Yamatai Is a Copying Error for Yamato｜Printed Editions of the Gishi Wajinden and Yamato District in Chikugo

Almost everyone has at least heard of the Gishi Wajinden, the Chinese account of the people of Wa in the Japanese archipelago. It holds a key to ancient Japan, and it describes Yamatai, still an unsolved mystery, as the country over which Queen Himiko reigned. Yet Yamatai has still not been identified, and the debate over where it lay, led by the theory that places it in the Kinai region around Nara and the theory that places it in Kyushu, has never been settled.

Why does Yamatai remain unknown? Not because no decisive discovery has been made, but because an unexpected blind spot has gone unconsidered, namely the copying errors and misprints in the source itself.

To begin with, the only historical source that describes Yamatai is the Gishi Wajinden. It is gradually becoming clear that this single source accumulated copying errors and misprints in each era, and changes in the sounds of the Chinese language are tangled up in the story as well. In other words, the problem is not that the location of Yamatai is unknown. A combination of factors, including the way the text was handed down, the effects of dynastic change in China, and the use of the latest technology, has stood as a wall in the way of identifying it.

To give the conclusion first, “Yamatai” [邪馬台] is a new set of characters and a new sound born of copying errors and misprints, and the original was “Yamato” [邪馬臺]. To the people of Wei in Himiko’s lifetime, it would have sounded something like “iamadeo,” a sound that can be written as yamadö. What complicates matters is that the name did not come from the Chinese of the time. It came from the language spoken by the people of Wa, a land inhabited by a foreign people, so the country’s name as the Wei envoys heard it had passed through a conversion, in which the sounds of another language were understood through their own mother tongue. Put simply, it is like the experience of saying English loanwords to English speakers exactly as we pronounce them in Japanese katakana, and finding that they do not understand.

Another important point is that no book called the Gishi Wajinden actually exists. It is a common name used in Japan, and strictly speaking it refers to the section on the Wa in the Account of the Eastern Barbarians, within the Book of Wei of the Records of the Three Kingdoms. It is presented as Wei’s record of what it saw and heard, but the Records of the Three Kingdoms was compiled around the 280s by Chen Shou (233–297), a historian of the Western Jin. By the 280s, the three-way struggle among Wei, Shu, and Wu was over. Wei had destroyed Shu in 263, and then, reborn as the Jin dynasty (the Western Jin), it had conquered Wu in 280 and unified China.

A further feature of the Gishi Wajinden is that Chen Shou did not investigate the matter himself. In fact, he never once went to Wa. The record rests entirely on what Wei envoys, who had crossed to Wa before his time, saw and heard there. Moreover, when history is compiled, the wishes of Wei, as the victor of the Three Kingdoms period, are hard to keep out, so reports from Shu and Wu inevitably slip in as Wei’s achievements. It often happened, then, that what had originally been Wu’s account of Wa was transferred into an account by Wei.

Two Wei envoys are known to have actually reached Wa, and the nature of their missions differed greatly. The first was Ti Jun, in 240, and the second was Zhang Zheng, in 247. At the time, Wei held effective control over the Daifang Commandery in the central west of the Korean Peninsula and the Lelang Commandery in the north, where Wei troops were stationed. This was because Wei had destroyed the Gongsun clan, which had ruled the whole area. News of the upheaval on the peninsula reached the Japanese archipelago across the sea at once, and Queen Himiko of Yamatai swiftly sent envoys, who traveled by way of Daifang to Luoyang, where the Wei emperor’s palace stood.

Wei then bestowed on the envoys the title “Queen of Wa, Friendly to Wei” [親魏倭王], along with a gold seal, bronze mirrors, and other gifts, and in 240 it sent Ti Jun to Wa. Put simply, in return for Yamatai’s pledge of loyalty to Wei, rather than to Shu or Wu, Himiko was formally granted the title of “ruler of Wa,” the sovereign on the Wa side, as a member of Wei’s sphere. Ti Jun was therefore not “chosen and sent to investigate.” He came to carry out Wei’s return gifts and investiture under the tributary relationship Himiko had entered into. The advantage for Wei in building ties with Wa was that it could keep its enemy Wu, which lay to the south, in check.

The other envoy, Zhang Zheng, appears in quite a different context. It began in 247, around the time Wang Qi took up his post as the new governor of Daifang, when Himiko reported to Daifang that she was at war with Himikoko, the male king of Kunu. In response, Wang Qi sent Zhang Zheng and others to Wa bearing an imperial edict and a yellow banner, a military standard.

In other words, Zhang Zheng’s mission was neither investigation nor the handing over of gifts in the manner of Ti Jun. It was diplomatic support and formal instruction from Wei in Yamatai’s war with Kunu, its rival. He stayed in Yamatai for several years and witnessed Himiko’s death, the turmoil over the succession, and the enthronement of Iyo, also known as Toyo, a young woman of Himiko’s clan. After formally instructing Iyo, he returned home together with envoys from Wa. Ancient Japan vanishes from Chinese sources after this, so we cannot know how Iyo governed. Indeed, the Gishi Wajinden grows more vivid toward its end, and this is because it owes much to what Zhang Zheng actually saw and heard during his long stay.

