The rain began falling late last Friday. It poured during the night and continued on steadily all day Saturday only letting up after dark. This week we have had blue skies and brilliant sunshine. The floor of the orchard has suddenly burst with weeds, including tall daisies and waist-high thistles. Behind the house, bamboo shoots grow as tall as a person within days.
I've been reading a paper called Japanese Roots by Jared Diamond. It's mostly concerned with the riddle of the origins of the Japanese population, but in building its case, it takes in a host of other fascinating and to me unknown facts. I learned that because Japan's copious rains fall mostly during the warmer growing season, it has the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zone. (To make a comparison, Japan's farmland, acre by acre, supports 8 times as many people as farmland in Britain, a country where the similarly abundant rainfall is mainly in the colder months.)
It was this fecundity that allowed the Japanese hunter-gatherer inhabitants of 12,000 years ago to do an extraordinary thing. Rather than being nomadic, there were enough nuts, plants, fish and animals in the vicinity for them to settle and live in one place. Which led in turn to an unprecedented development.
The Jomon people (as we call them now) of Kyushu developed pottery vessels. They were the first in the world, and they were possible because the Jomons were settled: nomads don't want to be lugging around heavy, fragile earthenware.
Pots allowed the Jomon people to boil the toxins from nuts and acorns, greatly increasing the edible foods available to them. They were also able to boil and soften, rather than grill, plants, which meant that babies could be weaned earlier, and the old and toothless live longer. The population exploded, and the Jomons continued a basically hunter-gatherer life until less than 2,000 years ago, unmolested by the relatively poor dry-field rice farmers of mainland Korea. (Then Korean farmers began rice-paddy farming, the population exploded, and everything changed....)Reading all this made the Jomon people--who I'd known only through their ubiquitous pots and pit dwelling sites and shell mounds excavated all over the country--feel much closer. The shells that sit at the bottom of my compost pile 20 years after I put them there will doubtless still remain in 12,000 years time. And the rain falls and the sun shines and the land bursts with growth just as it did for the village-dwelling hunter-gatherers who made their living here before me.
--Julian