War II in 1945, the separate disciplines of archaeology and anthropology were increasingly professionalized. In both cases, empirical evidence, based on stratigraphy, measurements, and typological classification and comparisons, were emphasized, with the ultimate goal of establishing a sound chronology.

It has been pointed out by many authors that the sociopolitical climate in the 1930s and 1940s favored such devotion to details rather than debate of any larger or more political issues. By this time, two kinds of prehistoric pottery, representing two separate cultures, were known. “Jomon,” the Japanese translation of “cord marking” was used by Morse as a descriptive term for the Omori shellmound pottery, and it became established as the name for pottery found in similar shellmounds and, by extension, the name for the culture and the Stone-Age people who made it. A different kind of pottery, first recovered in Tokyo in 1884, was understood to belong to the bronze-using rice growers of the Yayoi period, a period that lasted a few centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian era. The occupation of the archipelago by these groups could not be easily reconciled with the official version of national history based on the eighth-century history texts of Kojiki and Nihongi, which attributed the founding of the imperial state to the descendant of the Sun Goddess in 660 b.c. Scholars who persisted in using archaeological data to interpret prehistory and proto-history ran the risk of losing their jobs, or even being imprisoned. Given those circumstances, the excessive empiricism of chronology building, with no apparent reference to “national history,” was the prudent approach.

Early Post–World War II Years: Freedom of Inquiry

The end of World War II in 1945 meant the lifting of restrictions on historical inquiries, which made it possible to rewrite the history of Japan based entirely on archaeological evidence. The excavation of a Yayoi settlement site at Toro, near Shizuoka, between 1947 and 1950 dramatically underscored the new role that archaeology was to play in construction of national history in postwar Japan. Beginning shortly after the war, with severe shortages of such basic necessities such as shovels and food for the excavation crew, the Yayoi excavation was of a scale that had never occurred before in Japan, in terms of both expenditure and the number of participants. The investigation was both interdisciplinary and multi-institutional, with a large number of professionals and students and numerous local volunteers participating in unearthing the first rice paddies from an archaeological site as well as many artifacts, including wooden agricultural tools and building materials used for residential and storage structures. The excavation results were widely reported in the media, which raised the awareness of archaeology among the general public (Fawcett 1995). As W. Edwards (1991) notes, the image of the ancient, peaceful rice-growing village, re-created through archaeological investigation, supplied the new metaphor of continuity for the Japanese cultural and national identity, replacing the old mythological one made unacceptable by the war and defeat.

Another significant excavation took place in 1949, following the 1947 discovery of stone artifacts from an exposed Pleistocene formation by Aizawa Tadahiro (1926–1989), an amateur archaeologist, at Iwajuku about ninety kilometersnorth of Tokyo. The excavation by a team from the Meiji University provided the first convincing evidence for the existence of a Paleolithic period in Japan (Sugihara 1956). Within a few years of the excavation, the evidence for Paleolithic occupation had been confirmed at a number of other sites (Serizawa 1954; Serizawa and Ikawa 1960). The Iwajuku excavation not only added great temporal depth to the nation’s history, it also gave the evidence a firm scientific basis: human occupation of the archipelago began in the geological past during the Ice Age, not in the mythical “age of gods.”

The “scientific” approach during the early postwar years also involved making generalizations about the nature of past societies with reference to the theoretical framework of historical materialism. Seiichi Wajima (1909–1971) used the data and insights he had accumulated during the 1930s and 1940s to present an interpretative