倭人考 2On the Wajin, Part 2

In last week's article, I focused on the foundations we must keep in view when we look at the ancestral group of the Japanese that is spoken of as the Wajin, a group that never actually existed. This lets us assume a basic picture of the Wajin, yet the grave problem lurking beneath this ethnic foundation has always been bent into extreme forms by the constraints of history. In fact, when the Wajin are discussed, they are spoken of as a distinctly Japanese people, a general existence abstracted from the present. But at that very point they have already been transformed by the constraints of our own era, so this is not their original form. Of course, we must accept such a gap as long as we seek insight into history. The question then becomes whether the person speaking holds a thoroughgoing awareness of it.

The conceptual space of Wakoku (倭国), which the ancient Chinese state made into an object as the land where the Wajin lived, exposes this problem. The very word "Wa," long in general use as a bureaucratic term on the Chinese side for ancient Japan, later came to be felt on the Japanese side as discriminatory and demeaning, and a counter-movement against this archaic name arose on the scale of the state. It goes without saying, though, that the idea of a state at this point is not that of the modern era, and it remained within a local space. Seen from the Han and Wei dynasties, whose viewpoint was built on the premise of Chinese civilization, Japan appeared as the world of a foreign people with no writing, no documents, and no unified system. Indeed, the account in the Gishiwajinden (魏志倭人伝), the oldest written record of Japan, shows that to the Wei envoys of the time Japan looked quite foreign. Yet these ancient documents gradually became a troublesome problem for the court powers on the Japanese side, who later acquired writing and the technology of documents and grew strong by compiling information. As the Japanese side built its court around the emperor, a certain sense of ethnic consciousness took root in a local way. But this consciousness could not arise on its own initiative. It always moved in step with conditions on the Chinese side, which was assumed to lie outside. In other words, if internal strife occurred on the Chinese side and the system weakened, thereby causing its influence on Japan to decline, then ethnic consciousness on the Japanese side would rise in reaction. I am simplifying considerably here, but the same dynamic can be seen in the relations between Japan and the United States after the Second World War.

So the way ancient Chinese documents viewed Japan gradually came to be regarded within the court as discriminatory and demeaning. For the forces that had gained some sense of hegemony around the emperor, diplomacy at the time meant letting Chinese influence flow in at some moments and cushioning it at others. It is natural, then, that as the political power of the emperor and the clans grew, independence from Chinese influence came to be demanded. The emotional recoil that began around this time moved, over a very long span, toward discarding the name Wa from Wajin (倭人) and Wakoku. This movement eventually reached the present name of the country, Nippon (日本), and the name of the people, Nipponjin (日本人), but its origin lay in an emotional recoil. One more thing must be said. To feel this driving force as discriminatory or demeaning, as described above, belongs strictly to our own dimension since the modern era, and we must not read that feeling back into that time. It was an alienation from China within the narrow range of state formation. What matters is that this sense of alienation did not arise among Japan and the Japanese in the present sense. It was a phenomenon confined to the closed place of the court, a quite limited political center. Only the rulers shut inside the court took alienation from China as a problem, and it had nothing to do with the people of the plural world that spread widely beyond the court. The historical view that the Japanese broke away from Chinese influence and began to stand on their own in this era is therefore entirely mistaken. Such errors come from not understanding that this is a problem of illusion. In a sense, it was because this consciousness was realized first that the emperor and the surrounding clans could take hegemony, but it was hegemony in a limited field only, and it can hardly be called unitary rule.

