When thinking about the general trends in the evolution of Japanese society, I found it really interesting how the priorities would change as they accomplished new things. During the Paleolithic period of Japan, there was a lot of focus on hunting and weaponry, because that was necessary for them to survive. Therefore, that needed to be their focus. However, as they entered the Jōmon period, there was a growing focus on pottery. They still focused on food for survival, since a lot of the pottery was used for cooking or storing food, but they began incorporating a little bit more artistry. Then, during the Yayoi period, they began focusing a little bit more on luxury, with the objects that they would bury the more powerful members of society with. In general, it was really cool to look at how Japanese society began focusing on more, for lack of a better term, extravagant things once they completed what they needed for survival.
It was also really interesting to look at artifacts from different periods with the context from the readings. For example, the reading mentioned that starting during the Jōmon period, Japan started becoming more aware of other places, and then during the Yayoi period, there was a fair amount of Korean inspiration. I think it is really cool that we are able to discover how Japan was inspired by its surroundings in the artwork, specifically pottery and in later years, bronze. Especially since much of Japanese history happened before Japan had a written language, and therefore many manuscripts were written by the Chinese, archeology is the most trustworthy source of information when it comes to those time periods, and looking at even the advancements in how the pieces looked shines a light into their technological advancements, which I find amazing.
The article that I read about Queen Himiko was very interesting, albeit overstimulating. The main thing that I got out of the library session was that while not all sources are trustworthy, there is a large variety of texts that I can look to for research. In high school, it was very much academic texts only to be found on our school’s database or GoogleScholars, so it was really interesting to see the types of sources that may not have a PhD behind them but are still very educational. That being said, my article was not one of those sources, and I think the lesson in being able to decipher which sources I should use and which I should not is a very important one that I will be using a lot in the future.
Friday, Karl F, ed. Japan Emerging : Premodern History to 1850. INSERT-MISSING-SERVICE-NAME. New York, NY: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429499531.
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/ancient-japanese-queen-himiko-burned-animal-bones-tell-future-020207
