During the Yayoi period the Japanese got tired of hunting and gathering, and
settled down into an agricultural society.
Japan developed late in the game,
historically, compared to China and the West.
When these other cultures were
already firmly established and bullying their neighbors, Japan was messing
around with this new thing called "farming."
The Yayoi Period lasted from 300 BC to 250 AD.
It roughly coincides with the Chinese Han Dynasty.
It begins soon after the death of Alexander the Great,
and the end of Greece's Classical Period,
the period that most people picture when they think of ancient Greece.
At the end of the Yayoi Period, the Roman Empire was already past its prime.
We don't know for
sure where the Yayoi came from, but the predominant view is they were the
shovel teeters that we discussed in a previous video here.
They migrated to a
Japan already inhabited by the Jomon for thousands of years, bringing with them
new methods of wet rice farming and metalworking.
These new people had the
impossibly beautiful Asian features that persist to this day.
Another hypothesis is they grew out of the Jomon.
Meaning the Jomon invented with rice cultivation and
iron making, and progressed to an agricultural society.
This is probably not true,
because the end of the Jomon Period was not a prosperous time where
they had the luxury of trying new and creative things.
The Jomon were struggling.
Food was scarce.
They were too busy trying to survive, trying to find
new sources of meat and nuts.
There IS a legend about the origin of the Yayoi
that is often repeated.
It goes like this.
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The first emperor of a unified China was Emperor
Qin Shi Huang, who founded the Qin Dynasty.
The job of Emperor came with
occupational hazards such as people trying to kill you.
Three times did
assassins make attempts on his life and three times he escaped death.
The emperor,
paranoid and obsessed with finding a way to live forever,
gave a mission to his
court sorcerer, a man named Xu Fu.
"Set sail to find the Mythical Mountain of the Immortals.
There you must meet with a 1000 year old magician and retrieve
from him the elixir of life, which grants immortality."
To this, Xu Fu said...
"Suuuure"
Xu Fu gathered a fleet of ships and a few thousand excited souls and began his
quest for the elusive elixir.
A few anxious years later...he returned
empty-handed.
He explained to the Emperor,
"Your highness! There is a large sea monster, ahem, blocking the way.
Please give me a
contingent of archers so that I may vanquish the monster and continue my...
absolutely reasonable...quest.
the Emperor agreed.
Xu Fu set sail again and
never returned.
Legend has it that Xu Fu actually landed
in Japan because he thought Mount Fuji was the mythical mountain he was searching for,
and he and his crew lived out the rest of their days there.
He introduced wet rice farming, metalworking, and Chinese medicine to Japan, helping to
start the Yayoi culture and Japan as we know it.
As for emperor Qin Shi Huang, he
never got his immortality.
Ironically, it may have been his obsession with living
forever that killed him.
One story explaining his death claims that he died
from mercury poisoning.
His doctors and alchemists made mercury pills for him to drink.
They believed it would prolong his life.
It didn't.
Now although we have records of Xu Fu's expeditions, this idea of him
founding the Yayoi is likely just a legend because the timing of when bronze
and iron were introduced to Japan doesn't work out.
We don't know what happened to
Xu Fu's expedition,
if they got lost at sea or landed someplace, but
if they did land someplace, said "screw this" and never returned, would you blame them?
They had an emperor counting on them to make him immortal.
This was a
time when people thought becoming immortal was within the realm of possibility.
In the Emperor's eyes, if you failed him, you cut his life short.
That's the same as you killing him.
And so it would be wise to haul arse out of there.
By the end of the Jomon, the society was exhausted.
The land could no longer support the growing population.
It had trouble replenishing the plants and animals.
The Jomon had hunted and picked and cut for 10,000 years.
Nature couldn't keep up.
Nature was the dealer on Snoop Dogg's street.
Sometimes you can't keep up.
When the Yayoi came along, they had a massive advantage over the Jomon:
Agriculture.
Wet rice farming was a game-changer.
They didn't have to find
edible plants or move where the animals moved.
They just found a good spot,
settled down, and farmed their rice paddies.
The population boomed...
like STDs in Russell Brand's neighborhood.
We don't know whether the Yayoi killed off the
earlier Jomon people that they encountered or just assimilated them.
We clearly see Jomon influence in the Yayoi.
They lived in pits dwellings like the Jomon and had pottery designs with some
Jomon features.
From studying their pottery, we see that the two cultures
traded and interacted a lot,
especially in the early Yayoi years.
But there came a
point where the Yayoi became so successful that they replaced most of
the Jomon population to become the dominant culture
Their pottery was
simpler than the Jomon's, more utilitarian.
They also loved bronze mirrors, and bells.
Bells were the sh*zz.
They made a bunch of them.
The bells were called "dotaku" and were made of bronze.
They kept making bigger and bigger bells.
Eventually the bells couldn't even ring, they were just...there
and kept accumulating.
The more bells you had, the cooler you became.
They had no function except as objects for performing rituals.
We have a similar thing in our society,
they're called POP! figures.
They don't do anything and somehow just accumulate in your home.
In a few years, we'll be using them in rituals.
Please Lord grant me my wish.
I wish to be rich.
Argh, loopholes.
I wish to be the ruler of a country.
The Yayoi brought change to a Japan that was stagnant for thousands of years.
The change was dramatic, exceeding that of an Industrial Revolution.
They had a religion that would later develop into the Shinto religion.
The Japanese language and social class system originated from the Yayoi.
They ushered in, overnight, a new beginning for Japanese culture.
In the next video, we'll go in-depth into how the Yayoi lived.
See ya!