倭人考 4On the Wajin, Part 4

One thing I hope to bring into view over the course of this series is that the forms of illusion we live in since the modern era are not historically universal. They are quite particular. We tend to take pride in the idea that the world and the thinking we have reached are the best history has produced. That attitude cannot be dismissed outright, but it is undeniably somewhat immature. Personally, I think there has never been a time when exploring one's own origins mattered more than now. If we turn, on our own initiative, to face the concealed reality itself, rather than being caught up in the context of identity crisis as a social phenomenon, I believe that will become one root for surviving the turbulent times ahead.

The question of origin is a painful process of digging thoroughly into one's own depths. Introspection is the last utopia left to human beings. The truth of origin, reached by diving deeper and deeper toward it, begins first of all with a steady gaze at one's own existence. When we see clearly into the individual illusion that makes up our existence, we inevitably grasp, inwardly, the complex workings of communal illusion and pair illusion. At this point many people look outward rather than at their own origins and settle into the comfort of escape. Yet whether in anthropology or anywhere else, it is self-evident that one must explore one's own origin before studying ancient civilizations. Research into another country's origins carried out from outside is, in later generations, set against the inquiries of local people, and its oversights come to light. The first limit of communal illusion is that one cannot see into another country without having thoroughly looked at one's own origin, and that limit is hard to notice from outside. If this basic point goes unnoticed, research into another country's origins is gathered up into the realm of the signified. Even relics displayed in a museum do not, by themselves, speak the truth. And this structure, in which the truth cannot be reached from an outside view alone, is not unique to the modern era. It already appeared, at the same level, in ancient times.

In my own case, I am diving in with Japan as my origin, but this kind of problem was already exposed in the Gishiwajinden (魏志倭人伝), a section of the Book of Wei, the Chinese history that records the oldest known picture of Japan. As we have seen throughout this series, even a single ancient word of the local tribes on the Japanese side, "Wan," is immensely complex. For the local tribes, Wan was the word for "us." Through ancient Chinese envoys it became the characters 倭 and 委, bureaucratic and scholarly terms of the dynasty. When those characters were later brought back to the Japanese side, the sound itself shifted, through the written character, from Wan to Wa. But once the ancient world of sound is altered on the basis of characters, it becomes constrained, unable to grasp the world before writing. In Japan this is known as kotodama (言霊), the spirit of words: in ancient Japan the sound itself held a plural world. Yet once even a single sound is treated as a written character, its meaning shifts under the constraints of each age. A kind of ideology enters the sound through those who carry it, and the sound Wa is a typical material for telling that history. In a sense, the sound Wan is the oldest source on the Japanese side for that shift.

Even today, for example, it is said that Japanese people "value wa" (和を尊ぶ) or "cherish wa" (和を大事にする). This cannot be discussed simply, but to put it plainly, the Wa here has been changed into 和, and since the modern era the word has generally been translated as "harmony." That is not wrong in itself, but we need to understand that it is of an entirely different phase from the origin. The premise is that 和 does not equal harmony, and yet an old memory remains there. That memory is the sound world of Wan, the ancient tribes' word that Chinese envoys once rendered in the character 倭. The world of harmony as understood by people born and raised in the English-speaking world and this world of 和 lie in different conceptual spaces. Something that has not yet found words, and cannot be gathered into the single word harmony, is contained there. What lies hidden there is not a refusal of mutual understanding. It is a set of structures of illusion.

When the word spoken as Wan in some regions of ancient Japan was provisionally given the character 倭 by the Wei envoys, as a name for a country or tribe, the prototype was set for the sound to shift to Wa. But this was not a concept with a particular tribe of the archipelago as its object. It was only the sound of a common language rooted in a limited place. In the extreme, it is a remnant of a word that spread, under the chiefs of each land, as the language shared by the people living in the sphere of Himiko, who held the position of queen over the lands when the Wei envoys came. A particular tribe must have stood at the source of this word, but we have no means of knowing. All we can say at least is that Wan was a sound spoken often enough to leave an impression on the Wei envoys.

The background to the growing need for such a common language already appears in the Gishiwajinden. It briefly sums up the situation before Himiko's rule: the lands were in turmoil and repeatedly at odds, and as a kind of truce their chiefs gathered and agreed to install Himiko as queen. This suggests that the chiefs of these lands already shared some common language. It is not known whether that language came from the native people of Japan or whether their roots lay in migrants who arose from a common matrix on the continent, but I personally think the latter is more likely.

