Stone Spatulas

A broad end below a narrow attachment

These objects broaden away from a pierced end without the separate head of the headed blades or the pronounced tang of the tanged blades. Sixteen specimens or documented units enter this broad-form comparison. The Japanese stones range from serpentinite to tuff; “jade complex” does not identify every specimen’s mineral.

The Japanese term hera means spatula. It describes an outline; it does not make the object a kitchen tool. Endō Hiroya is a useful boundary case: its long body widens only gently, approaching the plain slats. Lingyanghe lies toward the opposite boundary, with a broad, nearly rectangular body. These boundaries matter when comparing possible uses.

Published interpretations

Igarashi Mutsumi interprets five large serpentinite examples from Kanagawa and Gunma as waist ornaments, possibly personal insignia · archived. He personally observed near-45° wear around the holes on both faces. Ordinary hanging would pull the cord toward the top; these oblique traces led him to propose a somewhat taut cord and contact against something. Bone replicas whirled mechanically for fifteen hours wore mainly at the sides of the hole and only lightly at its top (Kumbani et al. 2019); Igarashi’s spatulas were not simply hung.

The Chinese objects have different published readings. The Shandong register interprets the yellow Dawenkou spade as an ornament derived from a tool · archived, citing its edged outline but no obvious edge-use traces. For the green Lingyanghe spade, the Juxian gazetteer offers a production tool or an axe symbolizing authority · archived. Zongri’s specimens are catalogued as jade knives, with no use traces reported. These are separate objects and observations, not competing votes on one universal function.

None of these accounts reports an acoustic trial or an experimental match between ancient wear and whirling. Testing selected specimens as bullroarers is the proposal made here; the published evidence currently concerns attachment, edges and possible ornament or tool use.

Twelve objects, different proportions

Each measurement belongs to its named specimen; an unreported thickness does not establish thinness. Dates in the Japanese group are cultural attributions: Igarashi places the five serpentinite examples in the late Early to initial Middle Jōmon, following Tsubota Hiroko. The Chinese pieces below span distinct archaeological cultures.

Scroll sideways to compare all columns.

The Yoshimine museum entry · archived gives its own 120 × 30 mm dimensions. The Sannai-Maruyama archive · archived identifies object 9530 and its 78 mm length. Neither entry supplies a motion-specific wear diagnosis.

Five holes with the same oblique wear

Igarashi’s five observations concern Ishihara, Yamaguchidai, Endō Hiroya, Mitsugosawa-naka and Miharadajō. Their shared wear supports treating this particular subgroup together; it cannot supply a wear diagnosis for Yoshimine, Nakano B 239 or every object called hera. His account supplies no matched experimental wear controls.

Four of the five came from earth pits; Ishihara is the exception in his account. “Pit” does not establish a grave or a position on a body. The Mitsugosawa-naka excavation table · archived independently records a complete serpentinite object, 126 × 38 × 7.5 mm and 62 g. The Miharadajō report, p.147 · archived, describes groove-like depressions crossing the hole on both faces. It also distinguishes marks from manufacture along an edge. Those observations should remain separate from Igarashi’s later use-wear interpretation.

The Ainu swung a spatula for wind

On Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, the Ainu swung a board to raise the wind. At Shiraoi in 1916 Neil Gordon Munro saw a booming device shaped like the Ainu weaving spatula, used to bring a favourable wind for the deer hunt. In the north of the island the same object was called rera-suyep, the wind-raiser. An old woman, Tekatte Fuchi, answered the name by miming the swing of the arm and the roar, and remembered that as a girl she and the other children were forbidden to swing a spatula “lest by so doing they raised a storm” (N. G. Munro, Ainu Creed and Cult, 1962, p. 117). The Ainu boards were wooden and much larger than these stones; the action was the same: a flat blade on a cord, swung to move the weather.

The Ainu were not alone. Whirling a blade for wind, rain, thunder or thaw runs across the whole north. In Europe it was the Scottish thunder-spell and the bullroarers of Norwegian fishermen. In Siberia the Khanty and Mansi of the Ob asked for wind with one, the Nganasan and Enets of the Taimyr Peninsula called it with another, and the Chukchi storm howler, the Vadul weather blade of the Kolyma and the Amur Evenki wind-summoner carry the practice to the Pacific. Across the Bering Strait it continues among the Gwich’in of Alaska, the Dakelh of British Columbia, the James Bay Cree, and the Shoshone and Paiute of the Great Basin in the western United States, who swung it for wind and to bring a thaw. The atlas records nearly seventy weather bullroarers across northern Eurasia and North America.

A practice spread that widely, on both sides of the Bering Strait, is not a recent invention. It is likely far older than the Jōmon spatulas, which makes the Ainu wind-raiser a fair model for them: a spatula-shaped blade, swung on a cord, to call the wind.

Broad Chinese blades retain their edges

The yellow Dawenkou blade from Shandong, China, has three edged sides and a body only 4 mm thick. Zhong Yaxun illustrates this exact object at right in her 2024 study, p.47, fig.22 · archived. Lingyanghe’s larger green spade has a 16 mm eye, but its own thickness is unreported. An edge, a hole and a similar outline do not establish the same attachment or use.

The two Zongri objects from Qinghai, China, have a different attachment contrast: catalogue 152 has two neighboring holes, while 153 has one. Both preserve a curved beveled edge. Gu Fang’s catalogue, volume 15, nos.152–153 · archived, reports no use traces on either. That is a limited published inspection, not a microscopic demonstration that bindings never touched them. Their Qijia attribution does not supply a date for an individual grave.

The useful test is how the cord moved

A hole, a broad face and a thin body make selected specimens worth testing as rotating blades. A successful replica would demonstrate that the chosen stone, dimensions and rigging can produce sound. Historical identification requires another match: where the ancient attachment touched the hole, which direction it moved, and whether the faces contacted skin, clothing or a haft.

For the five Japanese specimens, a comparison of experimentally worn pendants, waist fittings and rotating replicas could test Igarashi’s explanation against whirling under matched conditions. The different sizes, sections and contexts collected under hera give no reason to assign every Japanese spatula one function. Until that test is run, the wear points to a cord pulled taut and moving, which a whirled blade explains at least as well as an ornament; the Chinese edged blades preserve a wider set of possibilities.

The comparative catalogue

Measurements are length × width × thickness in millimetres. A dash means unreported; ≈ marks an estimate. Groups and possible duplicate objects remain labelled. Download the specimen table.