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CHAPTER 2

THROUGH THE KEYHOLE:

THE PEOPLE OF WA

Not even Japan’s two most ancient chronicles can agree what happened to the fourteenth emperor, Chūai. The simplest account, in the Nihongi, is that he was overseeing a war against a rebellious tribe, the Bear People in Kyūshū, when he was struck by an arrow and died. The Kojiki, however, has a far more supernatural tale to tell.

Near the edge of his island domain, it said, Chūai was partway through his campaign against the Bear People, resting in one of his subsidiary palaces, plucking idly at a musical instrument, when one of his wives—known to posterity as Jingū—began speaking with a voice that was not her own. She spoke of a land to the west, rich in gold and silver, and told him that it belonged to him.

Chūai was plainly irritated by her comments, and stopped playing. He had stood on the cliffs and faced the west, he told her, and there was nothing there. But instead of taking the hint and staying silent, Jingū uttered a deathly curse.

“You will no longer rule All Under Heaven,” she spat. “Now, turn in your final direction.”

His chief minister blanched visibly, and stammered that the emperor should continue to play his instrument. Angrily, Chūai went back to his music, but only plucked at the strings occasionally. The notes grew further apart…then discordant…then suddenly ceased.

Courtiers took up lamps and approached him only to find that he was dead.

The chief minister asked for divine inspiration, but the answers he received the following day from his oracles matched Jingū’s odd words. The next emperor, he was told, was still in Jingū’s womb—this was the will of the Sun Goddess, and of three other previously unheard-of deities.

It is not all that clear from the Kojiki where these words came from. Possibly they came from Jingū herself, who continued to utter strange phrases, calling on her people to assemble a fleet and to calm the waters by scattering chopsticks and toy boats on the sea. She led her fleet away and returned some time later, proclaiming that she had subdued the lands across the sea. Some stories said that the King of Silla had joyfully proclaimed her as his ruler. Others claimed that she had dragged him to the seashore and hacked off his kneecaps to make him fall before her, spearing him in the sand and burying his corpse in an unmarked grave.

She returned to her homeland to give birth.

Then, and only then, she put Chūai’s body on a funeral barge and sailed back up the Inland Sea to the Yamato heartland. News of Chūai’s demise had been suppressed until that moment.

Her stepsons plotted to overthrow her. One climbed a tree to scout the distance, but his perch was uprooted by a giant boar, which ate him.

His younger brother laid in wait for the funeral barge, but as he prepared to attack, the boat disgorged a company of armed soldiers. The two forces fought to a standstill, at which point the leader of Jingū’s forces told his enemies that there was no point in fighting, for Jingū was already dead.

To show his sincerity, he took his knife and cut his bowstring.

The stepson’s forces responded in kind only to discover that the man’s act had been a ruse. Jingū was still alive; her men had hidden spare strings in their topknots, which they swiftly used to turn their bows back into deadly weapons.

Something fishy was certainly going on. Chūai had left for Kyūshū alive, but had come back dead. Jingū had returned from an unknown land, claiming to have carried Chūai’s heir in her womb for three years, still communing with the voices in her head. She had turned on her stepsons, and now proclaimed that her supernaturally conceived son was the new emperor.

“The days,” said the Nihongi, “were dark like night.” The bad omen terrified the people, but was eventually dispelled when it was discovered that two priests had been buried in the same grave. When their bodies were separated, the sun reappeared.

Down at the water’s edge, the bay was full of beached dolphins.

Some called it a feast sent from the gods, but the dolphins’ bodies were already rotting, and their blood stank.

The prince was still a child, but Jingū agreed to serve as his regent until he was of sufficient age. She ruled for sixty-nine years before dying, at which point the aged Emperor Ōjin finally succeeded his odd mother. He died when he was 110 years old.

The era from around 300 BCE to 250 CE, Japan’s “iron age,” is known to modern archaeologists as the Yayoi period, named for the Tōkyō district where its most famous remains were uncovered in 1884. Its origins, however, lie across the sea in Korea, from which several hundred thousand new migrants would cross the straits in search of a safe home. Asides in the earliest surviving chronicles of the Japanese suggest that these travelers first made their home in Kyūshū, but advanced over several generations along the Inland Sea until they found the best of possible locations, at the “Gateway to the Mountains” (Yamato) near what is now Nara.

These new arrivals hailed from a world that, if it was not openly Chinese, at least aspired to emulate Chinese civilization. They brought with them knowledge of the Chinese writing system, which was used inexpertly and inaccurately in early attempts to transcribe the words and concepts of the Japanese islands. They also brought new technology and materials—most notably metals and the potter’s wheel—as well as a culture steeped in patriarchal Confucianism. Whereas the archaeological record and ancient legends speak of chieftesses and warrior-women, in what may have even been a society where women either held the reins of power or shared it with the men in complementary roles, the newcomers swiftly marginalized the womenfolk. Denied many of their former occupations, women in powerful positions were soon found only in relation to shrines and ceremonies, a position which would be further undermined in subsequent centuries by the advent of Buddhism. In the world of the newcomers, dominated by a Confucian tradition wary of female influence, women were usually seen merely as wives, mothers, and daughters to be wed, appeased, or traded. There were occasional throwbacks, like the ax-wielding Empress Jingū, but even her power base seemed shakily founded on her husband’s importance, or perhaps her family’s desire to keep hold on power until her son was old enough to wield it. It is in her time that we last hear of female shamans that, in the words of J. Edward Kidder, are “oracular and battle-tested.”

The earliest written record of Japan’s ancient myths dates from the Kojiki, completed in 712 CE, by which time they had plenty of chances to be half-forgotten, re-interpreted and embellished. Although certain elements are liable to form a relatively accurate list of kings and queens or a gazetteer of notable events, others may have been added simply to serve the interests of later figures. Others may simply relate half-remembered accounts of ancient enmities, but are worth repeating for a glimpse of the stories the Japanese tell themselves about themselves.

