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I've been looking up stuff since my last post and it looks like various sites give different dates for the Jomon period. Here's one site which looks like it goes into some of the details:

The Prehistoric Archaeology of Japan

Now why I'm curious about the date is because I'd heard of corded items in European archaeology--here's a site mentioning a conference which seems to explore that parallelism:

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF CORDAGE ACROSS EURASIA

Organisers:

Simon Kaner (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich, United Kingdom)

Noriyuki Yamamoto (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures Norwich, United Kingdom)

This session commemorates the 90th anniversary of the death of one of the founding fathers of Japanese archaeology, Tsuboi Shogoro, in St Petersburg in 1913. Tsuboi was a pioneer of the scientific study of pottery in archaeology.. This session will investigate how pottery studies, of which Tsuboi was a pioneer in Japan, have shaped archaeological discourse across Eurasia. Along with other scholars of his generation, including Hamada Kosaku who studied seriation with Flinders Petrie, Tsuboi was instrumental in adapting Western archaeological concepts for a Japanese context.

The use of cordage to decorate pottery vessels is one of the defining characteristics of the Jomon period in Japanese prehistory. Cord-marking is also, however, a major attribute of pottery decoration across much of Eurasia, in particular in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, visible in the Corded Ware cultures that stretch from the Volga to western Europe, including Beakers. This session brings together specialists from Europe, Russia and Japan, to consider the many dimensions of cordage and cord-marked pottery in prehistory.

Papers will consider the technology, symbolism, context, formation processes and function of cordage and cord-marked pottery across Europe and will provide an unprecedented opportunity to place the cord-marked pottery tradition of Jomon Japan in a Eurasian perspective. The session will also address the ways in which European archaeological method and theory have influenced archaeology outside Europe, taking as the focus the changing interpretations of types and technologies and their relationship to prehistoric peoples and cultures.

"I've been looking up stuff since my last post and it looks like various sites give different dates for the Jomon period."

Me too. You'll find the same dating situation with the Olmec.

Jomon Pottery Early Period

This style of bowl was common in western Kyüshü during the Early Jömon period. The geometric pattern is extremely similar to the patterns used in Korean pottery from the Pusan area.

"The use of cordage to decorate pottery vessels is one of the defining characteristics of the Jomon period in Japanese prehistory. Cord-marking is also, however, a major attribute of pottery decoration across much of Eurasia, in particular in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, visible in the Corded Ware cultures that stretch from the Volga to western Europe, including Beakers."

James Chatters (of Kennewick Man fame), in his book Ancient Encounters speculates that the genes that produced Kennewick Man also produced the Asians and Europeans. If Cord Pottery is oldest in Japan and is also found later in Europe, this may be some support for his speculation? Europeans were 'hatched' in Asia?