What matters here is that the ancient rulers who found the name Wa discriminatory did not immediately replace it with Nippon. The change in the concept that names the state, from the ancient Wa to the modern Nippon, passed through a far more complex course. Wa was only a provisional label, fixed by Chinese envoys in order to grasp the Japanese side as part of the Toi (東夷), the "eastern barbarians." Yet the rulers on the Japanese side fixed their energy on rejecting it, and there is a gap in that. The psychological cause is that, outside the court of the time, there was a feeling close to taboo around the sound "Wan" that I touched on last time. At its root this is a taboo against the remnants left by the rulers of the previous age. Last time I wrote that the sound Wan was the prototype to which the Chinese side assigned the characters "Wa" (倭 or 委), but to the people of the lands belonging to the sphere called Wakoku at that time, Wan meant nothing more than "ourselves." If we take the problem here to be the name of the country, the path from Wa to Nippon is not one continuous line. In the world of illusion it is rather a complex concept built up through countless alienations and fusions. Wa did not link to Nippon all at once, nor was it formed in stages. To grasp the essence of this problem, which people since the modern era find hard to understand, I think we should notice that the word the ancient rulers chose when they moved away from Wa was the country name "Yamato." Please take this as adopted strictly as a sound. It is of a completely different order from a country name in the sense we mean today.

It is quite complex, so let me set it out simply. Around the middle of the 3rd century, the sound "Wan," an unwritten word used within a limited circle by some tribal groups living in the Japanese archipelago, was gathered by envoys from the Chinese side, who had a culture of writing. It was given the characters 倭 or 委 and used as a bureaucratic term of the Chinese dynasty, and in the process the sound shifted from "Wan" to "Wa." Wan originally meant no more than "us" for some ancient tribes on the Japanese side. But under the influence of the Chinese idea of the shii (四夷), the "four barbarians," which fixed the foreign peoples in place so as to keep the unified system stable, a sound that had belonged only to a particular tribe was abstracted and extended on the Chinese side as Wa, to refer to Japan itself. The sound Wa, not Wan, was then put into writing and used in official and scholarly texts on the Chinese side, as Wakoku to name the country and as Wajin to name its foreign people. This could not be avoided given the ancient limits of communication across the sea. The gap between a Chinese side that already had advanced writing and had built a state system, and a Japanese side that had no writing and lived in a plural world, must have been beyond our imagination. Still, it is self-evident that some interpretation was possible through the tribes who had come to the Japanese side as migrants.

This raises a strange question. Why did the rulers on the Japanese side set up Yamato in opposition to the old Chinese terms Wakoku and Wajin, fixed in the documents? Looked at from this angle alone, the shift in sound from Wa to Yamato is incomprehensible even to me, a Japanese. But the intention shows itself when we look at the characters. When I brought up the term Yamato in my Shitsurae article, I deliberately added the gloss "southern Nara Prefecture." To be exact it is the southern part of the Nara Basin, because in the early history of the emperor and the clans the court was set up almost without exception in this region. That this region was called Yamato does not mean that the whole Japanese archipelago of the time was Yamato. The image of Japan as a unified state and of the Japanese as a single people took hold only after the student movement of the late 1960s was defeated. Before that, Yamato cannot be generalized to all of Japan or all the Japanese. To do so places a unified state where Japan did not exist and a single people where the Japanese did not exist, and sets up what does not exist as though it did. The pre-war and wartime term "Yamato people" (大和民族) is likewise a concept constructed through the ideological reading of the military. The premise that "the Japanese are a single people called the Yamato people" is therefore false. And yet this falsehood is widely accepted as truth. Why does this happen?

It happens because there is a source from which such images are born, and the images, intricately entangled and fused, are left alone without anyone looking at them. Put the other way, without this conscious, deliberate attitude of leaving alone, or rather of looking away, the image could not stand as reality. It is a typical attitude of modern people. The concept of Yamato has been used in many ways through history: yamato-gokoro (大和心), the spirit of a people; yamato-kotoba (大和言葉), the native language; yamato nadeshiko (大和撫子), an ideal of womanhood; and yamato-e (大和絵), a style of painting. In every case the sound Yamato is written with the characters 大和. Yet the core of a problem no one has noticed lies hidden in this ordinary term itself.