Although the later Nihongi is presented as a straight chronology of a thousand years of wars and deeds, it is far more likely to offer a cluster of separate family lineages that originally happened concurrently: the king-lists of old Yamato; the sagas of the ancestors of the Kyūshū nobility; the last legends of once-proud clans, now invisible beneath new names and alliances. At some point, many may have once regarded themselves as “kings” of one part of Japan or another—Kyūshū, perhaps; the coasts of the Inland Sea; and the Yamato foot-hills. The line from the Sun Goddess did not merely descend through the emperors, but through some nineteen other clans that claimed descent from her children. It may even conceal subtle differences between different kinds of newcomers—we can place no single great cataclysm that may have led to the largest influxes of migrants, but if there were several waves, it is very likely that they came from different Korean kingdoms—particularly Baekje and Silla, depending on which one had the upper hand. There are numerable dynastic spats, usually justifying the accession of a younger heir above his brothers (or, more usually, half-brothers). We might read these incidents as indicators of the tussles behind the scenes between powerful families seeking to influence the next emperor by trying to ensure that his mother comes from their bloodline. If the right fair maiden from the right clan attracted the emperor’s eye at the right time, his eldest son might be easily ousted in favor of the infant child of a new favorite, suitably steerable to ensure further influence at court.

Certainly, in the ancient tales of sophisticated gods from Heaven locked in battle with snarling, belligerent gods of Earth, we have all the indicators of a story told by the winners in war for control of Japan. But we also have many signs of a story that has been mangled in transmission. With the benefit of digital archives and internet searches, I can tell you the details of my own ancestors stretching back just over a hundred years, but I can tell you of nothing before then save a few misty allusions and rumors. How much harder was it for the chroniclers of the eighth century, describing events up to a millennium in the past, with nothing to go on but hazy memories of lost scrolls?

For generations to come, lineages of the Japanese nobility were divided into three categories: immigrants, the descendants of emperors, and the descendants of the “gods of heaven and earth.” Perhaps the three sacred treasures of Japan are intended to reflect this tripartite-structured Japan as mirror, sword, and jewel—the later arrivals of the mainland with their fancy Chinese mirror, the earlier invaders with their sword of conquest, and the indigenous people with their sacred comma-shaped jewel, regarded as a symbol of wisdom.

Tales related to Jinmu may have been the ancient legends and tales associated with the Ōtomo clan, whose ancestral turf was close to the mainland in Kyūshū, and who were therefore liable to have been involved with the first of the conquering newcomers. But the tales of the tenth emperor, Sujin, seem to draw on the lore of the Mononobe clan, a powerful family that was largely outmaneuvered in the politicking of the early Japanese state, and which appeared to have strong connections to assimilated indigenous peoples. It’s not for nothing that Sujin is described as having a council of female shamans, setting a very different policy from the conservative Confucian-influenced newcomers. Sujin’s reign is a time of localizing and confining local kami, suggesting a poetic allusion to the incorporation and pacification of multiple neighboring clans, from whom he collects tribute in meat and textiles.

Meanwhile, the tales of the fifteenth emperor, Ōjin, seem to cleave closely to the family traditions of the Soga clan, whose strong ties to mainland Asia are reflected in long tangents about diplomacy and cultural exchange.

One day, someone may finally be able to reconfigure the Nihongi from its current single-strand thousand-year epic form into three or more interlocking sagas, each spanning the same period of two or three centuries, leading up to the historically verifiable moment in 552 CE when Emperor Kinmei (509–71) received a fateful gift of Buddhist treasures from Baekje. In its earlier pages, we see a muddled narrative of acculturation and conquest, as mountain fortresses riddled with kami and demons yield to the march of progress or flee before it. We also hear of the indigenous people, first mentioned as far south as Kyūshū, when Emperor Jinmu declares he has scared away the “Aimishi.” The word is a coinage, bits of classical Chinese stuck together in an attempt to make a sound that did not exist in that language.

Eleven emperors later, the Nihongi reports on several campaigns of conquest and subjugation by Emperor Keikō, in which he sometimes runs into local barbarians whom he captures and sacrifices, and sometimes runs into locals who welcome him with open arms. The princess Kamu-nashi, for example, “chieftain of that whole country,” comes out to meet him waving a tree branch in truce on which were hung a sword, a mirror, and a jewel. Was the tree branch an actual banner-substitute for the barbarians, or was it a facsimile of the multi-branched ceremonial swords wielded by the Korean newcomers? Regardless, the princess enlists the help of Keikō in putting down “rebels” in her own domain—which, it is implied, is henceforth incorporated into his. Meanwhile, his soldiers embark upon pacification not only of the princess’s enemies, but of some new ones encountered on the way, such as the ominous, cave-dwelling Earth Spiders, who are clubbed with stone maces until the blood runs ankle-deep. His lieutenants report another land apparently in need of some civilizing:

In the eastern wilds, there is a country called Hitakami [Sun Height]. The people of this country, both men and women, tie up their hair in the form of a mallet, and tattoo their bodies. They are of a fierce temper, and their general name is Emishi [Shrimp Barbarians]. Moreover, their land is wide and fertile. We should attack them and take it.

Like the Earth Spiders, the Shrimp Barbarians have a name bestowed upon them by their enemies. Possibly it is a reference to their staple food; more likely it is some sort of reference to long whiskers on their menfolk. It could even derive from emushi, which may have been the natives’ word for a sword. The description of them in the Nihongi has enough parallels with accounts in Chinese annals, and with the archaeological record, to confirm what everyone has suspected all along: that the newcomers swiftly assimilated the Jōmon, killing them off or scaring them off their lands to trouble the next generation of conquerors.

Generations later, Yūryaku (r. 456–79), the twenty-first emperor, would boast in a letter to the Chinese that he and his ancestors had conquered 115 barbarian “nations” of these “Hairy People.” The Japanese would still be discussing their Emishi neighbors in the time of the 38th emperor, Tenji (626–72), whose emissaries to China were recorded in the New History of Tang, and referred to “Shrimp Barbarians” (in Chinese, xiayi). On the borders of the land of Wa, say the Tang annals, there are great mountains (the Japanese Alps?), beyond which are the Hairy People.

