(Barnes 1990; Fawcett 1990, 1995; Habu and Fawcett 1999; T. Kobayashi 1986; Pearson 1992; Tanaka 1984; Tsuboi 1986; and Tsude 1995). According to the Center for Archaeological Operations (1999), the total number of people employed at the prefectural and municipal levels as administrative archaeologists in 1997–1998 was 6,872. There must have been an additional hundred or so working at the national level with the Agency for Cultural Affairs and its institutes in Tokyo, Nara, and elsewhere.

Hiroshi Tsude (1995), using figures from a few years earlier, estimates the total number of archaeologists in Japan at 5,700, of which 300 are in academic departments, 700 in museums, and the remaining 4,700 (or 82 percent) engaged in the administration of cultural resources management. In spite of their large numbers, cultural resources management archaeologists are always pressed for time, starting one operation after the other, conducting excavations, and preparing mandatory excavation reports, which are technically excellent but purely descriptive. They have little time to fully digest their findings and formulate any syntheses. Nor could the very small number of “academic” archaeologists keep up with the rapidly accumulating data and come up with syntheses and theoretical formulations. Japanese archaeologists are drowning in a flood of data.

The Archaeology of National Origins

The allocation of such huge resources to archaeological activities is feasible in Japan because of the high level of interest in the discipline by the tax-paying public. Spectacular results of excavations are widely reported on television and in newspapers and attract a large number of visitors to the sites. The Sannai Maruyama site, a very large Jomon period site at the northern end of Honshu, dating to about 3500–2000 b.c., featuring six enormous wooden structures and about 700 pit-house remains, received over 1 million visitors between 1994 and 1997 (Habu and Fawcett 1999). At the opposite end of the archipelago, some 160,000 visitors went to the Uenohara site to see evidence of settled village life as early as 9,500 years ago when the site was opened to the public over the summer holidays in 1997 (Weekly Asahigraph 1997, 17). These on-site interpretation events are some of the measures Japanese archaeologists have taken to keep the public informed of the significance of their activities, but they are, in fact, responding to the public’s demand for information about the nation’s past.

Public interest in archaeology in Japan is the legacy of long-term antiquarianism, but the level of the interest has risen in recent years, partly because of a series of spectacular finds, starting with the 1972 discovery of a painted tomb of Takamatsuzuka. There is also an increasing and perceived need for the Japanese people to define their distinctiveness as Japan takes its place the among the nations of the world. The interest in archaeology grew hand in hand with the growth of the discourse called Nihonjinron (“theory about the Japanese”) and Nihonbunkaron (“theory about Japanese culture”), both of which purported to explain what was distinctly Japanese. Archaeological finds became relevant within this context because archaeological remains, even those of the 9,500-year-old Jomon villagers, are perceived as the remains of Japanese ancestors. A large number of archaeology books are published, some with beautiful photographic illustrations and others in convenient pocketbook format, bearing titles and subtitles like “The Origins of the Japanese,” “Japan’s Cultural Roots,” and “Where Did the Japanese Come From?”

Archaeology thrives in Japan because it is perceived not as an abstract academic exercise but as a means to elucidate the nation’s past, as a substantial contribution to increasing the Japanese peoples’ understanding of who they are. In Japan, archaeology is national history, helping to define the present with reference to the past.

Fumiko Ikawa-Smith

References

Akamatsu, Keisuke. 1937. “Kodai shuraku no seisei to hatten” [Process of Formation and Development of Prehistoric and Early Historic Settlements]. Keizai Hyoron 4, no. 2. Reprinted in Kodai Shuraku no Keisei to Hatten Katei, 141–207. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1990.