The bells grew for centuries until they became too large to sound, then vanished without a word – and no one now knows what they were for.

In the spring of the sixth year of the Wadō era (713 CE), in a field called Nagaoka in Yamato Province, someone's hoe struck metal. The farmer brushed away the earth in astonishment. He dug around the find on every side and heaved from the pit a thing he had never seen – nearly a metre tall, hollow within, slender, tapering toward the top, covered with the green film of centuries. The bronze was cold and heavy, smooth where time had worn the pattern away, rough with verdigris in its hollows. The man circled it, unsure whether he beheld a tool, a weapon, or perhaps something sacred. One thing he understood at once: it had come from no hand that anyone nearby could remember.

He carried the find to court. Empress Genmei reigned then, and the capital at Nara had stood for only three years, still smelling of fresh timber and damp plaster. It was an age of great chronicling. Barely a year earlier the oldest chronicle of the land had been completed; the myths of the gods were being set into words, fleeting memory forged into lasting script. And just then, in a state feverishly recording its own beginning, the earth gave back an object older than any sentence those chronicles knew.

The officials examined the thing closely. Someone struck it. The bronze answered with a tone clear and drawn-out, beautiful enough that a court scribe noted in ink: the sound in keeping with the scale, the shape strange, unlike anything known. He did not write what it was. He could not. No one at the court, where Chinese books and Buddhist sutras were read, could name the object. It was placed in the treasury, among things precious and unintelligible.

So begins every tale of this object: with earth, a spade, and astonishment. Not with a hero, for there is no hero. The people who cast it left not a single name, not a single line of writing, not a word about what they believed. They had vanished nearly five centuries earlier, so swiftly that even their descendants forgot the secrets buried in the ground. Between that silence and our question stands no one who could answer.

This is the oldest surviving record in which the word read today as “dōtaku” appears. 銅鐸 – literally “copper bell” – nothing more, for nothing more is known. (Here, incidentally, lies another inaccuracy: the bell was made of bronze.) The object entered history as a riddle and a riddle it remained. Since then it has been dug up in hundreds of specimens scattered across the Japanese archipelago, weighed to the gram, X-rayed, ranged in a neat line from oldest to youngest. We know almost everything about it but one thing: why it was made. Thirteen centuries after that day in the field at Nagaoka, the question of that farmer and that scribe still hangs in the air, unchanged, clear as the tone of struck bronze. Why?

The Boundary Beyond Which Archaeology Falls Silent

Archaeology answers many questions about the dōtaku with impressive precision. It knows the alloy they were cast from and at what temperature. It knows how the casting moulds and the patterns on the body changed. It knows where they were buried, how deep, and in what arrangement. It can line up every known specimen in a single row and say which came earlier and which later.

At one question it falls silent. At the only one that truly interests us: why? Beyond a certain line science no longer answers; it merely poses hypotheses, weighs them, and honestly admits it does not know.

The thesis of this essay is simple. The dōtaku is a mirror of our ignorance. The more beautiful it became, the less useful it was – until it ceased to be a bell and became a pure sign whose content we cannot read. We will ponder this remarkable history today, though we shall most likely not solve the riddle.

One fundamental thing must be said at once. The Yayoi period is prehistory. The people of that age left not a single sentence of writing, not a single name, not a single quotation. There is no hero to carry the story, because we know none. Two things carry it instead: the object itself, and the moment when, after ages, it returns from the earth under someone's spade.

What a Dōtaku Actually Is

The dōtaku (銅鐸, “bronze bell”) is a hollow, thin-walled bell cast in the Yayoi period (弥生, roughly 500 BCE – 300 CE). The dōtaku themselves were made over a shorter span, from about the second century BCE to the end of the Yayoi – some four hundred years. They clustered in western Japan, and their heartland was the Kinki region, the area around present-day Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka.

Bronze is an alloy of copper with tin and a little lead. Copper melts only at 1,084 degrees Celsius, and to pour it one must exceed eleven hundred. Tin and lead, melting far lower, lowered that barrier and eased the casting. Today the dōtaku are greenish with patina, coated in the noble verdigris of ages. When they came out of the mould, they shone like gold. One must remember this before a museum case: we are looking at the dimmed, aged shadow of an object that, for the people of Yayoi, blazed in the sun like something from another world.