The land of the Shrimp Barbarians is a small country in the island of the sea. Its ambassadors have beards that are four feet long. They draw arrows back to their neck, and placing a gourd on the head of a person dozens of paces away, they hit it without fail.

Talk of these Emishi disappears almost entirely from the historical record by the time Japan becomes more recognizable to the reader, even though they are integral to the country’s formation. Much of their culture was impermanent; they built in wood and adorned themselves with shells. They did, apparently, raise some impressive stone monuments, accounts of which occasionally crop up in later Japanese annals, but only as they are repurposed. Emishi henges and stone circles, menhirs and stone altars were once found all over Japan, although most of them were ripped up to form the foundations and battlements of medieval castles. The creation of one iconic image of Japan is likely to have involved the destruction of another.

As collaborators, slaves, and mothers, the Emishi formed a substantial part of the Yamato population, while their ancient traditions, distorted and forgotten, surely formed the building blocks of what is still Japan’s official religion, Shintō, the Way of the Gods. Emishi folktales, and the ghosts of departed tribes, can be heard echoing in Japan’s place-names. Even the modern name of the island of Hokkaidō, the “north-sea-way,” may originate in a mishearing of a more specific term hoku-Ka’i-dō, “the north road to the Shrimp Barbarians.” In centuries to come, whenever the Japanese tried to assert a unique sense of Japaneseness, a declaration that they were somehow different or superior to the cultures of the mainland, they would cast aside the inheritances of Chinese bronze and Korean steel, silk brocades, Buddhism and Tang architecture, Chinese literature and poetry…and what would they be left with? Strip away China and Korea, and you also strip away many of the ancestors of the Japanese themselves. The very core of the Japanese spirit, its very essence even today, is the ghost of the Emishi.

Yamato Takeru, said to have flourished in the first century CE, was a prince of the proto-Japanese who killed his own brother and was banished by his father to the borderlands, where he vanquished various enemies. His aunt, the chief priestess at Ise Shrine, gave him the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven that was once ripped from the tail of a dead serpent by the god Susano’o. Trapped in burning grassland by a treacherous local warlord, Yamato Takeru used the sword to slash his way out of the fire, thereby giving it the name by which it would be known thereafter: Grass Cutter (Kusanagi).

But while Yamato Takeru was legendary, his time saw communications from real residents of Japan with the elites that then claimed to rule China. In 238 CE, emissaries arrived in China from Himiko (“Princess of the Sun”), the queen of Yamatai, a kingdom likely to have been on the Kansai plain west of Japan’s Central Alps. They are probably responsible for much of what ancient chroniclers have to say about their homeland, which is described as a mountainous territory to the “southeast of Korea”—the Korea Strait being the shortest and most obvious means of reaching it.

Much ink has been spilled over Himiko, who may have been a witch-queen “deft in the way of the gods,” or possibly a sun-priestess and figurehead. Himiko may not even have been a name, but a title, a contraction of the Japanese for “majestic woman,” himemikoto. It may even have been a corruption of a term in Japanese that refers to a sister–brother pair ruling as a princess and prince: hime-hiko. Whoever she was, her interest in communicating with an unseen Son of Heaven more than a thousand miles away betrays a respect for and awareness of China that may have derived from contacts with the edges of the Chinese realm.

Despite all the descriptions of Queen Himiko in Chinese accounts, there is no mention of her in the chronicles commissioned by the rulers of Japan in the early eighth century. Had she already been forgotten, or was she hidden in the ancient accounts under another name? Perhaps she was Heaven Shining (Amaterasu), the capricious Sun Goddess who dominates early Japanese legend. Perhaps she was Divine Merit (Jingū), the ancient warrior-queen who was said to have been possessed by the Sun Goddess, and who supposedly led a successful war against Korea. Perhaps she was one of several shamanic seers mentioned in the kingly list as helpmeets to male rulers.

To the authors of the Chronicle of Wei, a third-century Chinese annal, Himiko was the queen of what was probably the largest of some thirty kingdoms in the archipelago, with a population of 70,000 families. Although there has long been disagreement about the precise location of her domain, the fact that the vast bulk of the Kofun-era tomb mounds are in the Ōsaka–Nara area suggests that she lived there, somewhere in the watershed of the Yamato river. The ancient place-names of the area evoke a Tolkienesque time of simplicity: the Gateway to the Mountains (Yamato) river pierces the hills that divide the plain from north to south at a place called the Great Pass (Ōsaka). To the north is the Good Flat Ground (Nara). At the edges: Mountain Back (Yamashiro), the Splendid Land (Iga) and the Sacred Streams (Ise). The many rivers of the area flow down toward the Riversides (Kawachi), where they meet the sea at the Wavecrest (Naniwa) and the Clear Coves (Suminoe).

The Chinese chroniclers mention a veritable Scrabble-bag of twenty other forgotten kingdoms in Japan, with names like Shima and Ihaki, Kokata and Kanasana. These names seem to have been meaningless to the Chinese, assembled from characters that approximated the sounds in a language that was foreign to them—unless, that is, their informants really were referring to kingdoms with names such as Devil-Slave (Kina), Naked (Luo), and Black Teeth (Heichi). Nor is there anything but the vaguest of schematics suggesting where these countries were. The discrepancy between the Chinese league (li) and a far shorter Korean variant has left all distances impossibly confused, but a little triangulation of distances, geography and archaeology suggests that Himiko’s realm was somewhere near the Kansai plain, the site of today’s Ōsaka and Kyōto. Her biggest rivals in the kingdom of Kuna to her south, in what is now Wakayama, are described as fine swimmers and divers, habitually barefoot, with bodies and faces heavily tattooed to ward off sharks and dragons.

Her envoys reached China confident that sorcery would keep them safe. They would travel with a “bearer of mourning,” a designated guardian tasked with remaining chaste, unwashed, and ungroomed as a charm against their safe return. He would be richly rewarded if they came back unharmed; executed on presumption of failed duties if they did not.

