A rational approach to these remains beganduring the Tokugawa period (a.d. 1603–1868) when peace prevailed and arts and scholarship flourished. One of the intellectual traditions out of which the “almost archaeology” of the Tokugawa period (Bleed 1986) grew was neo-Confucianism, which provided the ideological support for the hierarchical regime. For example, Arai Hakuseki (1656–1725), who served as an adviser to the Shogun government, came to believe that stone arrowheads were not the weapons of a heavenly army that had fallen from the sky but had been manufactured by human beings in ancient times.

Another tradition on which the “almost archaeology” of the Tokugawa period was based was the kokugaku (“national learning”) school, which rejected the secular rationalism of Confucianism and turned instead to studies of such ancient texts as the Kojiki. It has been suggested (e.g., Yazawa 1985) that the concept of the ethnic homogeneity of the Japanese nation, which would be advocated by the national government in later years and which forms the theme of popular archaeology books today, originated with this group of scholars. The reverence for ancient emperors that the kokugaku promoted led to field studies of burial mounds (kofun), with a view to their conservation and repair. Based on textual descriptions, but without firm evidence, many kofun were identified as imperial tombs. Although the identification had the positive effect of protecting the tombs from pot hunters, it also resulted in the current restriction on archaeologists’ access to these remains.

Finally, there were a number of antiquarian groups active in Japan. One of these was the Rosekisha (Rock Fondlers’ Club), of which the central figure was Seikitei Kiuchi (1728–1808), a wealthy official who lived near Kyoto. This group had several hundred members from various levels of society, including aristocrats, samurai, and Buddhist priests, who collected stones of unusual appearance, both natural and artifactual; held meetings to show their collections and compare notes; and published their findings with detailed descriptions and illustrations. These collectors represented the beginning of a broadly based amateur interest in archaeology, fostering the idea that archaeological inquiry was both fun and respectable. The club provided the necessary pool of human resources when, in response to threats to archaeological sites posed by the rapid economic development of the post–World War II years, a national system of salvage archaeology had to be put into place quickly.

Archaeology in the New Nation State

The political process that overthrew the Tokugawa Shogun government in 1868, reestablishing direct imperial rule (in theory at least), is referred to as the Meiji Restoration. The new Meiji government was committed to bringing Japan out of its isolation and to make it a modern nation state, and the introduction of archaeology as practiced in nineteenth-century Europe and America was a by-product of the arrival in Japan of scientists and technical experts whose special knowledge and skills were deemed useful by the new government. These experts included John Milne (1850–1913), an English seismologist who in 1876 became professor of geology at Tokyo University, where he remained until 1894; William Gowland (1843–1922), an English chemist who served as a consultant to the Mint from 1872 to 1888; and Edward Sylvester Morse (1838–1925), whose research trip to Japan in 1877 to study mollusks turned into a two-year appointment as professor of zoology at Tokyo University and who is generally credited, through his excavation of the Omori shellmound in Tokyo (Morse 1879a), as being the father of modern archaeology in Japan.

These scholars wrote books and articles about Japanese archaeology, most of which were published abroad in foreign languages and were read by very few Japanese. Nor did these men leave students who would become archaeologists. Being avocational archaeologists themselves, their impact on early Meiji Japan seems to have been through interaction with their Japanese counterparts, about whom it has been remarked “that there were more people interested in archaeology in Japan than anywhere else in the world” (Morse 1879b). Some examples of the interaction, where benefits seemed to have flowed in both directions, are summarized in English by Peter Bleed (1986) and Fumiko Ikawa-Smith (1982).