and a few personal names. All of these would have been based on how Chinese was pronounced at that time.

A lot of people have studied this, mainly by analyzing poetry, for Chinese poetry at the time used rhymes, which gives clues as to how words were pronounced. However, the Japanese do not ordinarily worry about this. They base their transcriptions on Chinese as it is pronounced by modern Japanese. It is well to not get carried away by resemblances between these transcriptions and modern Japanese words and names. First, given a choice of pronunciations most scholars select the one that best suits their theories, and second, we know that the Japanese have had copies of this Chinese book since early times.

It is quoted by name in Nihon Shoki , published in AD. That means that names in the Chinese account could have influenced names used in ancient Japan. This was never a best-seller, shall we say, and has been out of print for ages, so it might be hard to find. Since the Mickey Mouse Protection Act guarantees that no work published since can ever go into the public domain unless its publisher specifically puts it there, I assume that I cannot legally copy it.

So, I have written my own translation from the Chinese original with the aid of several translations into Japanese, my Chinese not being good enough to do it without some help. There are a few comments to make before I begin. There is an active controversy about the location of places named in the text, and at one point the Chinese is ambiguous enough grammatically that it becomes necessary to make a decision as to exactly how to translate it into Japanese or English , and the choice permits one to support one theory or the other.

I have chosen one rendering, but because this is an important issue, when the spot comes up I will include a note explaining what is at stake. Also, it will become immediately obvious that there is something wrong with the distances cited. I will ignore that until after the translation is completed. Finally, I have corrected the text in three places.

The oldest surviving Chinese text comes from printed editions that are several hundred years later than the original, and there may well be other mistakes that we cannot recover. The three in question, however, represent a modern consensus. Two are minor, but the third is important. The leading Wa state in the text is customarily rendered as Yamatai in both English and Japanese. If you are not familiar with Chinese characters you may have to look closely to see the difference.

However, if this were not changed, the correct pronunciation would be Yamai or even Yamachi or Yamaichi. Later Chinese books that quote this material all use the "tai" character. The explanation is supposed to be that during the Wei dynasty the "tai" character was reserved for use in imperial proclamations and ordinary subjects were not permitted to use it. The author of the text had the choice of finding another character that was pronounced the same or another character that looked as much as possible like the original character.

Chinese authors normally preferred to do the latter in such cases, ignoring the dictionary meaning and pronunciation of the replacement character. However, it is just as possible that the printer of the oldest version made a mistake. This is important because Yamatai sounds much like Yamato, which is one of the ancient Japanese names for Japan. Many Japanese scholars would say that Yamatai ought to be replaced by Yamato, but everyone has agreed to keep Yamatai so that it is clear that we are referring to the 3rd century version and not the later one.

The Wa people live in the middle of the great ocean southeast of the prefecture. They live on mountainous islands divided into countries and districts. Formerly there were about countries. In the time of the Han dynasty they came to the court a few times. These days about 30 countries have diplomatic relations with us. To get to Wa from the prefecture, one follows the coast by sea. This line is much argued about. What, exactly, does "its northern coast" mean?

The latter is almost certainly correct. I interpret it to mean "the Han country of Kuya". I believe that everyone agrees that it was located at the mouth of the Naktong River just west of modern Pusan. This place is an isolated island of only square li. It is mountainous and thickly forested and its roads are like the trails of wild animals. There are households. There is no good farmland and the people eat seafood. They go in boats to the north and the south to trade for grain. From there continue south across the ocean for li. Its official is also called hiku and the assistant hinumori.

The area is only li square and it is thickly forested with trees and bamboo. There are about 3, households. There is farmland and it is farmed but cannot produce enough to feed the population, so they also trade north and south for grain. It has 4, households. It is a narrow shore between mountain and sea. The forest is so thick you cannot see a person walking in front of you. They like to eat fish and abalone. The water is shallow, and they gather them by diving.