Jōmon people

Around 12,000 BCE in northeastern Japan, sedentary foragers known as the Jōmon were "contemporaneous with and likely earlier than the Natufian period in the Fertile Crescent."

Heide Goettner-Abendroth writes:

Japan’s old- est and extremely long cultural epoch is the Jomon era (16,000–300 B.C.E.), when gatherers and hunters came from the north via the island of Sakhalin, lying at the mouth of the Siberian River Amur. In the Middle Jomon phase (4500–2000 B.C.E.), these people developed permanent settlements, the first agriculture (arid rice-growing), beautiful ceramics and a multitude of artistic goddess figurines (the “dogu figurines”). These were most probably made by women, while the men built stone circles in the form of sun-clocks. All this characterizes this phase as Neolithic, and it was Japan’s classical matriarchal epoch. In the Late Jomon phase (2000–300 B.C.E.), the population began to decrease, but the people’s artistic abilities and sen- sibilities remained.10 Today, descendants of the Jomon people still live on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido: the Ainu, the oldest indigenous people of Japan, who have no patriarchal customs and foster an egalitarian society.

Goettner-Abendroth contends the society became more stratified in the Yayoi Period (300 B.C.E.-300 C.E.), as migrants brought new cultures and agricultural techniques from the south, and became patriarchal in the subsequent Kofun Period began (300–710 C.E.).