A man appears in the village center, walking.
His clothes are filthy.
His face, smeared with dirt.
Black dots bounce across his unkempt hair.
The midday sun shimmers above the Yayoi village.
The chirp of cicadas permeate the air, punctuated by occasional sounds of children’s laughter.
Excited talk among the village folk center around one topic: The expedition to China
that set sail months ago, is returning, with promises of bronze bells and other treasures.
The man’s gaze pauses on the thigh of a deer crackling above a nearby fire, before
moving on.
He avoids the village women as he walks, and they avoid him.
But men and women alike seem to show deference to the stranger, like they know he carries
a heavy burden.
Who is this dirty man?
Is he being punished?
Is he just homeless?
No, nothing like that.
They call him a fortune keeper.
Psst...hey guys, stick around until the end of the video for a special message.
Whenever the Yayoi sailed to China for a visit, they appointed someone at home to be the
FORTUNE KEEPER.
Not fortune TELLER, that’s a person who claims to see the future, but is scamming
tourists $20 at a time when they could be billionaires if they had any actual powers.
No, a fortune KEEPER had one purpose: to stay as dirty and disgusting as possible by not
cleaning himself.
Before sailing to China, they told him of things he could no longer do: “Okay, you
can’t wash your clothes, comb your hair, remove your fleas, eat meat, or approach women.”
If the voyage had good fortune, they showered him with gifts and slaves, and probably gave
him an actual shower immediately.
But if the voyage was disastrous...dude be dead, because obviously he must have broken
the rules.
Fortune keepers were probably used at other times when people needed good luck.
Now to us, this practice seems a BIT cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
But, to understand why they did it, we need to understand a basic theme of Shinto: purity.
During the time of the Yayoi, Shinto was a little baby religion.
Actually it wasn’t even a religion yet, it was kind of a sperm.
But the Yayoi DID have a mix of rituals and beliefs that would later turn into a religion.
The theme of purity was already in practice at this time.
Shinto followers believe that humans are born pure, and we pick up impure things over time.
What counts as impure?
Err...almost anything it seems, impure basically means “ANYTHING bad.”
Anything related to death is extra unclean.
Luckily, you can cleanse yourself physically and spiritually with water or through purification
rituals.
This is why Izanagi had to bathe after returning from the land of the dead.
Visitors to Shinto shrines ritually cleanse their hands and mouths with water before approaching
the main shrine.
In the Yayoi days, after a funeral, all members of the family bathed to cleanse themselves.
Separately!
They believed that the physical and spiritual worlds were intertwined.
By taking on PHYSICAL uncleanliness, the fortune keeper also sucks up all the SPIRITUAL uncleanliness
and bad luck of the community, leaving only good luck for the voyage.
Now, it would’ve been really bad for the fortune keeper, spiritually, to be so dirty.
So, to offset that, he would abstain from dirty things like secks.
Now, if you’re the type of person who thinks this makes no sense because secks is beautiful
and pure and not dirty at all...my response is, sorry you’re doing it wrong, and you
should try harder.
The Yayoi laid the foundation for a medieval Japan.
They had clans, kingdoms, and developed a class system.
When I think of the Yayoi, I think of agriculture, bronze, and iron.
Wet-rice farming caused a population boom.
It peaked at 2 million people.
The ability to work with bronze and iron allowed them to create kickass tools and weapons and
armor, and engage in that delightful human pastime: war.
Oh, so many wars.
Some Yayoi customs, that’s 2000 years ago remember, have lasted until modern times,
like eating raw fish, clapping before prayers, and casual sexism.
Wet-rice farming changed everything.
All of a sudden, people had a ton of food.
It’s hard to move a farm around, so they had to settle in permanent farming villages
and lived a more sedentary lifestyle.
The Yayoi developed a strict class system.
People of a lower class had to step to the side of the road to let higher-ranked people
pass.
This custom lasted until the 19th century.
Men had multiple wives.
Men of higher status had more wives.
The Yayoi did not have a written language, so most of what we know of them come from
Chinese writings.
China was advanced.
China called the Yayoi “those barbarians to the east.”
According to the Chinese, Japan had 100 kingdoms.
30 of these were in direct contact with China.
These were probably the strongest, trading with the more advanced Chinese gave you an
advantage over your rivals.
It’s FASCINATING to me that the main advances that made the Yayoi successful, farming and
metalworking, also contributed to their society becoming more unequal and violent.
The Jomon were egalitarian and peaceful in comparison.
Why?
Well, having farmland meant having land owners.
Having rice meant having this precious thing to trade.
The few who owned the land and rice accumulated wealth and power, leading to a class divide.
Power consolidated around a few elites until a complex class hierarchy formed, with slaves
at the very bottom.
And once people had land, well, you gotta protect it, right?
You don’t want someone to steal your stuff.
And sometimes you wanna expand, but Akira next door is being a pest and living on your
future rice paddy.
B--ch gotta go.
Enter: metal.
Sure sure, you can make farm tools, but WEAPONS…
*sniffffff*
Ahhhh, that’s the stuff.
Iron came first, then bronze followed.
They learned metalworking techniques from the mainland.
Iron was easy to make, anyone could do it with a backyard furnace, so it was mainly
used to make lower-class tools for farming and labor.
Bronze required large dedicated foundries and was hard to learn, so it became more valuable
than iron.
Bronze was used to make upper-class symbols such as bronze bells and mirrors, oh and WEAPONS.
The rich and powerful flaunted these bronze items around like people do today with luxury
items such as Lamborghinis, and happy marriages.
I like to imagine conversations between lower-class people went something like this:
Man, Akira’s bronze bell is REALLY big.
You know what they say about people with large bells.
What do they say?
They’re compensating for something.
Oh oh oh… that’s why I only use small bells, because I have a huge c--.
Metal was hard to come by in Japan, metal ore was mostly imported.
The kingdoms closer to the mainland forged strong trade relationships and rose to the
top...by going around conquering their neighbors with their shiny metal death things.
Besides taking people’s stuff, conquering had spiritual meaning for the Yayoi.
They lived within clans, called uji.
The leader of a clan is both a shaman and a warchief, and each clan was represented
by a kami.
The leader communicated with the kami and oversaw religious ceremonies associated with
the kami.
When one clan conquered another, it also conquered its kami.
The victors often incorporated the new religious practices into their own rituals.
Through this process, the Yayoi developed a complex kami hierarchy.
As the decades of wars raged on, small tribes evolved into larger and larger states, until
one state emerged to rule them all: the kingdom of Yamatai, ruled by the legendary shaman
queen Himiko.
Hey!
Didn’t see ya there.
You guys, I gotta say, it’s been a crazy past couple of weeks.
The views and subscribers on this channel have shot up compared to last month.
I mean, before that it was just me watching my own videos.
Hahaha earwax!
Now it’s passed 3000 subscribers.
I mean, just look at this, this is a graph of my subscribers over time--
Oh no wait,
that’s just a graph of my parents’ disappointment.
I’m Asian.
This was when I told them I didn’t want to be a doctor.
Anyways, thank you so much everyone for watching and subscribing.
I read all of your comments, even the racist ones.
I’m glad there are people out there who like this kind of stuff, because I like making
it.
I’m new to this creating videos thing, so I hope I don’t disappoint you in the future.
But if I do, feel free to insult my eyebrows.
So, let’s all have a great year together, right guys?
Guys?
Guys, talk to me.