Amid the sparse prose of the Chronicle of Wei there are several comments that would echo through the ages. The people of Himiko’s realm, it said, were notably long-lived, often reaching 100 years old. When high-ranking persons walked on the road, commoners were expected to back away into the roadside bushes. Their archers held their bows “below the middle,” evoking images of the distinctive top-heavy Japanese bow. And when her people expressed assent, wrote the Chinese chroniclers, they said “Hai”—as they still do today.

The ruler of the Chinese coasts was pleased to receive emissaries from such a faraway place, and sent a typically condescending thank-you note, in which he appointed Himiko as queen (even though she already was one), and sent her multiple bolts of wool and silk—including some crimson brocades decorated with dragons—a hundred bronze mirrors, and two long swords.

The bearer of mourning plainly did his job, because the ambassadors made it home, returning with another letter from Himiko sometime later that thanked the Chinese for their gifts. The Chinese were asked to arbitrate in a dispute between Yamatai and Kuna, although it is unclear whether a letter from a distant, unseen potentate would have any effect on a local dispute.

Himiko then died.

Classical Chinese is so terse that proximity can imply causality—the text may be intended to suggest that she died because of the dispute, meaning that the emperor’s decree was useless and led to her execution in a coup. Or she may have just died before the message arrived, being notably old by this point. Either way, she was replaced by a teenage girl, confusingly recorded as “a priestess of Himiko”; the Chinese chronicles dispassionately report that a hundred women were sacrificed at Himiko’s funeral.

Over the next few centuries, later Chinese chroniclers would occasionally write about the land across the sea, but it is unclear to what degree they were merely embellishing the assertions made in the Chronicle of Wei. The Book of the Later Han returned to the topic of Himiko, long after her death, to describe her as a shaman-queen with a thousand female attendants and a single male squire who “served her food and drink and communicated her words.” This text also openly assumed that the Japanese aristocracy were descended from the Chinese First Emperor’s legendary expedition—an account that was plainly believed by at least some contemporaries. Further confusion has been caused by the compilers of the Nihongi, who seemed determined to make their narrative fit those few moments of the historical record that could be confirmed through comparison with Chinese chronicles. Excited by tales of the witch-queen Himiko, these compilers appear to have taken the accounts of Empress Jingū, for example, and shoved them in several chapters earlier than they really should have been mentioned, so that a female ruler of Japan would appear in the same period in which such a figure was reported by the Chinese.

Archaeology offers further evidence of the life and culture of these Yamatai peoples. Excavations all over Japan, not merely in the south, point to a culture of foragers initially living close to the coasts and rivers, where their seasonal diet relied heavily on marine produce in the winter months. The seafood, however, would suddenly decline. The late Jōmon period saw a drastic fall in the number of indigenous inhabitants, caused not by war but by a drop in temperature that restricted access to the two main foodstuffs that sustained them in the winter—shellfish and nuts. Northern Honshū, in particular, seemed to have suffered an apocalyptic decline in population from which it took centuries to recover. The population elsewhere rose again thanks to an increased focus on the cultivation of grains, particularly a new arrival from the mainland—rice.

The period from 250 to 700 CE, roughly concurrent with Europe’s Dark Ages, is known in Japanese climatology circles as the Kofun Cold Stage, a dip in temperatures substantially worse than that known in Europe as the “Little Ice Age.” Global temperatures fell, with a mysterious “dry fog” recorded in both China and Europe that reduced the impact of solar radiation for over a decade in the mid-sixth century and led to widespread famines and outbreaks of disease. Japanese weather, too, turned colder and wetter; several archaeological sites have been preserved because they were abandoned after floods.

This period dealt substantial damage to the surviving indigenous peoples of Japan, but allowed the more technically advanced immigrant communities to flourish. By 200 CE, the arrival of iron had brought swift changes to the Japanese realm. The locals continued to build with timber, but were able to access far more of it with the new efficiency of metal tools. Just as modern Japanese cutlery reflects a scarcity of metal—knives and metal implements are used in the kitchen, but not at the table—most of the Yayoi people continued to work with wooden tools, attesting to the rarity of early iron objects. However, many of these wooden tools themselves, such as shovels and rakes, became more widespread and efficient because of the availability of iron tools to make improved versions. Architecture, too, became straighter, as fences and beams were hewn with truer blades. Land was swiftly cleared, and the primeval forests were decimated in the quest for materials, but this also allowed for the development of agriculture on a larger scale.

The trees stayed on the mountainsides, where they kept the soil in place and allowed for reliable amounts of water flowing down the slopes into the new rice paddies. Japan’s volcanic soil was relatively poor for agriculture, but could be tricked into producing higher yields by flooding the fields. Communities that could grow their own food could forge ahead, as could those that stored surplus produce “for evil years.”

The Ise Shrine, one of the most sacred sites in Japan, is particularly useful for understanding the ancient country. Ever since the shrine was first rededicated by Empress Jitō around 692 CE, it has existed in two forms: the “original” wooden thatch-roofed building, and a copy under construction alongside. The shrine is rebuilt as an exact copy of itself every twenty years, echoing a similar narrative of demolition and renewal that seemed to accompany changes in omens or dynasties among the Japanese of the distant past. It also gives us a clue as to the architecture of ancient Japan—sturdy constructions of cypress wood above a ground of white pebbles and around a sacred central pole, with extended finials that give each roof a crossed, horned profile. It is possible that many of the buildings of the ancient Japanese capital looked like these before developments in technology and materials dragged them away from the original plans.

The Kofun period, however, takes its name from a different kind of architecture, the massive “ancient graves” (kofun) that dot the Japanese landscape. The simple, square burial mounds of the Yayoi period give way during the third century CE to huge tumuli featuring a distinctive combination of a rounded top connected to a trapezoid mound. From above, this makes them appear to be shaped like keyholes, and indeed they are often referred to as “keyhole tombs.” Their oldest examples date from the Nara area, but in the ensuing centuries they proliferated elsewhere, implying a dominant aristocracy that took its manpower and customs further and wider.