What matters, then, is that the group speaking the common language with the sound spoken here as Wan is tied to an important origin of the people who lived in the Yayoi period in the Japanese division of eras. They are generally called the Yayoi people and are described as following the Jomon people of the long Jomon period, but in reality they were a complex group of multiple origins. That the main force that formed the Yayoi period was migrants from the continent was pointed out over a hundred years ago, and in recent years that old observation has been reinforced with scientific grounds, from an anthropological standpoint based on nuclear genome analysis. Broadly speaking, the roots of the group that became the matrix of the Yayoi people lie near the West Liao River in Northeast Asia. My own inference is that they originated with the bearers of the Hongshan culture (紅山文化), which existed from about 4700 to 2900 BC and spread across northern Hebei Province, southeastern Inner Mongolia, and western Liaoning Province in China. Even on what nuclear genome analysis has shown so far, the nuclear genome of this West Liao River group is of the Northern China type, genetically clearly distinct from the native Jomon people of the archipelago and from the populations peculiar to the ancient East Asian coast carried by the ancient tribes of the southern Korean Peninsula.

The Hongshan culture was surveyed in 1908, before the Second World War, by the archaeologist Ryuzo Torii, who was conducting surveys of Manchuria and Mongolia, and by 1935 Japanese archaeologists had carried out large-scale excavations. The war made continued research impossible, though, and the Chinese side showed little interest in the region, so archaeological results lagged far behind. Progress finally came in 2015. A survey report by a team led by Xiaoping Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences pointed out that the region had been in a special environment at the time the Hongshan culture emerged. The whole area had long been assumed to have been desert for the past million years and so attracted little interest, but it turned out that abundant water, lakes, and forests existed there only during a limited period, from 12,000 to 4,000 years ago. Climate change beginning about 4,200 years ago turned it to desert again, and from roughly 4,000 years ago the group that made the Hongshan culture began moving south in search of a new place to live. This is the originating event for the appearance of the Yayoi people, who later flowed into the Japanese archipelago as migrants by way of the Korean Peninsula. Climate change was the chief cause that formed the Yayoi period. Seen from another angle, the end of the Jomon period, which lasted over ten thousand years, lay in upheavals on the continent driven by climate change. This is the oldest large-scale inflow of new groups into Japan.

As this West Liao River group moved from Northeast Asia to the archipelago, however, it mixed with other groups along the way, so the premise is that "Yayoi people" does not equal "West Liao River group." In fact, nuclear genome analysis based on archaeological samples from the Japanese side has so far found no pure West Liao River type. Broadly, then, the Yayoi people are placed as having four base types.

Composition of the Yayoi people

1: A mix of the West Liao River group and the Jomon people.

2: A mix of the West Liao River group and the ancient East Asian coastal group, with no mixing with the Jomon people recognized.

3: A mix of the West Liao River group and the ancient East Asian coastal group, with mixing with the Jomon people recognized.

4: The Jomon people.

Of these, types 1, 2, and 3 are groups that mixed on the Korean Peninsula and then flowed into the archipelago. If we assume that their original group brought the prototype of Yayoi culture to the archipelago, it is self-evident that language was part of what they brought. Academically, that language lineage is placed in the Transeurasian family, and this language is the prototype of present-day Japanese. The origin of present-day Japanese rests more on the language of the Yayoi people than on that of the Jomon people, which means it was built by migrants. There are regional differences, however. Across the archipelago, a considerable number of Jomon-lineage language areas also remain.

This time I will touch only on the main points. I continue my own surveys in various places on the Japanese side, so I will disclose these matters slowly in the future. What matters here is to grasp the possibility that the striking sound Wan, which the Wei envoys and earlier Chinese envoys heard many times, was probably not the language of the Jomon people but a sound that came from the group originating near the West Liao River. By the 3rd century, when the Wei envoys visited, the group that had made the Hongshan culture had drifted to Japan, mixing along the way, and settled. Once we understand that this is the main force called the Yayoi people on the Japanese side, things become much clearer. Conversely, I think one reason the ancient Japanese side of the Yayoi period and part of the ancient Korean Peninsula shared a cultural sphere is that they had a common ancestor. This is a theme that appears often in Japanese mythology, and it must not be read as modern invasion or colonization. It speaks of an old memory in which a sphere across the sea unfolded because a common ancestor existed. It is truly a world without nationalism, but Japan and Korea each stand in a configuration where nationalist ideologies are set against each other, so this view has never been taken up, and we arrive at today without it. Needless to say, understanding the whole picture of the routes by which these ancient groups entered Japan requires a view that goes beyond the structure of East Asian confrontation. The true picture can never be clarified unless a joint research team of the three countries works on it over many years, with the unification of the Korean Peninsula and the normalization of relations between China and Japan as major prerequisites.

