倭人考 5On the Wajin, Part 5

Mysterious peoples whose origins remain unresolved by history, blending together in complex layers to form the wellspring of what we now call the Japanese. As the age approached the mid-third century, a delegation from the Kingdom of Wei arrived on the Japanese archipelago, and an enigmatic sound lingered in their ears. That sound was Wan. According to prevailing estimates, the Wei envoys set out around the year 240 from Daifang Commandery, a territory under Wei control on the mid-western coast of the Korean Peninsula, and their movements across the Japanese side are preserved in the historical record. Among the nations on the archipelago that maintained contact with Wei, the envoys were headed for a particular capital that had unified several of these nations into a single sphere. The figure who governed that sphere was a queen named Himiko.

The capital where Himiko resided was a nation called Yamatai, yet the location of this ancient seat of power, sometimes spoken of as a kingdom, remains unknown to this day. This is, in fact, quite strange. By that period, the Chinese side already possessed advanced techniques of surveying and geographical understanding, and the account in the Gishiwajinden (魏志倭人伝), though concise, describes the very route along which the envoys traveled to gain an audience with Himiko. Hearing this alone, one might assume the location of Yamatai could be settled without difficulty, and yet it has never been definitively established. Why has the question of where Yamatai stood produced such confusion? In this article, we will trace the path toward understanding that mystery.

When approaching this kind of problem, it is helpful to keep the following relationship in mind. On one side stood the envoys operating under the influence of Wei, a Chinese state that already possessed sophisticated writing and literary techniques, along with a political order centered on a dynasty ruled by a male sovereign and an administrative bureaucracy. On the other side stood the Wajin of Wakoku, who had no writing or literary techniques of their own. Though the prototype of a dynastic structure was taking shape among them, the kind of male sovereign governance found in the Chinese model had not yet been fully established. Officials from the Wa side were already posted throughout the sphere of Yamatai, and this suggests that contact with ancient China had set in motion a gradual transition toward dynastic form. Yet there is a quality that may be difficult for us to imagine. The difference between possessing and not possessing writing and literary culture produces a divergence that reaches into the very structure of consciousness itself. Put another way, once a people have come to know writing and literature, an irreversible rupture separates them from the consciousness of those who have not. What tenuously bridged this gap in Japan was kotodama (言霊), the belief that spiritual power dwells within spoken words. And the discord born inevitably from this unbridgeable gap is precisely what surfaces so conspicuously in the Gishiwajinden.

As a fundamental premise, the existence known as the Wajin of Wakoku derives from a limited set of tribes on the Japanese archipelago who maintained contact with Wei and, before it, the Han dynasty. It would be an error to abstract them into "the Japanese" as a whole. As I have touched upon in earlier articles of this series, I personally believe that the linguistic sphere in which people referred to themselves as Wan was deeply shaped, at its origins, by migrant forces from Northeast Asia, and that within the pluralistic structure of the Yayoi people, composed of multiple tribes cooperating with one another, the word arose naturally as a means of establishing mutual understanding. From the limited vantage point of written records, the Gishiwajinden authored by the Wei envoys is the oldest account conveying the form of Japan. At the very least, we can say that during this era, the sound Wan was rendered in the official language of the Wei people as the characters 倭 or 委 (Wa), and from these emerged the bureaucratic literary terms Wajin (倭人) as a concept of a people and Wakoku (倭国) as a concept of a territory. In other words, neither "Wajin" nor "Wakoku" were designations that the inhabitants of the Japanese side had consciously used for themselves.

At that moment, a fissure opened between the form of illusion held by the local people and the form of illusion that the Wei side created and projected onto the Japanese side. I believe this divergence, which brought pain to the mind, was a driving factor behind the formation, in the early eighth century, of two works compiled on the Japanese side. Those works were the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. That is to say, up until at least the mid-third century, the power of communal illusion on the Japanese side was still incomplete. It did not possess the intensity found in China. But when the envoys arrived to visit Queen Himiko of Yamatai, the form of that illusion began to change, moving toward a new stage of the age.

What is crucial here is that when the Wei envoys inscribed the Wajin and Wakoku into literary records using written characters, an act of fixing abstracted meaning was carried out with ruthless indifference to the inner world of the local peoples. The power of writing and literary records lies in the ease with which they can strip away matters of the heart, and this power simultaneously erases the essence of history while constructing history anew, a dual structure of profound consequence. This is precisely why written documents cannot be trusted too readily in historical inquiry. What this means is simply that the envoys heard the word Wan frequently within the limited sphere of the nations they visited, and from Yamatai's perspective, the Wei envoys were the equivalent of what we would today call state guests. For this reason, the opportunities for the envoys to freely observe the daily lives of people across the various nations would have been extremely limited. For the most part, they would have been received and entertained by officials of the various nations. When we consider the political dynamics at play within Yamatai, recognition by Wei effectively guaranteed the legitimacy of sovereign power. It follows that the officials on the Wa side who managed the reception through Yamatai would have been thoroughly committed to ensuring that any aspect of their world unfavorable to their interests was kept from the envoys' eyes.

In fact, it is estimated that several Wa emissaries departed from Daifang Commandery in advance to notify Yamatai of the Wei delegation's impending visit. The Wei envoys then followed a route determined by the Yamatai side, passing through various nations before entering the capital. It is therefore prudent to treat this document as fundamentally bureaucratic in character, for the envoys were not roaming freely across Japan observing with their own eyes. The envoys first traveled southward along the western side of the Korean Peninsula and then turned eastward, crossing to the Japanese archipelago by way of the islands of Tsushima and Iki, which served as gateways from the peninsula to Japan, before making landfall on the Kyushu side of the archipelago. I say "estimated" because the locations of the nations named in the text remain a subject of intense dispute. Having passed through these nations, the envoys safely reached Yamatai and were ultimately granted an audience with Queen Himiko. Yet it is here that a troublesome problem lurks, one that has rendered the location of Yamatai indeterminate. To see the truth, we must dismantle the very premise itself. That premise is scribal error and misprint.