The contents of the kofun would surely have much to tell us about this period in Japanese history, but their sacred status as the resting places of ancient Japanese “emperors” keeps them largely off limits to archaeological exploration. There are, tantalizingly, several similar keyhole-shaped tumuli to be found in Korea, in the Yeong-san river basin in what was once the state of Baekje, implying strong cultural connections between the builders of both.

Although Japan was already occupied from end to end, the narrative in the Yayoi period takes on a new tone. The story of what would become Japan is not now told by the Jōmon peoples, and possibly not even by their most impressive inheritors, the Yamatai. Instead, it becomes a story told by people whose arrival from the mainland is indicated by in the form of a large mound burial in the first century BCE in Kyūshū, the island closest to Korea, and a gold seal from around the same time found in the Fukuoka region.

Chinese chronicles report “disturbances in Wa” around the middle of the second century CE as these new arrivals, armed with iron that cut down both enemies and forests, began to push ever further up the coast. The corpses in their Japanese graves are notably taller than the locals, perhaps explaining why dispatches back to the mainland referred to a land of “dwarves” in the first place. There is a palpable break in the line of Japanese kings around the late fourth century, possibly related directly to unrest on the mainland that saw the collapse of the Kara state, with up to a million refugees arriving in Japan. These migrants, however, appeared to be arriving with their wealth intact, and were soon interfering with and influencing the politics and power struggles of local kingdoms. Some of the indigenous Jōmon people fled north to escape the newcomers, while others seemed to welcome them, even as they were swamped by their numbers. The archaeological record reveals a double impact—first of a huge influx of these new bloodlines, forming 73 percent of the population in some areas—and then of the inevitable increase of the newcomers’ numbers as they bred both among themselves and with the locals.

Where Chinese chronicles once described everyone on the islands as “barbarians,” now there is a new narrative of civilization in the hands of these fresh arrivals, pushing back against the barbarians of the periphery. For centuries thereafter, there would be a frontier in the north—a place where young men might carve out a career on the marchland; where “barbarians” on the edges were divided into the good ones who had assimilated and the bad ones who pushed back. The long march northward would only come to an end in the nineteenth century, when the Japanese staked their claim on the last stretch of wilderness in the far northern island of Hokkaidō. There, the local Ainu people bore an unsurprising resemblance to the original inhabitants of Japan in many of the accounts from the ancient past, now eking out an existence on the very edge of the land that was once theirs.

By the early third century, the keyhole tombs had made it as far as the Kansai plain—the heartland of Queen Himiko’s legendary kingdom. Notably, they contain very few shell bracelets; the old ruling class had been supplanted. Mainland technology and genes soon wormed their way into the local elites. Deforestation rapidly escalated as these newcomers pursued new housing, new land cleared for crops, and new social projects such as dams and dikes.

It is likely that the confused historical record obscures a dual struggle for influence, as the old kingdoms jostled for power and the newcomer elites fought for recognition not only in the community of local kingdoms, but also back on the mainland, where they intervened in Korean politics.

Owing to the muddled condition of Japanese annals, the real dates are impossible to determine. Chroniclers, like readers, are apt to be confused by repetitive accounts of wars across the straits and kings begetting heirs, and are frustrated even further when a quick count soon establishes that these sovereigns appear to have superhuman lifespans, coming to the throne in adulthood and still somehow managing to rule for over a century. Your guess is as good as mine as to how historical a figure the dragon-slayer Yamato Takeru was—probably not all that much, although his son Chūai is another generation closer to the time when the annals were set down. It was the biographers of Chūai’s widow, Jingū, however, who really muddied the waters. The Kojiki reports her setting sail for Silla on the Korean peninsula with an invasion fleet, which speeds across the strait, borne on the backs of helpful fishes and a generous tailwind. The ruler of Silla, seeing this unlikely entourage approaching, does not even bother to fight, but swears allegiance to Jingū, pledging himself as a mere stable-boy to the sovereign of “Heaven,” and vowing that “each and every year, for as long as heaven and earth remain” he will send ship after ship in a constant rotation of tribute, specifically in horses.

The whole story is foggy with poetic license, and so wracked with portents and sorcery, along with strange turnabouts of fate, that one might just as easily interpret it as an account of a Korean invasion of Japan, but it does seem to bear a much closer resemblance to Japanese attitudes substantially later than the chapters in the Kojiki. Move the stories of tribute and alliance later—to, say, 369 CE—and they suddenly bear a much closer resemblance to cross-straits actions reported in Korean annals, as well as in the attitudes and proclamations of the man who was supposedly Jingū’s long-lived grandson, Emperor Nintoku (r. 313–99), who apparently died at age 145. Nintoku was a particularly powerful sovereign who commissioned a number of large public works, including dams to divert troublesome rivers. He also famously permitted his subjects a three-year moratorium on their duties, allowing his own palace to fall into ruins, its thatched roof leaking, while the rest of his country prospered. Such a story sits at odds with the material evidence of huge public projects, not least the 2,000 laborers who spent sixteen years building his supposed gravesite—the Daisenryō Kofun, the largest of all the “keyhole” tombs—in what is now Ōsaka.

The Daisenryō Kofun is, in fact, supposedly one of the three largest tombs in the world, matched only by the famous grave of the First Emperor of China and the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Today it is set in a central pond that is itself ringed by two additional moats. Like many other surviving kofun tombs, it cuts a lush, viridian shock of the ancient past into the modern landscape. It is not open to the public; visitors are permitted to approach no closer than a shrine on the outskirts that looks across the pond. It takes an hour to walk around it, but all you see is a thickly wooded hill across the moat. The best view you will have of this and similar kofun will be from the air as your plane approaches Kansai or Itami airport. You see the endless metropolis stretching toward the hill and then a sudden stark, unexpected flash of green, unbuilt upon, so thickly overgrown with trees that no human can pass. The road curves around it; the locals ignore it. It is as if a piece of Japan had been walled off and abandoned 1,500 years ago, left to the wild.

