Conclusions

This brief overview demonstrates that violence has always been a feature of human social life in Japan from the very earliest colonisation of the islands. Nakao and colleagues propose a figure of 1.8 per cent mortality from violence in the Jomon period.

This figure is lower than in a number of other prehistoric societies, yet is it certainly not insignificant, particularly as it is very likely to be a minimum estimate. This is both because cases of violent trauma may be under-reported, and also because only a subset of individuals dying violently will display skeletal evidence, most notably in the case of projectile injuries. The contexts in which violence - whatever its prevalence - occurred in the Jomon period remain far from clear. It is noteworthy that the two above-mentioned lethal cranial injuries from Jomon Hokkaido are found on females rather than males, but then the expectation that it is primarily males who are affected by conflict in small-scale societies is clearly unwarranted.^{^[346]} Is this, then, evidence of domestic violence? Alternatively, the targeting of women and children in acts of revenge and retaliation is a recurrent feature of inter-group conflict in small-scale societies. While often cited as an emic motivation for conflict, however, it is debatable how well revenge serves as an ultimate explanation and there may be underlying socio-political/eco- nomic motivations even for hunter-gatherers.^{^[347]}

Evidence for violence-related trauma in the Jomon skeletal record is currently being reassessed and will contribute to the ongoing debate concerning conflict in hunter-gatherer societies. The Yayoi period saw a significant transformation in the nature and scale of violence, with something that could be arguably termed ‘organised warfare' becoming widespread, at least in western Japan. Unlike in the Jomon, fortified settlements and new types of specialised weapons become common in the Yayoi. For many Japanese archaeologists, resources such as land, water and iron were the main source of conflict in the Yayoi period. Chiefdom-like political units fought each other for influence in a process that became even more violent in the following Kofun period when new military technologies introduced from the Asian continent completely transformed the nature of warfare in Japan.

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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