In form the dōtaku resembles a flattened bell, oval in cross-section, tapering upward. Distinctive “fins” run along its sides, a suspension loop juts from the top, and the body is divided into bands covered with patterns. The sizes vary greatly. The earliest are a dozen or so centimetres tall. The latest exceed a metre. Between the two ends of that scale the whole story plays out.

We know today around five hundred specimens. That is both many and few – many, because each demanded fire, ore, and a master; few, because spread over four centuries and hundreds of communities they yield an incomplete picture. They cluster in western Honshu, around the Inland Sea, on Shikoku, and in Kansai, though stray finds reached far east, into the mountains of present-day Nagano. In the late phase clear regional styles appear. The most splendid, slender and richly decorated, are tied to the Kinki region; others, with a different loop and pattern, developed around Ise Bay and in the Nōbi plain.

The body itself was decorated in a few established ways, and these patterns too have their names. One is ryūsuimon (流水文), the “flowing-water pattern” – wavy, parallel streams running downward, as if someone wished to halt the motion of a river in metal. Another is a dense lattice of diagonally hatched bands, dividing the surface into rectangular fields. In richer specimens the two faces of a single bell sometimes differ: one bears the lattice, the other horizontal bands called ōtaimon (横帯文). The geometry is surely not accidental, but what it was meant to signify for the people of Yayoi – again, we do not know.

One thing must be cut off at once, for it is constantly confused. The dōtaku has nothing to do with the later temple bell, the bonshō (梵鐘) – that great, smooth bronze hung in a Buddhist gate and struck from outside with a wooden beam. The bonshō came to Japan together with Buddhism, half a thousand years after the last dōtaku vanished into the earth. To link them is an anachronism as thick as a wall. When the people of Yayoi were making dōtaku, Buddhism did not yet exist on the Islands.

A Lineage from the Continent

The idea of a bronze bell was not born on the Islands. It came from far away, by a long road. The oldest small bronze bells we know come from China, from the Bronze Age cultures of Shang and Zhou. They were small, fist-sized, worn at the belt, hung on dogs' necks and horses' harnesses, fixed to chariots. The sound was both signal and ornament. The earliest Chinese bells of pure copper are about four thousand years old; bronze spread there some three thousand seven hundred years ago. Sometimes a distant ancestor of the dōtaku is also sought in a Zhou-era percussion instrument or in the horse bell, the badaku (馬鐸).

Around the sixth century BCE such bells reached the Korean Peninsula. There they took on a role that will prove important for this whole history. Shamans wore them on the body, to work themselves into a trance with their jangling, into a state of possession by a deity. In Korean graves they are found beside mirrors of dense, geometric pattern and beside bronze daggers – the equipment of people held capable of hearing the voice of the gods. The jangling accompanied not a harvest festival, then, but the passage into another world. This trace – sound as a gateway to the divine – is worth remembering, for in Japan the bell will move toward an entirely different role.

These small Korean bells, called by archaeologists Chōsen-shiki shōdōtaku (朝鮮式小銅鐸), were a dozen or so centimetres tall, with a smooth, patternless body and a loop worn down from use. In the middle of the Middle Yayoi they crossed over to Japan. And here something new began. The bell started to grow. It gained side fins, gained patterns, gained a style of its own. From a jangler hung on a shaman's body it became an object the continent had never seen.

A certain gap in our knowledge must be marked here, one that science has not yet filled. The distance between the simple Korean bell and the oldest decorated dōtaku is considerable. Some researchers see a straight line; others prefer to speak of a common ancestor of both forms.

Even where the first Japanese dōtaku was made is unclear. The dispute long ran between Kyushu and Kinai, and in December 2004, at Nagoya, one of the oldest known casting moulds was unearthed, and the question of the birthplace flared up anew. The deeper one digs, the less obvious becomes what had seemed already settled. The riddle refuses to close from the very beginning.

Fire, Mould, Gold

Let us imagine the casting, for it is the only scene from these people's lives we can reconstruct reliably. First the mould: at first of stone, laboriously carved, then increasingly of clay, which allowed finer patterns and larger sizes. In the mould, the negative of the future bell – the patterns cut in reverse, mirror-wise. Beside it, a furnace and a crucible. The ore goes into the fire, the temperature passes eleven hundred degrees, the air above the hearth trembles. The molten bronze pours into the mould in one sure motion; a moment's hesitation would mean bubbles and cracks.