The Yamato state was powerful enough to establish cross-straits relations with the Korean state of Baekje by 369 CE, in which year there is a record in Baekje’s imperial chronicles of an imperial gift bestowed upon the “ruler of Wa.” It was an unwieldy ceremonial seven-branched sword. Korean chronicles also report multiple raids by the people of Wa; either pirate attacks or sanctioned military incursions, or both. Japan’s own chronicle, the Nihongi, is similarly focused on Korea during the period, noting that the state of Silla was expected to provide tribute to Japan, and that its failure to do so led to punitive raids around 365.

The Gwanggaeto Stone, a monument unearthed in 1883 in what is now northeast China, refers to several events in the fourth century that suggest increased Japanese involvement on the Korean peninsula. It claims that around 391 CE, the “Wae robbers” came across the sea, “destroyed” the kingdoms of Baekje and Silla, and had to be met with armed resistance from the kingdom of Goguryeo.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the provenance of the Gwanggaeto Stone is caught up in the politics of the time in which it was discovered, a mere two years after the face of Empress Jingū, or at least an artist’s best guess at it, had appeared on the newly issued one-yen banknote. The stone was found by a Japanese military officer, who was accused by later Korean scholars of doctoring the stone with a chisel to imply a significantly greater “Wae” presence on the mainland than was originally intended. It certainly seems odd that the stone would talk about the Japanese having “destroyed” both Baekje and Silla when both kingdoms were plainly not destroyed at all; and strange indeed that the same sentence has two missing characters, suspiciously etched away by unknown forces, which presumably once mentioned the state of Kara. It seems far more likely that the Japanese simply served as troops that came to the aid of one Korean kingdom in its battles with the others.

The stone goes on to record some two dozen castle names, each presumably the site of a battle, before Baekje formed a new alliance with the “Wae” in 399 in an attack on Silla, for which Goguryeo was called in to the rescue. This would seem to dovetail with Baekje’s own annals, which record that King Asin’s eldest son, Prince Jeonji (Straight-Branch), had been sent to Yamato as part of a hostage exchange. This Jeonji would return home in 405 after his father’s death with an honor guard of a hundred Japanese troops—which turned out to be more than merely ceremonial when the prince discovered that his uncle had seized the throne. Jeonji and his Japanese escort then camped on an island, waiting for matters to take their course. During this interval, in an odd moment of historical inaction, the “populace of the kingdom” then killed the usurper for him. The same story, in a garbled form, appears in the Japanese Nihongi—but 120 years too early, adding further fuel to the idea that the dates in that narrative are all over the place. In repositioning the life of Empress Jingū, the compilers of Japan’s chronicles seem to have also dragged the lives of her son and grandson far away from their original placement.

The Kojiki similarly has a lot to say about Korean matters, seemingly out of chronological order, noting, “Also, many people came across the sea from Silla. Thus the mighty one…conscripted them to build dikes in the manner of overseas and thereby made ‘Baekje Pond’.” The story matches neatly with the tales of dam-building and large public works in the realm of the emperor Nintoku, who died in 399, but similarly places them over a century too early. Also placed way too early in the Kojiki is the account of a Korean prince called Sunspear arriving in Japan with strings of jewels, mirrors, and scarves with magical powers.

The Baekje annals are a veritable Yamato love-in during King Jeonji’s reign. In 409, the Yamato court sends King Jeonji a gift of “night-shining pearls” (thought to be a poetic term for any kind of glittering gem). In 418, Jeonji sent Yamato a gift of ten rolls of white silk. And horses—always horses, a promise backed up by the archaeological record of Yamato graves.

Although imperial graves may not be opened, some were stumbled across by accident and subjected to rescue archaeology in modern times. Early tombs from this period contain peaceful items: comma-shaped stones denoting authority, forked ceremonial swords, and mirrors from distant China. Some of the latter may even have been the self-same mirrors mentioned in the Chronicle of Wei, passed on as heirlooms and eventually buried with particular aristocrats. But from around 500 CE, the contents take a turn for the warlike. We suddenly find aristocrats buried with axes and swords, armor and helmets. From the 450s onwards, the graves of Japanese aristocrats are also found containing saddles, bridles, and other items associated with horses—both horses and cattle having been introduced from the mainland.

Nor should we assume that the newcomers considered themselves to be forever free of their mainland attachments. There is evidence in chronicles from both sides of the Korea Strait that the Yamato people traded with their cousins for military manpower, scribes and ironware. Yamato’s Hanzei emperor (r. 406–11) applied to the Chinese court to be officially called the “Supreme General Who Maintains Peace in the East, Commanding with a Battle-Ax All Military Affairs in the Six Countries of Wa, Baekje, Silla, Imna [Mimana/Kara], Chin-Han, and Mok-Han.” This suggests that, for a moment at least, a Japanese ruler considered himself to be the overlord not only of Japan, but of much of southern Korea. The Chinese fobbed him off with just plain “General Who Maintains Peace in the East,” but did eventually grant a similar title to his son, the Ingyō emperor (r. 412–53), shortly before his death.

By the sixth century, the administration in Yamato was robust enough to plan ahead for disaster relief—the first reference to public granaries in the Nihongi dates to 536 CE, the year in which the European chronicler John of Ephesus wrote: “The sun became dark, and its darkness lasted for eighteen months.” Korean chronicles spoke of a decade of wars and invasions. In Japan, the aged Senka emperor issued a telling decree: “Food is the basis of the Empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving and cold?”

His words, in the Nihongi, allude to starvation conditions on the Korean mainland, and the prospect of a new refugee crisis calling for food supplies to be sent to north Kyūshū. Soon afterwards, the Japanese annals record ambassadors from the mainland offering “tribute,” and conversations among the Yamato courtiers about the prospect of seizing the opportunity to invade the mainland.

In 552, the king of Baekje caused a stir by sending some special gifts across the strait: a bronze statue of Buddha chased in gold, along with attendant banners; and a stash of sutras, the precious Chinese translations of the original Buddhist scriptures. This was not the first time that Buddhist items had reached Japan, but previous missionaries or contacts had achieved little. This king was looking for some serious cooperation in his quarrels with the neighboring kingdom of Silla, and plainly hoped that Buddhist artifacts would go down well overseas as emblems of belonging to some sort of club. Buddhism, of course, was all the rage in China now, and was seen as a symbol of contemporary sophistication.

