Agriculture and Violence in the Japanese Islands
Since at least the 1980s it has been widely accepted by Japanese archaeologists that agriculture was the primary cause of the growth in the scale of warfare and violence in the archipelago from the first millennium bce.
This process is usually explained in economic terms: farming saw an increase in population which in turn led to conflicts over imbalances between available resources and mouths to feed.[337] If, however, the Jomon period also witnessed at least some phases during which resource affluence led to population increases and considerable social complexity, then should not similar conflicts have also occurred during that period? Warfare was certainly common in the affluent foraging societies of the North Pacific that are often compared to the Jomon.[338] Jomon villages were also quite sedentary, and the use of cultivated plants appears to have been more common in the Jomon than in most other North Pacific hunter-gatherer societies.[339] If Jomon populations were already engaged in early forms of agriculture, then should not warfare have been a significant element in the Jomon period?In the first chapter of this volume Steven LeBlanc argues that human populations including hunter-gatherers will always increase until carrying capacity is exceeded and that increased violence and warfare is associated with the ensuing resource conflicts. High mortality from violence has been demonstrated in a Venezuelan hunter-gatherer group but a long-term analysis of hunter-gatherer demography in western North America concluded, contra LeBlanc, that forager populations adjusted to changing climatic conditions.[340] Significant chronological changes in Jomon population levels are known especially from eastern Japan; the causes of such changes have long been debated but there is currently no evidence that violence was associated with this population pressure.[341]
The relationship between Jomon food production and violence is rarely discussed in the literature but is an important problem in the comparative study of the origins of warfare.
In attempting to explain the apparent contradiction of Jomon peaceful affluence, Matsugi proposes ideological factors: just as the Jomon people knew about but avoided adopting full-scale agriculture, it is suggested they made a cultural decision to defuse resource conflicts by other (unspecified) means and avoided full-scale warfare.[342] The problem with this explanation is the scale - both temporal and spatial - over which it must be applied, and the comparative homogeneity in Jomon world view and socio-political structure that it implies. Any group that chose a different route, one of conquest and expansion, would be expected to profit immensely, at least initially. Why, then, do we not seem to see evidence of this strategy? Keith Otterbein has argued that raiding and warfare hinder or even prevent plant domestication, a proposal that may be consistent with the Jomon evidence.[343] In a contrasting approach, however, Robert Rowthorn and Paul Seabright have modelled the transition to farming as a type of prisoner's dilemma wherein the increased costs of defending agricultural resources and facilities led to the rapid spread of that economic system. Note that in this last model, societies develop a greater potential for organised violence even if the actual prevalence of warfare does not always increase.[344]In Japanese archaeology, the appearance of elite individuals is often interpreted within a Marxist framework whereby community work in rice paddies needs considerable labour and organisation to create embankments and irrigation systems and that, as a result, some individuals might have been nominated as ‘mediators' between communities to deal with conflicts related to land and surpluses. These individuals would eventually acquire more and more authority and power, developing symbols and manipulating violence and oppression to consolidate that power.[345] As we saw above, obvious traces ofYayoi period conflict are found on skeletons from northern Kyushu to the Kinai area and, considering the importance of an increasing population during the Middle Yayoi and the limited size of the agricultural plains, such conflicts must have been inevitable. At the same time, moated settlements develop, some with very sophisticated defence systems, and the first bronze weapons begin to appear in tombs. However, traces of violence in a given area do not necessarily mean that the chiefs of that area established their authority through violence or that they tried to win or extend that authority with violence, nor that there were recurring and organised conflicts or even well-trained armies.
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