Tribute from Green Forest
Whenever I visit a new land for Jomon fieldwork, I find myself peering down at the ground, curious about the paths and the depressions underfoot. But not on this day. Standing in the Sannai Maruyama Site, I was strangely tempted to look up toward the heavens. Was it because the construction of a baseball stadium had been canceled to preserve the enormous plot of 42 hectares, and in it, a six-pillar structure was reconstructed, and its giant wooden posts embedded in the earth were towering overhead? There was more to it than that, though. Walking through the site, I would run into a longhouse so large that it takes a trip around the building just to grasp its sheer size. The space inside has a whopping capacity of over 150 people.
In all respects, Sannai Maruyama is a huge archaeological site, having produced 40,000 boxfuls of artifacts. It was one of those sites that, from the outset, I had given up covering in one visit. To date, I have taken five trips there, each in a different season. Once, I explored the site in the snowy winter wearing straw snowshoes. Another time, I received special permission to climb a hottate-bashira earthfast post and get a view of the Hakkoda Mountains. Then, realizing the view from that vantage point also extended to the sea far away, I imagined the Jomon people keeping watch and broadening their horizons. I have not been in the site in the pitch dark yet, but if you ask me, our ancestors’ observations must have included the celestial objects in the cosmos. According to the adjacent Jomon Jiyukan, the Sannai Maruyama settlement was occupied for some 1,700 years between the Early and Middle Jomon periods (about 5,900–4,200 years ago).
This summer, Jomon fans throughout Japan were thrilled with the news that the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan were inscribed as a cultural UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sannai Maruyama was one of those 17 sites. The papers said the justification for inscription was, “They bear unique testimony to the development over some 15,000 years of the pre-agricultural yet sedentary Jomon culture and its complex spiritual belief system and rituals.” The sedentary lifestyle is a given for many of us today, but it was around the advent of the Jomon period when people gradually woke up to the sensation of “going home” and began making houses for family units. The curator Mayumi Sato told me that the amount of chestnut pollen found increased in proportion with the growth of the settlement’s population—her words painted a perfect picture of the Jomon people strutting ahead in the open landscape, leading us by example how to coexist with nature.
I have another anecdote from a few years back about a link between a Sannai Maruyama relic and the present. The Jomon Jiyukan houses and displays a woven basket called the Jomon pochette (collection of the Aomori Prefectural Board of Education). Woven from the inner bark of a conifer of the cypress family, the small basket is a rare artifact surviving from the Jomon period not in fragments but in its complete three-dimensional form. It is designated an Important Cultural Property. I had photographed this miracle of an artifact, and after a while, showed the picture to a friend who works at Yoshida & Co., known for its Porter brand of bags. My friend was deeply moved by the fact that a pouch existed in the Jomon period and that it still exists today. Several days later, he showed my picture to an artisan at Yoshida, who then told him the basket was woven in the ajiro wickerwork pattern that continues to be produced in the Tohoku region today. The chain of encounters developed into a collaboration project to create a present-day Jomon pochette.
During my travels for Jomon fieldwork, I never feel as if I am looking at the past thanks to those occasional encounters that highlight the link between the Jomon world and our lives in the present. For those of you who have found your dream for the future, I would suggest you take a trip to the Jomon site in Sannai Maruyama.
＜ PAPERSKY no.65（2021）＞
Jomon Fieldwork | Nao Tsuda × Lucas B.B. Interview
A conversation between ‘Jomon Fieldwork’ Photographer and writer Nao Tsuda and Papersky’s Editor-in-chief Lucas B.B. The two discuss the ways Jomon culture continues to play an important role in modern day Japan. The video was filmed at Papersky’s office in Shibuya in conjunction with Tsuda’s exhibition “Eyes of the Lake and Mother Mountain Plate” held at the Yatsugatake Museum in Nagano.
Nao Tsuda | photographer
Through his world travels he has been pointing his lens both into the ancient past and towards the future to translate the story of people and their natural world.
tsudanao.com