John Ertl: Jomon Houses in Mita

2024/04/10

For several years, I have been conducting cultural anthropological research on prehistoric pit dwellings. Currently, I am excavating Middle Jomon period sites, investigating various reconstruction designs, and building reconstructed pit dwellings using tools and materials that would have been available in the past. Since the end of the war, more than 600 prehistoric reconstructed dwellings have been built across the country. If you open the first page of a Japanese history textbook, you can see what they look like. However, no one knows for sure what actual Jomon period pit dwellings were like. Therefore, all modern reconstruction examples can be called "imaginary reconstructions" that reflect the current perspectives of the people who built them.

Let me give an example of a reconstruction related to Keio University. After moving to Tokyo in 2018, I took up residence next to Mitadai Park, near the Mita Campus. Mitadai Park was established in 1978 following the excavation of the Isarago Shell Mound, and in one corner, there is a conical concrete reconstructed Jomon dwelling. I later learned that this was designed by the late Professor Kimio Suzuki of Keio University. Inside this dwelling are life-sized models of a couple and two children, wearing furs and performing various tasks. Such "Jomon family" displays can be seen at other sites as well. If a kitchen counter were placed next to the mother and a kotatsu in front of the children and father, wouldn't they instantly transform into a Showa-era family?

Archaeologically, there is no evidence that nuclear families lived in Jomon period pit dwellings. As an anthropologist, considering the diversity of kinship and residential patterns found around the world, I find it hard to believe that Jomon families were the same as the Showa model family in central Tokyo. Professor Suzuki, who was a faculty member in the Major in Archaeology and Ethnology, understood this issue and could have presented any number of alternatives. However, to this day, there are almost no cases where Jomon families are depicted as, for example, polygamous or as same-sex couples living together. In the end, the more we try to make Jomon families feel familiar, the more we are encouraged to "see ourselves" in the Jomon people.

If Jomon people were depicted as unshaven, covered in scars, and with full-body tattoos, would we still accept them as our ancestors? If a reconstructed dwelling were displayed as a crude and shabby structure, housing only a mother and children, would it appear at the beginning of a Japanese history textbook? We may be projecting our current values and ways of looking at things onto the past.