After cooling and breaking the mould, out comes an object gleaming like gold. The master cleans the edges, smooths the side fins, the hire (鰭), checks the suspension loop, the chū (鈕). Inside goes the zetsu (舌, “tongue”) – the heart of the bell, an oblong rod of bronze, stone, or horn, hung so that it strikes the walls as the bell sways.

There is in this craft a trace that says more than many a record. It happens that two dōtaku found hundreds of kilometres apart came from the same mould. Such twins are called dōhan (同笵). The bells from the Kamoiwakura hoard in the west have siblings in Tokushima on Shikoku, in Kyoto, in Osaka, in distant Fukui on the Sea of Japan. Either the mould travelled or finished castings did, and with them some bond – an alliance, an exchange, a shared rite. We have the map of these journeys. We have lost only their meaning. For in the Yayoi age there was no single state on the Islands, but a few dozen petty realms. Chinese chronicles counted more than a hundred of them at first, and after centuries spoke of only thirty – as many as remained once the stronger had swallowed the weaker. The history of these alliances and conquests must have been rich and tangled. We know almost nothing of it.

We do know, on the other hand, that workshops existed. In the settlement of Higashinara near Osaka, clay moulds for casting dōtaku and small bells were found – one of the confirmed production centres of the Yayoi period. Someone sat there over a mould, carving the mirror image of a dragonfly or a deer; someone tended the furnace; someone broke the cooling clay. We do not know their names and never will. All that remains of them are the moulds and what came out of them.

There is something more that the bronze betrays to the chemist and the geologist. Neither copper, nor tin, nor lead was mined on the Islands at the time. All the metal for the dōtaku came from the continent. Lead-isotope analysis, carried out on thousands of Japanese bronzes, revealed a clear shift: the early dōtaku were cast from lead of the Korean Peninsula, the later ones from lead of northern China. The boundary of this change falls roughly at the close of the second century BCE, when the Chinese Han dynasty was establishing the Lelang commandery on the Peninsula and a new stream of raw material flowed toward Japan. The conclusion is astonishing. The most sacred object, perhaps, of the Yayoi community, laid into native soil, was made from the first gram to the last of imported metal.

From Bells to Be Heard to Bells to Be Seen

The archaeologist Sahara Makoto captured the transformation of the dōtaku in a formula that has stuck for good: from “bells to be heard” to “bells to be seen.” This is no metaphor; it is a physical description.

The oldest really did ring. Inside hung the zetsu, and on the inner wall, where it struck, one sees a worn, smoothed band – the trace of thousands of blows. The strongest proof came by chance in 2015. On the island of Awaji, in a heap of sand at a gravel works, labourers came upon seven dōtaku now called Matsuho (松帆 – literally “pine sail”). One belonged to the oldest type, known from barely a dozen specimens in the whole country. With all of them the clappers survived, and with several – priceless – remnants of cord. Plaited, two or three millimetres thick, wound many times over. For the first time it could be proved that bell, clapper, and cord went together: the thing was hung and set in motion, not held in the hand.

The Awaji find proved a mine of detail. Some of the bells lay one inside another, and a CT scan showed the clappers wedged in the gap between the smaller and the larger. The bronze, leaching out its metal salts, preserved organic remains: not only the cord survived but blades of grass stuck to it. Radiocarbon dating of one bell pushed the moment of their burial back to between the mid-fourth and mid-second century BCE. Tellingly, they lay not on a hillside above a settlement, as usual, but by the coast – hence the conjecture that they were handled by people of the sea, masters of the Inland Sea routes.

How the ringing itself looked is hinted at by a small drawing on a clay vessel from the Inayoshi site in Tottori Prefecture. On it one sees an object hung from something like a stand or a branch – most likely a dōtaku in use. That is all we have left: the worn band inside, a scrap of cord, and a clumsy line scratched on a pot. From this we must reconstruct a gesture no one described.

Then began the retreat from sound. The dōtaku grew, the walls thinned, the loop changed from a functional handle into a flat, ornamental “plate,” sometimes with side wings. This path is classified by the shape of the loop into four types: from ryōkan-chū (菱環鈕), with a loop rhomboid in cross-section, through gaien-tsuki-chū (外縁付鈕), with an added outer rim, and henpei-chū (扁平鈕) with a flattened loop, to the youngest tossen-chū (突線鈕), covered with raised ridges. In the latest specimens the worn band inside disappears. There are no more marks of striking, because there was no striking.

