Jomon
Jomon pottery coated with black and red urushi
Jomon people’s love of urushi
The Jomon Period (14,000 BC - 300 BC)
The end of the Ice Age coincided with the closure of the Paleolithic era, when stone implements were used as tools. The Jomon period began approximately 16,000 years ago and the prehistoric culture that flourished at that time is called the Jomon culture.
The Jomon people were hunter-gatherers living spiritual lives, well organized and in harmony with each other and nature. They were a very sophisticated people with a wide range of artistic expressions from pottery to jewellery. The Jomon people learned over 9,000 years ago how to utilise urushi’s strength to enhance their lives.They used it as waterproofing for pottery, to strengthen basketry, to coat hair combs and even made talisman and fabric with urushi.
It is believed that the Jomon people used red urushi to symbolise life as it is the colour of living blood and black urushi as death because of the colour of dead blood. In this way, they could express the life cycle and their religious artifacts reflect this.
In 1999, at the Kakinoshima excavation site in Hakodate in Hokkaido, the oldest urushi artifact in the world was found. It was a piece of cloth which had been woven from vegetable fibers and had three layers of red urushi applied to it. Although the fiber had completely rotted, the urushi remained intact. It was radiocarbon dated to be 7,170~7,050 BC and was an incredible find!
As the fabric was found in a large grave pit around where the head and shoulders of a body would have laid, the experts think that it was a decorative fabric attached to the head and costume of a shaman. Several wooden dishes coated in red and black urushi have been excavated all over Japan and are very dynamic and modern in design.
Replica of a Jomon dish
Hakodate archeological dig
Jomon shaman
Photo credits: Hakodate Jomon Culture center