The Biggest Fraud in Japanese Archaeology

I'm not exaggerating.

Why is it so hard to study early Stone Age Japan?

Because it was a helluva long time ago, of course! However, there’s a more sinister reason, involving an amateur archaeologist nicknamed “God’s Hands.”

Most of Japan is covered in mountains, so people have been squatting on the same flat patches of land over and over. It’s common to find Stone Age artifacts if you’re doing construction in Tokyo, or if you’re a curious child with groundhog tendencies.

That’s exactly what Fujimura Shinichi did: as a schoolboy in the 1960s, he found Jōmon pottery in his backyard. Fujimura became obsessed with archaeology, the Stone Age, stone tools, Geodudes, and everything rocky.

Fast forward to his twenties, Fujimura began digging up amazing artifacts in deeper and deeper layers of the Earth. From 1976 until 2000, each find was crazier than the last, gradually pushing the date of the earliest humans in Japan further into the past.

Archaeologists had believed that the first humans arrived in Japan around 30,000 years ago. By the year 2000, Fujimura’s findings had pushed that date back more than half a million years.

Fujimura would find stunning artifacts like magic: arrow points, stone axes, postholes, statues of Bowsette, you name it. He was not subtle: sometimes he would lead reporters around a site and find tools right in front of them. This earned him the superhero-worthy nicknames “God’s Hands,” “Divine Digger,” and “God of Stone Tools.”

However, before God’s Hands could receive an invitation to join the Avengers, everything came tumbling down. In October of 2000, newspaper reporters got wind of God’s Hands’ suspicious luck and placed hidden video cameras around one of his sites.

On the early morning of October 22nd, the cameras caught him using his holy powers to bury existing artifacts for future discovery. Sure enough, the next day, God’s Hands triumphantly announced his “discoveries.”

Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s leading newspapers, promptly published a damning report. It turned out that for decades, Fujimura had been taking real stone tools that were only a few thousand years old and secretly reburying them in far older, deeper layers, rewriting history with a shovel and a smirk.

From there it was a wild media circus, with public outrage at misspent tax Yen, academics pointing fingers and arguing whether all Stone Age sites in Japan were bogus, suddenly brave know-it-alls claiming they’d known all along that God’s Hands’ finds were fishy, etc.: like a telenovela, but with fewer long-lost twins and surprise pregnancies.

Fujimura claimed that he only planted artifacts at two sites, but, to the surprise of absolutely no one, this turned out to be another lie. Twenty-five years later, we know that Fujimura messed with at least thirty sites and possibly as many as two hundred.

Japanese archaeology still suffers the fallout of Fujimura’s hoax. Many sites remain suspect, public trust and funding never fully recovered, schoolbooks had to be rewritten, academic careers were ruined, and sadly one person committed suicide over the affair.