The idea that scribal errors and misprints are what made the location of Yamatai indeterminate may come as a surprise. Yet in reality, the characters 邪馬台国 that form the name "Yamatai" are themselves a notation that was produced through several rounds of scribal error and misprint. What this implies is that the capital where Himiko resided was not, at the time, called Yamatai at all. This name is not what the people of Himiko's era used, nor is it the name the Wei envoys heard. As I described earlier, the envoys converted the sounds of the Wajin into Chinese characters, while on the Japanese side, the memory of this ancient world survived only as sound. Through the complex processes of history, this name emerged as the confused end product. In short, Yamatai does not exist. People have been searching for a fictitious kingdom that was never real, and that is why its location has never been identified. From here, let us examine the key to unraveling this trick.

Originally, the Gishiwajinden existed as part of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, and the original text was written in Hakka. However, China has historically undergone numerous shifts in hegemony, and with each change the dynasty relocated across the vast territory. When the ruling sovereign changed, it became inevitable that the text would be retranslated into the language used by the new ruler and the people around him. Through this process, the Gishiwajinden was, broadly speaking, transcribed from Hakka into Mandarin and Shanghainese, and it was during these transcriptions that scribal errors and misprints occurred on multiple occasions. Such errors are an inevitable consequence of repeatedly copying a text by hand, but in China's case a change of dynasty brought a sweeping change of regime and seat, and so the discrepancies grew large. As one might now surmise, the initial problem with the Gishiwajinden was not generated on the Japanese side at all. It was produced on the Chinese side through the historical process of repeated transcription. This is the crux of the matter.

To make matters still more complicated, the Edo period brought an era in which the Tokugawa shogunate promoted scholarship broadly, concurrent with the rise of Confucianism within Japan. During this time, a flood of texts poured in from China, and mastering the reading of classical Chinese became a mark of cultivation. In earlier periods, literacy in Japan had been confined to monks, Shinto priests, the aristocracy, and similar circles. But because the Tokugawa administration championed learning on a wide scale, written works came to be read even among townspeople and others who had previously had no contact with scholarship. Given that China possessed a volume of texts far exceeding what was available domestically, imports from the Chinese side were of great importance, and inevitably, new works that had not previously reached Japan began arriving in a steady stream. Precisely when the Records of the Three Kingdoms first reached Japan remains unclear. Some accounts hold that intellectuals were already aware of the text by around the eighth century, but it was in the Edo period that it began to be studied in earnest. Indeed, the Records of the Three Kingdoms enjoyed great popularity among commoners in the Edo period, and numerous samurai were avid readers as well.

The influence of the Records of the Three Kingdoms was enormous in Japan. Looking back, I myself was so fond of it as a child that I still remember the names of the figures and kingdoms that appear in it to this day. And it was the spread of the Records of the Three Kingdoms that gave rise to a new movement on the Japanese side, known as kokugaku (国学), or National Learning. Kokugaku is not nationalism in the modern sense, but at the very least, when we survey the full arc of Japanese history, it is partly true that it was established from a reactive position by certain individuals who had grown weary of the overwhelming influence China had exerted. The foremost figures of kokugaku, Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801), did not explicitly advocate opposition to Confucianism or Buddhism as such. They did, however, share a stance of rejecting what they saw as the Chinese spirit. In their effort to excavate a Japanese spirit capable of standing against the Chinese one, they inevitably began with an exhaustive study of the waka poetry found in the Manyoshu and similar anthologies. It was through this process that a sharpened awareness of the distinction between the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki took hold. Norinaga Motoori broke with longstanding convention and argued that it was not the Nihon Shoki, which had long held an unquestioned position of supremacy, but rather the Kojiki that was the true wellspring of the Japanese spirit. To prove his case, he spent over thirty years writing the first scholarly commentary on the Kojiki in Japanese history, the Kojikiden.

Even so, the Kojiki was compiled in the early eighth century, and any scholar seeking to learn about Japan before that period through written sources faced severe limitations. It was here that Edo-period scholars turned their attention to the Gishiwajinden, one section of the Records of the Three Kingdoms. When this Chinese text began to be studied in Japan, it was rapidly absorbed into the dimension of ethnic consciousness, and in fact, further scribal errors and misprints occurred at the very moment Japanese scholarship took it up.

In summary, the name Yamatai, attributed to the nation led by Queen Himiko in the mid-third century as described in the Gishiwajinden, was understood under a different designation in the Wei-era framework. Through repeated scribal errors and misprints, it was unwittingly transformed into a nation that never existed. Because this fictitious name had already been generated during the Chinese process of transcription, the Edo-period scholars who first undertook its study in Japan were inevitably compelled to build upon a Yamatai that had already lost its original form. Naturally, the scholars of that time had no way of recognizing this predicament, and as a result, the distortion expanded further, until Yamatai became inextricably fused into the fabric of history. This is the background behind the earliest split, introduced by the Confucian scholar Hakuseki Arai (1657–1725), who divided the question of Yamatai into the Kinai theory (placing it in the Nara region) and the Kyushu theory. These two theories continue to be fiercely contested today, drawing on archaeology and other disciplines, yet this is in truth a problem that neither history nor archaeology can resolve.

Then what was the sound of the name of the nation Himiko ruled, before the scribal errors and misprints took hold? Put another way, when the Wei envoys visited the Japanese archipelago in the 240s, what sound were they told was the name of the land where Himiko dwelled?

It was Yamato.