A diversity of foodways
At first glance, the modern Japanese agricultural landscape appears to be dominated by rice paddies, laid out in regimented grids across the lowlands that comprise around a fifth of the entire landmass of Japan, and tightly packed into mountain valleys and coastal terraces wherever slope and aspect permit.
Even in the urban sprawl that now constitutes such a dominant part of the modern Japanese landscape, dense housing is punctuated by the occasional paddy field. This ubiquitous presence of the rice paddy and the associated importance that rice farming has assumed in Japanese mentalities, however, mask a diversity of cultivation practices and intensive relationships with plants and animals other than rice that extends back millennia before the first paddy field was constructed in the archipelago. Yet rice agriculture and the practices it requires are still by many considered to have shaped the development of early Japanese society. Rice farming is celebrated as central to Japanese heritage: the terraced paddy fields of the Noto peninsula are put forward as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, and the region also boasts the oldest rice ball from Japan, 2,100 years old, from Sugitani Chanobatake in Ishikawa prefecture.1 The constitution of paddy fields themselves affects the nature of the archaeological record.2 In this chapter we will track the development of agrarian societies in Japan and consider the ways in which the relationship between rice farming and otherExcept in the chapter title, Japanese personal names are given in Japanese order (family name, given name). Macrons have been omitted throughout.
1 http://isp.unu.edu/news/2011 /sado-noto-farm-methods-listed-as-giahs.html (accessed 21 June 2014); I.K.M.B. Senta, Yachi Sugitani iseki gun (The Yachi Sugitani Site Group) (Kanazawa, 1995); J.J.
Ertl, ‘Revisiting village Japan', unpublished PhD thesis (University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 201-13.2 G.L. Barnes, ‘Paddy field archaeology', Journal of Field Archaeology, 13 (1986), 371-9, and ‘Paddy fields now and then', World Archaeology, 22 (1990), 1-17.
foodways contributed to the broader social and cultural developments in the archipelago up to 500 ce.
The Japanese archaeological sequence from the end of the Pleistocene to 500 ce is divided into three chronological periods. TheJomonbegins with the appearance of ceramics around 14,000 bce, and is named after the Japanese term for the cord-marking by which the majority of Jomon ceramics are distinguished.[733] Broad-based foraging replaced large-game hunting in the early stages of the Jomon, including a degree of plant domestication and cultivation. The Yayoi period begins with the appearance of wet rice agriculture in northern Kyushu and the introduction of metallurgy around 900 bce and is named after the locality in Tokyo where Yayoi-style pottery was first identified.[734] The Kofun period begins with the construction of the first monumental mounded tombs around 250 ce.[735] During this period the first state-level societies developed in the archipelago, accompanied by large-scale land development for agriculture and the centralized control of agricultural surpluses. This all took place in the context of the introduction of Buddhism along with other aspects of Chinese civilization from the East Asian continent in the sixth century ce, including writing, urban architecture, and systems of governance.
It has long been thought that Japanese traditional culture was based on rice cultivation, associated with many rituals and religious ideas. The first centralized government in the seventh century distributed paddy fields to the male population and collected taxes in the form of rice.[736] The origin of rice cultivation has therefore become a central problem for understanding Japanese culture, economy, and society.
There are, however, a series of other important grains traditionally grown in Japan, including barley, wheat, buckwheat, beans, and millets, and they supplemented rice especially in mountainous areas or in famine. The study of the history of Japanese agriculture has focused on the cultivation of these potential staple plant foods. Domesticated animals played only a limited role in Japanese farming.This chapter discusses the origin and development of rice cultivation in Japan, while reviewing the evidence for the cultivation of other kinds of plant food. Rice cultivation in paddy fields appeared around 900 bce, but there is an ongoing debate about the role of other cultivated plants, dryfield crops, and their status as staple foods, in the preceding Jomon period, possibly involving slash-and-burn agriculture. This diversity of trajectories towards agrarian society in Japan forces us to question the inevitability of the spread of farming lifeways, and to give weight to the ways in which a diversity of subsistence practices was implicated in the establishment and reproduction of traditions of social and ritual practice relating to agriculture in the archipelago.[737]