During the winter, deer, wild boar and serow were intensely hunted down. Although deer and wild boar could be hunted throughout the year, they were relied upon more as a food source during the winter months. Towards the end of the Jomon era,  the shika deer were so overhunted that hardly any deer over the age of eight years could be found from Jomon middens. Smaller animals such as flying squirrels, foxes, monkeys and hares also supplemented their meat diet. They also hunted the duck and the pheasant and other waterfowl and migratory birds.

It is often said that the prehistoric Jomon diet was a particularly varied and rich one, when compared to that of other hunter-gatherers around the world. Nevertheless, the grueling work of finding sustenance and surviving in the wild took its toll and the average Jomon person lived only into his or her thirties.    

There are around 435 native plant species that are edible.  Hunter-gatherers are known to develop intimate knowledge of their environment, to understand the annual cycle of food and resources. Thus they are able to exploit plants and animal foods that are found naturally within their eco-system.

In the spring, the Jomon people looked out for spring buds like angelica (aralia or taranome) sprouts, bamboo shoots,  and they gathered dogtooth violet, salty flower buds of the butterbur and young fronds of eagle fern stalks.

By the coasts and river estuaries, they exploited more than 350 kinds of shellfish, including clams, cockles and oysters.  They fished for tuna, sea bass, perch and bream and shark. They also caught bonito, salmon.

Over the summer, they targeted sea mammals like fur seals, whale and dolphins adding to that list of sea catches.

From April onwards, mushrooms such as the morel mushrooms begin to pop up, with about 120 edible mushrooms becoming available in succession through to the end of the autumn season.

Fruits like peach, and berries (strawberries, elderberries, wineberries and wild grapes) as foods become available as foods from summer onwards. Gourds were cultivated for use as vessels. Shiso or perilla herb was cultivated as the main condiment for flavouring food.

In the fall, the Jomon hunter-gatherers gathered grasses (millet, barley, buckwheat, rice) and all sorts of nuts and acorns, with chestnuts, acorns, horsechestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts forming the staple all over Japan.

Other starchy foods such as the native yamaimo mountain yam and the introduced taro yam must have been cultivated rather than gathered in the wild since roots and rhizomes do not grow well in woodland areas. Other plants cultivated in a rudimentary slash and burn way, include the burdock, green gram (Vigna radiata L.), hemp and kuzu vine.

Some of the nuts and most of the root vegetables would keep well as winter stores, along with the shellfishes and fish that were salted and dried ... and would help tide them over the lean winter season.

All images are COPYRIGHT KAWAGOE except those of the tuna, whale, hare which are in the WIkipedia public domain.