The record is striking. The largest surviving dōtaku, from the Ōiwayama hoard at Yasu by Lake Biwa, is 134.7 centimetres tall and weighs 45.47 kilograms. No one hung that mass on a cord, no one set it moving. It was for looking at, not for listening to.

And here is the core of the whole riddle. The grander it was, the less it rang. Form outgrew function and devoured it whole. The bell ceased to be a bell.

Pictures on Bronze

On some dōtaku scenes were cast. These are the so-called pictorial dōtaku, and they are our window – the only one – onto Yayoi daily life. The most famous come from Sakuragaoka in Kobe, where on 10 December 1964 people digging earth for plaster pulled from a steep slope, more than two hundred metres up, fourteen bells and seven bronze halberds, the dōka (銅戈). The whole assemblage was declared a national treasure. Four of the bells are covered with images, and at the richest of them, the fifth, the philosopher Umehara Takeshi himself marvelled.

These are precisely the dōtaku whose surface is divided by a lattice, familiar from the arrangement of fields. The pattern has a name of its own – kesadasukimon (袈裟襷文) – because with its mesh of diagonal bands it recalls the way a monk ties his robe. Into each field a little scene was set. A man with a bow and a dog give chase to game. Someone pounds grain in a mortar with a wooden pestle. A storehouse stands on piles. A heron catches a fish. There are a turtle, a dragonfly, a mantis, a lizard. Figures with a round head are read as men, those with a triangular head as women.

What these pictures mean, again, we know only approximately. The most common is the agrarian hypothesis. The dragonfly, mantis, spider, and lizard are the natural enemies of the insects that feed on rice – by casting them, one summoned their help to the fields. The most frequently depicted animal is the deer, though the people of Yayoi ate mainly boar. The old chronicle of Harima Province mentions a rite of sprinkling grain with deer's blood to make it sprout faster; the deer's life-force was to pass into the rice. It is possible, then, that the deer on the dōtaku is no game animal but a patron of the harvest (in the later Nara period deer were sacred creatures, as can still be seen today in Nara – more on this here: The City of Nara – a Geometrically and Spiritually Designed Metropolis of Ancient Japan Long Before the Samurai).

There is a regularity in this iconography that hints at something on its own. As the dōtaku grew and ceased to ring, the pictures on them grew poorer and simpler, until in the latest, largest specimens only two motifs remained of the once-rich gallery of scenes: the deer and the bird. On the record bell from Ōiwayama the pattern is already almost purely geometric, and at the bottom a pair of birds survived, rendered in a thin, trembling line. As if, along with its sound, the bell were losing the speech of images too, descending to a few signs whose meaning we can no longer read anyway.

A more cautious conjecture is also offered. Since the dōtaku were the property of the community and not of the individual, their images may have told what mattered most to the community: the order of labours, the rhythm of the seasons, perhaps a tale of the deities. It would be a gallery of the village's sacred matters, cast in metal to outlast the generations. It sounds convincing, and there is probably something to it. But it is still we who arrange these little scenes into a story – the people of Yayoi left no caption beneath any of them.

We look at these images with tenderness and helplessness at once. We see a storehouse and know it is a storehouse. We do not know whether the pounding of rice here is labour or prayer. The window is there, but the glass is clouded.

The Hoards of Shimane

Two discoveries from Izumo Province, an old land on the coast of the Sea of Japan, shook the whole field. The first is Kōjindani. In 1983, during the building of field roads, a shard of pottery was struck here; the prefectural authorities judged that more might lie in the vicinity and ordered excavations. A year later, out of the slope came 358 bronze swords. The number staggers: there were more of them than all the Yayoi swords found until then in all of Japan put together. All of them slender, half a metre and more in length, light, laid in four rows blade-up, tips alternating – a separate local fashion, later named the Izumo-type sword. On nearly all of them, on 348 of the 358, a small mark was incised, shaped like our letter “X.”

A year later a magnetic probe indicated that something else lay nearby. In a single pit, neatly arranged, rested six dōtaku and sixteen bronze spearheads. The dōtaku were small, belonging to the oldest known types, as if from a different world than the surrounding swords; the spearheads bore on the blade a herringbone pattern typical of northern Kyushu work. Three kinds of bronze from three traditions in one pit. The dating could not be pinned down precisely, but typological analysis places the deposition of both hoards roughly between the first century BCE and the first century CE. The whole assemblage was declared a national treasure in 1998.