By taking at least these premises into account, we can now take hold of a key to approaching Yamatai (邪馬台国), where Queen Himiko lived, as recorded in the Gishiwajinden. From these premises we can sense that Yamatai, where Himiko lived, was rich in the source of this ancient Japanese language. It is quite likely that Himiko herself inherited this language sphere, and given the possibility that the forces within the sphere of Wakoku acquired a common language in order to communicate with one another, that language would derive from the main force that was the matrix of the Yayoi people. The problem is how far this sphere of Wakoku extended across the archipelago at the time. Because it is hard to grasp this from the Gishiwajinden's descriptions, exactly where the lands named in the text were located has fallen into extreme confusion on the Japanese side as well. Provisional identifications, saying a given land lies at a given place today, have been made, and last year I visited every land in western Japan that has been provisionally identified with those in the Gishiwajinden. But nothing can be confirmed. Because there is no decisive evidence, a certain problem arose in the Edo period: where in Japan was Yamatai, ruled by Himiko, in the first place? The person who gave rise to the source of the Yamatai controversy, which has lasted several hundred years to this day, was Hakuseki Arai (1657-1725), a Neo-Confucian scholar of the mid-Edo period versed in many fields.

After studying the Gishiwajinden, Hakuseki Arai first claimed that Yamatai lay in the Kinai region (Nara Prefecture), but he later changed his view completely and claimed it was in Kyushu. These two claims raised the question of whether Yamatai was in Kinai or Kyushu, and astonishingly, this question has continued at the same level to this day without being settled. What muddled it especially was that Norinaga Motoori (1730-1801), a scholar of Kokugaku (National Learning), building on Arai, read the Gishiwajinden from the standpoint of an emperor-centered view of history and set up a hardline theory making the Kyushu view absolute. As a result, the location of Yamatai, where Queen Himiko of Wakoku lived, became unknown. Over several hundred years many methods of proof have been tried, yet no certain, decisive evidence has been found. One cause of the delay lies in the problems surrounding archaeology. Among the many kofun (ancient burial mounds) scattered across Japan, those that the Imperial Household Agency treats as connected with successive emperors are strictly restricted by the state, and cannot be properly investigated. In my hometown of Sakai, Osaka, there are huge clusters of kofun, but they have been investigated only in a limited way.

It is said that the state's intent is to avoid raising awkward questions about the origin of the emperor. The Imperial Household Agency imposes this restriction on itself, and the impossibility of proper investigation has complicated the question of Yamatai's location still further. Weary of a Yamatai problem that is never resolved, people explore possibilities beyond the conventional Kinai and Kyushu views, and sometimes fabrications spread nationwide, creating a confused situation. Seen the other way, these movements show that many people sense that the emperor's lineage lies within a crossing of multiple origins. This bears on the question of where the "pure Japanese" of the fiction maintained until now can possibly be found. And now that DNA analysis is reinforcing various past theories, I think anew that when everything is reduced to genetic results, another ethnic-nationalist problem inevitably arises. I deliberately named this section Communal Illusion because I want to assert that we must not lose sight of the fact that ethnicity should be read from the viewpoint of illusion. An anthropological view that leans in one direction, toward admiration of DNA as it does now, proceeds while ignoring complex forms of illusion, and I think it is extremely dangerous and will become a kind of risk in the future.

Put simply, suppose the nuclear genome shows that the emperor's lineage holds a crossing of multiple origins. Does the emperor's existence then lose its meaning? The answer is decisively No. The limit of anthropological scholarship is already visible here. Even if complex mixing is seen in the emperor's bloodline, it is after all a matter of bloodline, and among people like me who work outside academia, this is shared as a fairly well-known view. At the same time, once the crossing of lineage is clear, the false image of the "pure Japanese" disappears, and the definition of the Japanese inevitably wavers. In other words, without waiting for such scientific grounds, it is self-evident that this image is built by communal illusion. Next weekend I will have the whole of my own genome analyzed, and from around summer I will begin exploring origins on the basis of that data. I will do it on the premise of awareness that I am investigating illusion, because I want to show that model.

There is, however, another way to think about where Yamatai was, without relying on archaeology or anthropology. The key becomes clear through the succession of dynasties on the Chinese side, much as the group called the Wajin on the Japanese side was limited in scope. The Gishiwajinden we know today was compiled by Chen Shou of the Jin dynasty around the end of the 3rd century, based on the information of the Wei envoys. As dynasties changed on the Chinese side, mistranslations and misprints arose and the text grew confused. The confused text was then imported to the Japanese side, where further mistranslations and misprints shaped it. The reading of Yamatai by Hakuseki Arai, mentioned above, symbolizes this confusion. That the view of Yamatai's location changed completely, from Kinai to Kyushu, within a single scholar already in the early days on the Japanese side shows the confusion itself.

If so, what is this Yamatai?

And where was it?

In the next article, we will look into these points.