Jade and Magatama
The oldest ornament material in Japan was among the hardest stone there is. The jade of Itoigawa in Niigata formed around 520 million years ago and is among the oldest jade on earth; people began working it about 7,000 years ago, in the later part of the Early Jomon. The Olmec in Mesoamerica start using jade around 3,000 years ago and the Maya around 2,000, so this is a different order of magnitude. The first people in the world to put a hand to jade were here. The magatama — that comma shape, a dot pulled into a tail — also begins in the Jomon and becomes dominant in the Kofun period. It is the "jewel" of Japan's three imperial regalia. It crossed the sea as well. Tombs of Silla and Gaya on the Korean peninsula have yielded comma-shaped jades in quantity from the fifth and sixth centuries, and the gold crown found in 1921 at the Geumgwanchong tomb in Gyeongju has fifty-seven of them hanging from it. Where that stone came from, however, is unsettled. In 1986 Choe Eun-ju analysed nineteen pieces by X-ray fluorescence and found their composition matched neither Itoigawa nor Burmese jade. Korean jade, then? No jade source has yet been found on the peninsula. That there was traffic is certain; which way it ran is not. This is the kind of story that makes this map most careful about drawing a line. And then the current stops completely. In the Nara period the jade culture declined sharply and disappeared. The last known use is the ornament on the Fukukenjaku Kannon of the Hokkedo at Todaiji, made in the Tenpyo era (740–747). The shape of prayer moved toward the Buddha, and the jewels were no longer needed. Seven thousand years of it ended there. And here begins the longest version of a story this map keeps telling: the one that arrives late. When the culture vanished, so did the memory of where the stone came from. From the Edo period until the early twentieth century, jade excavated from Japanese sites was assumed to have come from Myanmar, Yunnan or Tibet. Japan has no jade, that was the settled view. What overturned it was not a scholar but a poet. Soma Gyofu, who lived in Itoigawa, read the old account of Princess Nunakawa, who ruled this land, wearing jade magatama, and reasoned that the stone must lie somewhere nearby. Ito Eizo, hearing this, followed a tributary of the Kotaki river and on 12 August found a green stone (the year is given as either 1935 or 1938, and it is still unsettled). In 1939 Kono Yoshinori confirmed Japanese jade in an academic paper. It took more than a thousand years to come back to something that had been underfoot the whole time. Altamira took twenty-three years; Hilma af Klint took a hundred (see Cave Painting, Hilma af Klint). This one runs past a millennium. Taking a long time to arrive is not the same as never arriving — and the longest example on this map turns out to be in Japan.