Over 2,000 excavation reports are published each year. These publications alone provide a tremendous base for research on Japan's past, without getting involved directly in excavation work. Only a small part of all this work ever reaches the international publications, however, and most of it is closed to anyone who does not read Japanese well. There is a great need to have far more archaeologists fluent in foreign languages and in Japanese to get involved directly in the work here. And there is an equally great need for ideas from the outside to come into Japanese archaeological research.
Japanese archaeologists recognize, in general terms, four prehistoric and four historic periods.
Each of these is further divided into two or more subperiods, which in turn are divided into a number of phases. In the following pages, I have tried to give brief overviews of the eight prehistoric and historic periods studied by Japanese archaeology. There are only a few good books in English on Japanese prehistory in general or on the specific periods. There are a lot of books in English on Japanese history, but these are based largely on documents and say little about historic archaeology in Japan. I have included some of the relevant English-language bibliography with each of the sections dealing with individual periods.