The Inishi of the Doigahama Yayoi｜The Path of the Ancestors and the Trade Networks of the Sea

Last week we saw that the Yayoi people found at the Doigahama site, which faces the beautiful Hibiki Sea in Yamaguchi Prefecture, may share common ancestors with the ancient people across the sea in Shandong. Yet both groups are thought to have failed to survive in history, and we may never learn more of them than that.

Still, it seems to me that the questions the Doigahama researchers have kept raising over the years are quietly but steadily shifting not only our idea of the Japanese as a people, but the very history we believe in. Beyond easy, catchy theories like the triple-structure model of the Japanese, I feel that a great deal of important history lies dormant in what they raise, history no one has yet thought through.

What deserves particular attention at Doigahama is that the Yayoi people there wore ornaments made from gohoura conchs and cone shells, which are found only in Okinawa and the other islands of the Nansei chain. Ornaments of this kind traveled as far as the tribes of distant Hokkaido, spreading out as if to wrap the Japanese archipelago. This implies that a vast trade network, with the Sea of Japan coast as its axis, was already complete by the Yayoi period. To put it more frankly, this network took shape and was completed in the Jomon period, and it was probably not the work of immigrants.

As I have already noted, reports suggest that the Northwest Kyushu Yayoi and the Yayoi found on Miyakojima in Okinawa were close to being the same people. In light of that, they appear to have traveled the sea over a far wider area than we imagine, mixing again and again wherever they went.

Perhaps the immigrant Yayoi who washed up all over the Japanese archipelago were carried and mingled by the Jomon sea peoples, who moved across the sea at will. Or, to go further, perhaps they crossed the sea and arrived in the archipelago with the help of those Jomon sea peoples. If so, the conventional view of history has to be looked at in both directions. I do not trust the one-way route of immigration from the southern Korean peninsula to northern Kyushu in the first place. But at the same time, my interest lies elsewhere.

That the Doigahama tribe were immigrants is certain. As newcomers, then, they could not have shared much in the benefits of the existing trade. And indeed, despite the long history of research at Doigahama, almost nothing is known of their customs, not even whether they practiced rice farming. The only certainties are the skeletons, many of them laid out with their heads to the east (southeast) in a strangely uniform line, and the genome information analyzed from one of them.

I, at least, believe they knew exactly who they were and where they had come from. For they deliberately laid out their dead facing “the path their ancestors had traveled.” That they laid the bones in the same direction makes it highly likely that not only the dead but the living, too, faced that same direction when they performed rites and worship. Their insistent “gaze toward the northwest,” I think, expresses their very origin.

The ancient word that expressed this origin survived for a long time afterward in Okinawa. It is the sound inishi. In modern Japanese, nishi has come to mean west, the direction, but in Okinawa nishi more often points north. The puzzle was solved long ago by Iha Fuyu, the founder of Ryukyuan folklore studies, who explained that the Ryukyuan word inishi indicates “the path by which the ancestors came.”

In other words, nishi was not originally fixed to the west. It expressed the path by which the ancestors had come, and so, naturally, where each tribe had different ancestors, it changed from tribe to tribe as far as direction goes. Consider where a given tribe was at a given moment and where it had come from, and a plural world emerges that the Japanese archipelago alone cannot sum up. Even with the same ancestors, when the place changes, everything changes. To put it another way, my present conjecture is that they “knew” where they had come from, and kept that memory in the direction they faced during rites and worship.

In fact, myth tells us that Kamuyamato Iwarebiko, said to have taken the throne as the first emperor, Jimmu, came from Hyuga Province. The name means “the land that faces the sun,” that is, a land in the west that receives the light of the sun rising in the east, and it cannot have been only the old name of present-day Miyazaki Prefecture. There must have been many lands of Himuka. Indeed, the story of Ninigi’s descent from heaven in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki openly tells of their inishi.

So if we limit ourselves to one particular line of Ryukyuan ancestors (not the Ryukyuans in general), the word nishi today carries the memory of some of them moving south, mainly from the north. It preserves an old memory of landing in the Okinawa Islands by way of southern Kyushu and Amami Oshima, and it was probably not a sound confined to Amami and the Ryukyus. I believe it was a word the Yayoi people used. But as the court expanded from Yamato onward, the old words were gradually replaced, and on the main islands inishi either fell out of use at some point, or perhaps, after the arrival of Buddhism, merged with the present directional sense of “west.”

The grounds for this can be seen in the fact that nishi, west as seen from Yamato, was for the imperial family and certain clans the place from which the imperial ancestors set out (present-day Miyazaki), which was later named Hyuga Province. Perhaps ancient words, too, spread from place to place along the trade routes I described above.

If this word has its source somewhere around the Yayoi period, then the direction the Doigahama Yayoi faced after burial was not simply “west (northwest)” but, for them, their inishi. And since that direction points toward the Shandong Peninsula, and joint research with the Shandong side has revealed their close affinity, they may have been the last figures in East Asia of a group now extinct.

Standing in that place, letting my thoughts wander, I gazed from the beach at Doigahama toward their inishi, and suddenly noticed that most of the debris washed up around me was printed in Chinese. Looking closely, I found that nearly all of it had drifted from Zhejiang Province. Zhejiang lies just below Shanghai, south of Shandong. In Japanese terms, it sits roughly where Amami does, facing the East China Sea.

If debris from Zhejiang washes up at Doigahama, then, whatever the many conditions, the currents very likely connect all the way here. And the Northwest Kyushu Yayoi resemble the type found on Miyakojima in Okinawa, and shells from the Okinawa region were carried along the trade network as far as Hokkaido. These are facts.

When we think about an age that possessed so vast a maritime trade network, we have to change the way we think at the root. The real problem of history lies not in what is true or false, but in the fixed ideas of the people living in each age.

For what the Yayoi of Doigahama suggest is that the trade network of the sea was not confined to “Japan” in the geopolitical sense, from Okinawa to Hokkaido. We can easily suppose that it could just as well reach Zhejiang, Shanghai and Shandong. There were no geopolitical divisions then of the kind we have now, so we ought to consider that possibility. The sea belonged to no one. It was completely open.

Doigahama, a quiet stretch of coast in Yamaguchi Prefecture. In the distance floats Tsunoshima, where many tourists come, but here it is astonishingly quiet. The many skeletons found here, turned 2,300 years ago toward the Shandong Peninsula, and the debris that still drifts in today from far-off Zhejiang in China.

To my eyes this contrast is of one nature, and I cannot help feeling that the two overlap. If debris washes ashore, so do people. It seems to me our ancestors are telling us to look hard, once again, at the natural force of the currents.