The arrival of this embassy sparked an explosive scandal, which is likely to have had very little to do with religion and everything to do with the one-upsmanship of certain noble families at the court who were seeking rank and position and arguing over whether intervention or isolation was the best policy toward the Korean peninsula. Emperor Kinmei’s ministers immediately began bickering about omens and portents and perceived threats to the local religion, suggesting the continuing existence of ancient enmities and rivalries at court, shakily held alliances and dynastic pacts stretching back into the mythical past.

Emperor Kinmei, says the Nihongi, was enchanted by the foreign paraphernalia, pronouncing it to be “of a severe dignity which We have never seen before.” Sensing an opportunity, Soga no Iname—who was not only the emperor’s pro-intervention chief minister but also the father of two of his wives—agreed with his august opinion and noted that Buddhism was swiftly attaining prominence on the continent as the religion of choice. If Buddhism were welcomed at the court, it could lead to closer contacts with the mainland.

But Soga was not the only wily schemer who saw his chance. Representatives of two other clans, the Nakatomi and the Mononobe, sensed that the emperor was inviting dissenting opinions. Whereas the Soga clan had strong connections to the mainland, and still had relatives and contacts there, their rivals were drawn from clans “descended from the gods,” who were likely to have been connected to the indigenous people assimilated by earlier invaders. The Mononobe regarded themselves as the armorers of the court and loyal warriors who had been first to support the legendary emperor Jinmu in his conquests. This made them staunch supporters of Japan’s indigenous religion, and they were horrified at the thought of introducing a new idol to the country when there were already “180 gods of Heaven and Earth, and the gods of the Land and of Grain” to consider. “If just at this time we were to worship in their stead foreign deities,” they cautioned, “it may be feared that we should incur the wrath of our national gods.”

Still wavering, Emperor Kinmei decided to have the best of both worlds, and ordered the Soga clan to take the Buddhist statue and worship it for a while, to see what happened.

Unfortunately for the Soga clan, while their leader was busy setting up a temple and burning incense to his new idol, a plague broke out. His rivals were swift to point this out to Emperor Kinmei, who finally made an actual decision, ordering that the hapless statue should be thrown into a canal and the temple razed to the ground. Omens, however, continued to be unhelpfully vague, since the flames from the temple then spread to the great hall of the palace.

Worried now that he had incurred the wrath of Buddha, Kinmei flip-flopped again, and was ready to receive reports of mysterious chanting heard across the waves at Izumi; he also ordered the carving of two new statues from a piece of camphor wood that had supposedly washed up on the seashore.

It was Kinmei’s grandson, Prince Shōtoku (574–622) who would really integrate Buddhism firmly into the Japanese state, along with many Chinese organizational ideas. Although he boasted a degree of Soga blood, which helped him in his dealings with that clan, Shōtoku was also a member of the imperial family. His reforms were aimed at slapping down the continued meddling in government by the feuding Soga and Mononobe families. The imperial family needed to maintain its link to the Sun Goddess by keeping its blood as pure as possible. This was already developing into a tradition in which each emperor’s chief wife was liable to be his own half-sister. Many emperors hence only had a single imperial grandfather, with inbreeding often even closer, depending on the families of the grandmothers.

Such dangerous family planning seems to have been designed to keep non-imperial relatives from exercising undue influence, although instances inevitably arose when a direct-line heir was not available, occasionally presenting the threat of outsider bloodlines sneaking in.

Kinmei’s son, for example—the thirtieth emperor, Bidatsu (r. 572–85)—was married to his own half-sister, whose mother hailed from the Soga family. After a messy series of intrigues over his successors, and the assassination of an emperor who tried to stand up to the Soga family, Bidatsu’s widow-sister was enthroned as Empress Suiko (r. 592–628).

Her accession masked ugly competition behind the scenes, with her chief minister and uncle, Soga no Umako, in an uneasy standoff with her nephew-regent Prince Shōtoku. It would erupt again after her death, but for as long as she was in power, Japan enjoyed thirty-five years of peace, concurrent with renewed and strong contacts with China’s Sui dynasty, the first family in centuries to claim overlordship over all of China.

Suiko’s reign got off to a bad start, with an earthquake in Nara that led to further mutterings about grim portents. Before long, however, increased contacts with a resurgent China brought powerful influences to her court.

Her leading adviser, Prince Shōtoku, is one of the iconic figures of Japanese history—his image graced the 5,000-yen banknote for much of the later twentieth century. In any other state, he might have been ideal sovereign material, but he lacked the double imperial-line descent required of an unassailable ruler. He is the subject of breathless hero-worship in ancient chronicles, although his real-world achievements are difficult to pin down. If we are to believe the chronicles, Shōtoku was an unearthly child prodigy who had the power of speech at birth, and who grew up to become a multitasker who could somehow hear ten petitions at once and rule on them simultaneously. Shōtoku was intimately associated with the arrival of Buddhism in Japan, and also with the establishment of firmer contacts with China. It is this latter achievement that is liable to have caused much of his popularity, as he would have been seen as the figurehead of an era that flooded Japan with new inventions, sophisticated luxuries, and the beginnings of literature. Chinese civilization, previously glimpsed only in the form of mirrors and tall tales, seems to have spread throughout Japan at a fast rate, spearheaded and remembered today as “Buddhism,” but likely to have been associated at the time with uncountable trade goods, new toys, and fads.

