Not the Jomon Jomon
Explore the Jomon in popular culture. The following are mostly Japanese websites. The name Jomon is often used to connect a group, business, or organisation to Jomon history and people. There may be other less obvious connections being made. Please suggest links (our contact details are below).
The Jomon Internet Service is based in Aomori, Japan. Represents the Jomon with Flintstone family style graphics; does not promise direct communication with Jomon ancestors. If you want to try, then consider some more-or-less serious attempts to reconstruct Jomon language: Anonymous, John C. Maher, and The Japanese Dialects (from which a reconstruction of Jomon language has been attempted).
If you are shy about speaking Jomon, then you can just listen to their music, courtesy of a great looking three-piece band called Jomon Japan, with shakuhachi, binsho (electric piano), and taiko. Presumably the concerts take place on stormy nights and are powered by lightning.
If you would like to meet living Jomon people, try joining the Jomon private school (Jomon juku e yokoso, Japanese language only). Here you can learn about attempts to distinguish Jomon and Yayoi traits among living Japanese. This is a highly speculative but popular activity in Japan, especially at drinking parties. Enjoy with sake and several grains of salt on the side of your cup.
Even if the Jomon people are really no longer with us, their culture may live on. At a 2002 conference on Shinto rituals, Mogi Sakae, an ethnographer at Kokugakuin University, pointed to formal similarities between prehistoric Jomon statuettes and dengaku masks. He argued that present-day agricultural festivals, and taasobi in particular, may have originated in Jomon period rituals.
Aki Sahoko
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As a free-lance artist and illustrator, Aki has worked closely with archaeologists to produce visual interpretations of Jomon life for books and museum displays (photo copyright of the artist). Her homepage is entitled 'A spiritual trip to the Jomon'.