What emerges from all this is that the two envoys had different tasks. The possibility worth weighing here is that while Zhang Zheng visited Yamatai, Ti Jun may never have done so. It has long been assumed that Ti Jun’s record formed the core of the Gishi Wajinden, but it is now thought that he landed in northern Kyushu without ever meeting Queen Himiko. In other words, Ti Jun did not go to Yamatai, because his role was to deliver the title of “Friendly to Wei” along with the gold seal, bronze mirrors, and other gifts, not to stay in Yamatai. Within northern Kyushu at the time, the country of Ito, near present-day Itoshima, was a diplomatic and military stronghold for Yamatai, home to officials stationed there on Yamatai’s behalf and to the people called the Wa. All of this suggests that most of what the Gishi Wajinden contains may rest on extremely limited firsthand observation and on hearsay.

After landing in northern Kyushu, Ti Jun probably heard that Yamatai, where the queen lived, was too far away and gave up on going there. He would then have handed the gifts from the Wei emperor to envoys of Wa, the Wa people themselves, completed his mission, and gone home. By contrast, Zhang Zheng, who had been sent to support Yamatai in its war, naturally stayed for several years in Yamatai, at the center of power. What he and his party saw and heard was passed across the sea to the Wei army stationed on the peninsula, and the information gathered and sifted there was conveyed to the emperor in Luoyang. As a result, observations and secondhand reports from different periods became tangled together, and in the end they were merged by the judgment of the compiler.

There is also a general tendency to equate Wa with Japan, but Wa is not Japan. The name referred only to a very limited region. So Himiko was not “the queen of Japan.” She held power only over the limited country of Yamatai and the allied countries that submitted to it or worked alongside it. Japan at the time was not unified, and power was scattered across the land in a kind of mosaic. Yamatai was simply one of the leading powers among them, although it was the one recognized by Wei in China. From this perspective, it is reasonable to think that the Japanese archipelago also held countries with something close to an alliance with Wu or Shu.

As for the text of the Records of the Three Kingdoms itself, Chen Shou finished it in the 280s, but because he died in 297, the work we have is based on a copy made around the turn of the fourth century, when officials went to Chen Shou’s house on the emperor’s orders and transcribed it. So even the Records of the Three Kingdoms is not Chen Shou’s original, and it underwent bureaucratic alteration with a strongly political intent. This is the basic background to how the work came into being, but at the time it served only as a historical record and was not widely read as it is today.

About a hundred years later, in 429, Pei Songzhi (372–451), a statesman and historian, took as his base text one of the manuscripts handed down as Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms and completed an annotated edition. It won wide acclaim, and so began the first era in which the Records of the Three Kingdoms was widely read.

Countless manuscript copies were presumably made in many places after that, but the decisive turning point came much later, with the invention of printing under the Northern Song (960–1127). The world’s first movable type, invented by a man named Bi Sheng (972–1051), reached its height from the early to the middle eleventh century, and with it the Records of the Three Kingdoms spread explosively. Shortly before that, around 1002–1003, a printed edition of the Records of the Three Kingdoms had been issued, collated by the government office for educational administration that oversaw the central school of the Northern Song.

The Northern Song was a golden age of revived learning in China, when the state promoted scholarship centered on Confucianism. Behind this lay a bitter history. In the turmoil near the end of the Tang (618–907), the great cultural age that preceded the Northern Song, countless books that had been handed down were scattered and lost. The Northern Song therefore established an office for educational administration and, beginning around 932, launched a twenty-year project to hand down the books once again. Into this current of reviving learning and recovering books flowed the new technology of movable type, and by the beginning of the eleventh century, the Records of the Three Kingdoms had been printed and was starting to circulate.

This, however, would later become the cause of the Yamatai debate in Japan. Because dynasties changed again and again in China, the source editions split into several lines, and most of them were lost in the course of history. Research on the Gishi Wajinden has relied on roughly five printed editions, but the crucial early Northern Song edition has been lost as well. The oldest surviving edition dates from the mid-twelfth century or later, and the others in use are newer editions from then up to around the early eighteenth century. In other words, only editions from after the advent of printing survive, and every manuscript has been scattered and lost. Over nearly a thousand years, the Chinese language itself changed considerably, and what Yamatai had once been called grew more and more uncertain.

Because of these circumstances peculiar to China, countless copying errors and misprints crept into the printed editions over periods ranging from several centuries to more than a thousand years. Further errors arose as the texts were transmitted to Japan, so that by the time the debate began on the Japanese side, it already carried enormous distortions. This, in the end, became the spark of the Yamatai debate. For a long time, researchers never imagined that copying errors and misprints were to blame, and they rushed about in search of a “location.” In reality, the problem lies in copying errors and misprints, and the riddle cannot be solved unless we turn our attention, at least as far as sound is concerned, to yamadö.

Just as the central and southern part of the present-day Nara Basin was once called Yamato [大和国], Queen Himiko of Yamatai was a figure connected with a country called Yamato. From this angle, the Kinai theory, which places Yamatai in Nara, might look like the stronger one. But in that case, why has the Kyushu theory stood as its equal rival?

Interestingly, a place name with the sound yamadö survives in Kyushu. It is the area around the present-day city of Miyama in southern Fukuoka Prefecture, which was once Yamato District in Chikugo Province, its name written “Yamato” [山門].

Yamato, written with the characters for “the gate of the mountains.” Who, I wonder, were the people who called themselves Yamato in northern Kyushu, the gateway for migrants in ancient times? And did their descendants eventually move as far as the Kinai region?

The mystery of Yamatai, it seems, is still far from solved.