Buddhism itself offered a radically different set of beliefs from those previously practiced by the locals—not the least with its offer of a concept of salvation rather than a nebulous, unappealing eternity in the underworld. Shintō—which seems to have only been adopted as a term at all around this point in order to distinguish it from the new import—was still very much concerned with reverence for spirits and the placating of supernatural forces. Buddhism, however, introduced the notion of karma, and the idea that all living creatures were living a cycle of life after life, the state of their being largely determined by whatever merit they had won for themselves in their previous existence. To new aspirants, such claims might be misread as the offer of eternal life and an improvement in personal circumstances—for women to be reborn as men, for men to return wealthier or more powerful, so long as they appeased the Buddhist deities, soon to be seen as incarnate within the many new temples springing up all over the country. None of this had much to do with true Buddhist philosophy, but as in China itself, translation errors and philosophical misunderstandings would characterize much of Buddhism’s early dissemination. Meanwhile, Buddhist practices would override much of the old order. As cremation replaced burial as the prevalent funeral practice, giant grave mounds fell out of fashion, with much of the effort previously expended on tombs redirected into the construction of elaborate Buddhist temples. The very architecture that defined the era became a matter of temple precincts and palaces inspired by Chinese designs.

Shōtoku’s love of things Chinese also extended to managerial strategies. It was under his tenure that the archipelago stopped being an inefficient, haphazard federation of occasionally hostile states and was transformed into a single unified polity with a reigning sovereign. The old tribal rivalries and ethnic tensions would, arguably, endure for another thousand years, but they would henceforth happen below the throne, acted out as a matter of loyalty to the emperor.

It was Shōtoku’s reforms, inspired by China and aimed at reducing the powers of the great families, which truly forced an organizational structure on the Japanese state. He established a court ranking system with a dozen grades, which clearly stipulated that positions were not hereditary; henceforth, it would theoretically be easier to keep nepotism from the government.

He also introduced a seventeen-point constitution, which was less a blueprint for government and more a set of requirements for loyal courtiers. Drawing heavily on Confucianism, Shōtoku insisted that courtiers avoid open conflict, adhere to their job descriptions, and offer true and full obedience to imperial commands. “In a country, there are not two lords,” he writes sternly; “the people have not two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of the whole country.” This might have set the tone for the rule of an absolute monarch, although Shōtoku immediately undermined himself by also insisting on the power of consultation and consensus. “Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.” Although it might have seemed like a contradiction, Shōtoku’s maxims, taken as a whole, would eventually come to imply that the emperor was a divine, inscrutable, and symbolic head of state whose assent—tacit or otherwise—was required for all decisions to be made by his court, but whose ministers were no longer necessarily hereditary nobles. Shōtoku introduced a Chinese-influenced sense of decorum, demanding that all entrants to the palace should drop to their knees and press their hands to the ground before walking on.

Several parts of Shōtoku’s constitution were overwritten by the clearer wording of later decrees, but even in modern Japan, legal scholars have been heard to argue that if his words have not been contradicted by a later revision, they still stand after nearly fourteen centuries.

Some words endure even more obviously. Until the regency of Shōtoku, the sovereign had been known as a king, great lord, or similar title. Following on from his constitution’s insistence that the ruler was the symbol of heaven, Shōtoku began using the term tennō, “heavenly sovereign,” usually translated as “emperor.” All previous sovereigns were upgraded retroactively.

Shōtoku also wedged Buddhism firmly into the state organization by demanding that officials recognize the “three treasures”—not the mirror, sword, and jewel of ancient legend, but the Buddha, the law, and the [Shintō] priesthood, establishing a tripartite appeal to divine authority. Shōtoku promoted further contacts with Chinese Buddhists, inaugurating several major temples and offering tax breaks to selected artists who were able to paint devotional icons. Empress Suiko, as his mouthpiece, commanded her subjects to make large images of the Buddha in copper or embroidery, but also decreed that the gods of “heaven and earth” should not be neglected. She might have been a figurehead, but Empress Suiko still enjoyed some power, and took the opportunity to remind her subjects of the country’s ancient collaboration between male and female powers. It was Buddhism, however, that attracted the attention of neighboring states—the sections of the Nihongi referring to her reign and Shōtoku’s regency are riddled with references to grand embassies from China and Korea arriving with golden gifts and holy scriptures and being greeted by fleets of sailboats and brightly adorned troops of cavalry.

Shōtoku’s constitution would form the basis of future consultations on the way to run the country; it was accompanied by a number of other reforms that added to its effect. One was the adoption of the Chinese calendar, which divided time into twelve-year cycles multiplied by five elements to create units of sixty years. A further “long count” in Chinese history held that every twenty-one cycles—which is to say, once every 1,260 years—there would be an event of earth-shattering transformation. Clearly, later chroniclers decided that Shōtoku’s reforms were just such a momentous event, establishing 601 CE as the “year zero” in Japanese counting, but also spurring authors to presume that the last momentous event must have been 1,260 years earlier. This, perhaps, explains why Japanese annals begin with the seemingly arbitrary date of 660 BCE, implying that Shōtoku’s regency was the best thing that had happened to Japan since the mythical time of the first, legendary Emperor Jinmu. A prophet might foretell that something similarly momentous would happen to Japan 1,260 years later, around 1861 CE—and by chance, such a prediction would only be a few years out.

One of the first acts of Shōtoku’s new nation was to pack an ambassador off to the Chinese to ask them to stop calling his people “dwarves.” The idea of a land of Wa, the prince thought, was insulting and belittling, and he would really much prefer it if the Chinese started referring to them with a little more respect.

An embassy sent to China decided to put this into effect in 607 by pointedly ignoring a previous missive that had hailed the ruler of Wa. Instead, it extended an ill-advised greeting from “the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises…to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets.” This scandalized the Chinese, not only for the implication that the island nation was somehow rising and ahead of China, but for the claim that the ruler of the islands was an emperor of equivalent standing to theirs.

Considering Japan’s position on the eastern horizon relative to China, and the country’s claim as the chosen home of the descendants of Amaterasu, Prince Shōtoku’s ambassadors regarded the “land where the sun rises” as a far more suitable name for their country—in Japanese, “Nippon.” In modern Mandarin, this is pronounced “Riben,” but in Tang-dynasty Chinese, it would have sounded more like “Yatbun.” A thousand years later, misheard as “Cipangu”—put through a Portuguese mangle into Spanish as “Japón”—it would give us the name by which we know the country today. From this point on, the land was called Japan.