11. Fujimura Turns Out to be a Fraud
Fujimura worked on over a hundred archaeological projects around Japan after his first discovery. Amazingly, the spectacular good fortune with which he began his career continued without cease or letup, and Fujimura kept finding older and older artifact. As his lucky streak continued, Fujimura’s finds kept pushing Japan’s human prehistory further and further back. His fame and prestige, already high, reached stratospheric levels in 1993, when he discovered stone age evidence of humans near the village of Tsukidate, which dated back over half a million years. At a stroke, Japan became the equal of its rival, China, in the antiquity scale. So remarkable was that streak, and so fortunate did Fujimura seem in his ability to unearth objects that few if any other archaeologists could find, that awestruck admirers began referring to the seemingly divinely guided Fujimura as “God’s Hands”.
The man’s archaeological skills seemed too good to be true, and as is often the case, things that seem too good to be are usually just that. In 2000, Japan was rocked when a daily newspaper published three photographs showing the respected and celebrated archaeologist planting supposedly ancient stone age tools at a dig site. Forced to confess after being caught red-handed on film, Fujimura admitted to planting evidence not only at that site, but in other locations across Japan, and throughout his entire career. When asked why he did that, a sobbing Fujimura tearfully responded: “the devil made me do it“.