The second discovery came on 14 October 1996, barely three and a half kilometres away, at Kamoiwakura. An excavator operator building a road heard a strange sound as he worked, stopped the machine at once, and looked into the cut. The bucket had struck buried dōtaku. Thirty-nine were dug up – the most ever recovered from a single place in Japan. Some lay one inside another. On fourteen of them appeared the same “X” mark as on the swords from Kōjindani. Two sites, three and a half kilometres, one symbol. What the mark meant, no one knows; the conjecture is offered that it was to bind and quiet the power locked in the metal, so that the buried bronze would not lose it. A conjecture, no more. Izumo alone has given archaeologists upward of fifty dōtaku.

Izumo is no accidental place. The oldest chronicles make it a land of gods: here Susanoo slays the serpent, here Ōkuninushi rules, here the myth of the ceding of the land to new rulers from heaven unfolds. It was long repeated that Izumo had mythology but no history – deities in plenty, evidence not a trace. After Kōjindani and Kamoiwakura that saying lost its force. A region where almost nothing had been expected turned out to be one of the densest bronze centres in the country. The temptation to join the unearthed metal to the myth of a lost kingdom is enormous. Yet it must be said plainly: between the bronze and the myth there is no bridge, only our wish to build one. Archaeology gives objects, not the names of gods.

The pattern repeats across Japan. The dōtaku were buried on hillsides, far from settlements, neatly arranged, sometimes alternating with weapon blades, without bodies, without buildings, without a grave. They were not buried with a person, as property is buried. They belonged to the community, not to the individual. The drama of discovery is each time the same: the earth yields up the hoard in a single instant, and the question “why here and why thus” remains under the spade.

Two Zones of Bronze, and a Dispute That Fell Apart

For long decades a tidy picture reigned in Japanese textbooks. Western Japan was supposed to divide into two zones of bronze. In Kinki the dōtaku prevailed – the bronze bell. In northern Kyushu, weapons prevailed: bronze swords, dōken (銅剣); spearheads, dōhoko (銅矛); halberds, dōka (銅戈). Two zones, two cults, two different ways of conversing with the invisible. A map as clean as a tidy drawing in an atlas.

Kōjindani shattered that map. In one pit, in Izumo – exactly in the middle, between the supposed zones – lay side by side weapons in the Kyushu style and dōtaku. What was meant to be divided into two worlds, someone had buried together. After that discovery the phrases “bronze-bell zone” and “bronze-weapon zone” fell out of use, and were removed from Japanese school textbooks.

The lesson is important. The boundaries were drawn by us. We supplied the histories, the names, the meanings. The bronze did not read them. An order that seemed inscribed in the earth turned out to be the order of our own heads projected onto the earth. Archaeology teaches humility.

Why They Were Buried

There are several hypotheses about the purpose of the dōtaku, and they are worth considering one by one, weighing rather than deciding.

The first, most widely accepted, speaks of a tool of agrarian rite. The bell served the festival of the harvest, the plea for water, for rice, for the fertility of the fields. The pictures argue for it: grain, the storehouse, insects and their enemies.

The second sees in the dōtaku a symbol of prestige and of the community's unity. Since they were buried in groups and never in the grave of a single person, they may have bound together a clan or an alliance of clans – a shared treasure, not a chieftain's property. The Ōiwayama site by Lake Biwa, source of the record specimen, yielded twenty-four bells in all, dug up in two campaigns, in 1881 and 1962; such an accumulation in one place counts as one of the stronger arguments precisely for reading the dōtaku as a sign of the community's unity.

The third speaks of a boundary deposit: a bell buried on a slope above a settlement, or between settlements, was to mark territory or guard it.

The fourth, cautious and lovely, reconciles them in time. The dōtaku were kept in the earth and dug up only for festivals – to ring, perform the rite, and bury again.

The fifth is the saddest: some hoards are perhaps deposits from a moment of danger, hidden in haste and never reclaimed, because their owners did not return.

It is worth remembering, withal, how strongly silence tempts us to projection. Of the old notions, one saw in the dōtaku a sundial, one a vessel for smelting gold, one a cauldron for heating bath water, and one a proof of secret Jewish practices on the Islands (seriously – there were such works too, now regarded as pseudo-history, on a common Hebrew-Japanese origin; see N. McLeod, Saeki Yoshirō). These are not mere curiosities. They are a diagnosis of our nature: into the void left by meaning we pour whatever meaning we happen to have at hand. Honesty demands otherwise: where science does not know, one must write that it does not know. Here it does not.

