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There was great excitement in Japan when an amateur archeologist in Sendai, Shin'ichi Fujimura, claimed he had excavated, in the 1970s and 80s, cultural artifacts in Japan dating back 150,000 years. His reports fanned the ethnic pride of many people who were eager to accept the idea that Japan and the Japanese people had a long and distinguished history. However, some people were suspicious of the Fujimura findings. In 2000, a national newspaper set out to follow him in his excavations and took secret photos of Fujimura planting artifacts in a Paleolithic stratum that he would later use as proof of the ancient origins of human culture in Japan. The scandal attracted suspicion to all evidence for the Paleolithic in Japan because most excavations of those early sites had been directed by Fujimura. Nevertheless, because of other, more reliable research we can now confidently say that there was human habitation in Japan dating back as much as thirty thousand years; but whether there were people in the archipelago prior to that time is a question awaiting more conclusive research.
Culture has also affected scientific studies of the origins of the Japanese people. The origin myths of Japan, recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, describe the creation of the islands and provide a genealogy of the gods. Central to these myths is the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, supreme deity and ancestor of the imperial line. It is these myths that provide the justification for the emperor's supreme position in Japan as the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess. The emperor today, the 125th descendant of the first emperor of Japan, remains a powerful symbol of the ethnic unity of the people and of the Japanese nation state, except for the Ainu, the Koreans, and the other non-Yamato citizens.
The first emperor, Emperor Jinmu, the great-great grandson of the Sun Goddess, is described in the Nihon shoki as beginning his reign on earth in B.C.E. 660. Thus logically, if one follows these creation myths literally, there could be no archaeological remains of human habitation in Japan before creation, before the Age of Gods, and before Jinmu. During the highly nationalistic and imperialistic period of Japanese history leading to the Pacific War in the 1930s and 1940s, the emperor was used as the unifying and motivating force for the Japanese military and civilian war effort. The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki provided the textual basis for attributing a divine ancestry to the emperor and indeed a unique descent for all the Japanese from the Age of the Gods, giving them racial and cultural superiority over other peoples.
Consequently, prewar archaeological research focused only on the past ten thousand years, i.e., it examined sites only from the Jōmon Period onward, with the assumption that lower strata from older periods would have nothing to offer. Following Japan's surrender in 1945 and the emperor's public admission that he was not divine, archaeologists began to excavate the lower strata looking for pre-Jōmon artifacts, with some success. Such excavations are still going on today.
How to reconcile the presence of the Ainu with these national and ethnic origin accountings has been problematic and has changed over time. In one account, the Ainu were already there when Emperor Jinmu arrived and were forced north and finally into Hokkaidō as Jinmu and his tribe left Kyūshū and moved to more northern areas.
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