Editorial
We are pleased to present Volume 9, Issue 2 of the Japanese Journal of Archaeology, theoﬃcial English language journal of the Japanese Archaeological Association. This issue
consists of three parts: one original article, a special section on the Japanese archaeologyof gender, and an English summary of a book awarded the Japanese ArchaeologicalAssociation Prize.
The article by MORI et al., entitled ‘Estimating the Sources of Stone Tools Made ofTuﬃtes during the Yayoi Period and their Archaeological Signiﬁcance,” is an outstandingand rare example of an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese archaeology. At universities
in Japan, curricula in the natural sciences and that in the social sciences and humanities
are completely separate. In fact, high school students who intend to major in science andengineering at university and those who intend to major in humanities and social sciences
are usually enrolled in diﬀerent classes. This reality considerably hinders interdisciplinary
studies in Japan. I congratulate the authors for overcoming this diﬃculty. In fact, thisarticle presents one of the ﬁrst applications of laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma
mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to Japanese archaeology.
The special section on the Japanese archaeology of gender is also very important in
at least two respects. One is that the entire special section is contributed to and edited
by native Japanese archaeologists who did not receive degrees at English-speaking
institutions. For native Japanese archaeologists who have not spent considerable time
abroad, it is extremely diﬃcult to write in English, and I praise the authors very highly
for their painstaking eﬀort. The other is that the Japanese archaeology of gender is,
as is the case with other areas of Japanese archaeology, data-oriented and empirical.
Owing to this data-oriented approach, hypotheses and models presented in this special
section are convincing, and I hope that this special section will contribute to advances inarchaeological theories of gender.
The article by YAMAZAKI Takeshi, entitled ‘Zooarchaeology of the Earliest Farming
Period’ is an English summary of his book, Nōkō Kaishi-Ki no Dōbutsu-Kōkogaku,
published by Rokuichi Shobō, Tokyo (2019). The author personally wrote the English
summary, which was edited by the editorial committee. His book is an important
contribution to Japanese archaeology for at least two reasons. First, there are not many
zooarchaeologists in Japan because of the reason stated in the above paragraph. Second,
while most works on zooarchaeology in Japan are skewed toward the Jomon period, hiswork focuses on the Yayoi period, when wet rice cultivation was fully adopted in Japan.
He vividly illustrates subsistence activities other than agriculture during the Yayoi period.
For the reason explained in the Editorial of the previous issue, we could not include twopapers I had hoped to publish in this issue. Another paper on gender and a full translationJAPANESE JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 9 (2022): 115–116

Ken’ichi Sasaki

of a paper to which the Japanese Archaeological Association Prize was awarded in 2019will appear in Volume 10, No. 1. I appreciate the understanding and patience of ourreaders.
Ken’ichi Sasaki
Chief Editor
Tokyo, March 2022

© Japanese Archaeological Association116