A Sudden Disappearance, and Amnesia

At the threshold of the third century something breaks off. The dōtaku cease to be made and vanish into the earth once and for all. At roughly the same time the Kofun period begins, the age of great tumuli. The whole order of signs changes. The powerful have themselves buried in mounds together with mirrors and swords – with objects of personal power. From the communal bell hidden on a slope, one passes to personal insignia laid in a lord's grave. These are two different ways of thinking about what is sacred, and about who counts.

It is most often explained by a shift in the balance of power. The small communities of Yayoi were merging into larger wholes under a single ruler, and the communal rite – the bell belonging to the group – gave way to a cult centred on the person of a lord. On this reading, the mass burial of the dōtaku would be a gesture closing the old order: into the earth went what the new power no longer needed. It happens that dōtaku reached the pit broken or smashed. For some researchers this is a trace of the object's deliberate annulment, the ritual killing of a thing that had lost its reason to be.

Strangest of all is the silence that fell afterward. The oldest Japanese chronicles, the Kojiki (古事記) of 712 and the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀) of 720, describe in detail the times close to the dōtaku's disappearance. Of the dōtaku themselves they say nothing. In the myths there is no trace of them. It has been suggested that the new Yamato order deliberately erased the symbol of an order it had absorbed or defeated – that the chronicles' silence is the silence of the victor.

That is why the record of 713 is so moving. The man who laid the dōtaku before the empress was named Murakimi no Azumahito, and the chronicle Shoku Nihongi (続日本紀) noted of the object only that its shape was strange and its sound in keeping with the scale. Less than five hundred years after the last dōtaku vanished into the earth, its own country could no longer recognize it.

And then the embellishing began. In 821, in Harima Province, another bell was dug up and called the “bell from the stupa of King Aśoka” – Aiku-ō (阿育王) being the Japanese name of the great Buddhist ruler of India. An object older than Buddhism on the Islands by half a thousand years was given a Buddhist pedigree, because that was the faith at hand. The empty sign was filled with content from the nearest shelf.

A Silence We Cannot Fill

Let us return to the court of 713. The official touches and examines the green, silent object, notes that it sounds pleasing, that it looks strange, and orders it secured and stored away.

Archaeology will give us the composition of the alloy, the kind of mould, the height of the slope, the depth of the pit, the orientation of the buried blades. It will lead us exactly to that line beyond which the silence begins. And there it will stop – honestly, for beyond it there are no more traces, only our need to hear something.

The dōtaku outlived its meaning. First it ceased to ring, then it ceased to mean anything, and in the end it was dug up by people for whom it was already only a riddle to be solved. The honest answer does not lie in solving that riddle. It lies in standing at its edge and not forcing one's way behind a veil that cannot be drawn back.

The bell that cannot sound nevertheless still rings – in us, as the need to understand. That is the only tone truly heard.

The bronze is silent. The rest we supply ourselves.

Sources

1. Sahara Makoto 佐原真, Dōtaku no e o yomitoku (銅鐸の絵を読み解く, “Reading the Pictures on Dōtaku”), 1997.

2. Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan 国立歴史民俗博物館 (National Museum of Japanese History), Rekihaku no. 121, special issue “Dōtaku no sekai” (銅鐸の世界, “The World of Dōtaku”).

3. Yasu-shi 野洲市 (City of Yasu, Shiga Prefecture), the feature “Dōtaku no nazo o saguru” (銅鐸の謎を探る, “In Search of the Riddle of the Dōtaku”) – records of the finds of 668, 713, and 821, and data on alloy and casting.

4. Kōbe Shiritsu Hakubutsukan 神戸市立博物館 (Kobe City Museum), descriptions of the national-treasure assemblage “Sakuragaoka dōtaku, dōka” (桜ヶ丘銅鐸・銅戈群).

5. Shimane-kenritsu Kodai Izumo Rekishi Hakubutsukan 島根県立古代出雲歴史博物館 (Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo), materials on the Kōjindani (荒神谷) and Kamoiwakura (加茂岩倉) sites.

6. Minami-Awaji-shi 南あわじ市 and the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Archaeology (Hyōgo-kenritsu Kōko Hakubutsukan), documentation of the Matsuho hoard (松帆銅鐸) discovered in 2015.

7. Jolanta Tubielewicz, Historia Japonii (“A History of Japan”), 1984 – a Polish study covering the Yayoi period.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

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"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

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未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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