Japanese people read the characters 大和 as Yamato without a thought, but this is in fact strange. If there is a Japanese person near you, ask them whether they could read these characters as Yamato once they set aside their fixed ideas. Almost none of them will ever have thought about it, and they will realize that reading this as Yamato really is odd. The characters are ateji (当て字). Ateji is hard to explain, but simply put, when characters imported from China were judged unfit to express sounds or concepts particular to the Japanese language, Japan created new uses for them that ignored their original readings and meanings. This is not a mere difference in notation. It is an important technique for transposing the concept itself. Seen this way, the characters 大和 would normally be read as "Great Wa," and while they do mean "Great Wa," they cannot possibly be read as Yamato.

Why, then, did these two characters, 大 (great) and 和 (Wa), which cannot be read this way under ordinary rules, survive as the ateji for Yamato to this day? Here the meaning of the inquiry into Wa, Wajin, and Wakoku that I have been developing becomes necessary. Read plainly, the characters mean "Great Wa," but in the oldest layer the word is set at a conceptual level that greatly extends the ancient word Wan. And this Wan was only the ancient Japanese spoken within the limited area the Wei envoys visited, even though we call it ancient Japan. It rests on what the envoys saw and learned when they visited Queen Himiko around the year 240, and on the record completed in the 280s after it passed to Chen Shou, a historian of the Western Jin. At the origin of the problem, then, the Wei envoys did not survey all of Japan in the sense we imagine today. They made an official visit on the orders of the Wei emperor, so their information was quite limited. The Gishiwajinden records that Wakoku once had more than a hundred lands, that thirty were then in contact with Wei, and that Queen Himiko, who ruled the sphere among them, lived in a capital called Yamatai. By my own sense from research so far, this era corresponds to the early Kofun period, but it is an elusive time in which the character of the preceding Yayoi period remained strong. The sound Wan, gathered by the Wei envoys from the people they met, may well have been a common language for the people of this sphere. But its meaning, as I said, was no lofty concept of a state. It meant only "us." And since local languages were surely deeply rooted in each region, what comes into view is that the words represented by this "Wan = us" were merely "one of the ancient common languages" that the powers of the lands supporting Himiko used to understand one another.

This is what connects to my earlier remark that, outside the court of the time, there was a feeling close to taboo around the sound Wan. To the emperor and the clans who formed the later court, the people who used Wan as a common language were an inconvenient presence for the new power. This is extremely important. I will write about it separately, but both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, compiled later, strain to erase the existence of Himiko's sphere of rule. It is clear from the fact that, although it is recorded in Chinese sources, it does not appear in the Japanese sources, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.

To state the conclusion, then, the terms rooted in "Wan = us" cannot possibly refer to the whole of present-day Japan or to its more than 120 million people. These terms were not universal. They were limited to the places and regions where they were used at the time, and the "Wan" those people spoke does not point to every tribe or people living across the archipelago in the present sense. Given that they used "Wan" as a common language, it may have originated in the speech of some tribe, but for most people it was only a common tongue, and in the villages of the land other languages were in use, which shows a plural picture. The Wakoku ruled by Himiko had already reached the stage of a highly developed state system. It is the oldest written record of Japan, but because it is already a developed stage, what came before has to be approached in a completely different way. Exploring the origin is not easy. The thirty lands on the Japanese side that had contact with Wei were extremely limited, and they lay only in western Japan, for Wei had no contact at all with eastern Japan. The Gishiwajinden therefore records nothing of conditions in the east. It says only briefly that "there are also lands east of the Queen's land, and Wajin live there as well." This was not something the envoys saw but something told by the people of Wakoku, so the record is valid only for a very limited place. It is also entirely unclear what is meant there by Wajin. All we can understand is that the queen who ruled such a limited sphere was Himiko, and even from the Gishiwajinden's record it is quite likely that the powers under Himiko had no knowledge of eastern Japan.

Next week, building on these points, we will look at Yamatai (邪馬台国), the capital where Himiko lived.