The Jōmon period is the long prehistoric era of the Japanese archipelago, conventionally dated from roughly 14,000 to 300 BCE, though the boundaries vary by region and convention: the northern UNESCO sites are dated to about 13,000–400 BCE, and rice farming reached the southwest well before the north, overlapping with early Yayoi. 'Japan' here is geographic shorthand for many scattered island communities, not a single people. Across those millennia they built settled villages, made some of the world's oldest pottery, and sustained complex societies mainly by hunting, fishing, and gathering, while some also tended groves and lightly cultivated plants.
Almost everywhere else, the settled village, the storehouse, and the crowded cemetery arrived with the farmer. In the Japanese islands they arrived thousands of years early, and with barely a planted field. The people we call Jōmon stayed in one place, buried their dead in the same ground for centuries, and left clay pots so old they rank among the first ever fired, yet they raised no fields of grain. They hunted deer and boar, netted fish, and gathered chestnuts and acorns by the ton, and out of that abundance they made red lacquerware, strange goggle-eyed clay figurines, and towns of several hundred people. For a long time the schoolbooks taught that farming had to come first, that only the harvest could free people to settle and build. The Jōmon islands had not read the schoolbook.