倭人考 7On the Wajin, Part 7

Queen Himiko is believed to have reigned over ancient Yamato from roughly the 180s through around 248. This enigmatic queen of antiquity exists in a domain that refuses every monolithic interpretation. It is impossible for us to know the truth of her. Yet without engaging with Himiko as a figure of central importance, no insight into the history of a nation or a people can be achieved. What is needed is to present her world from as many angles as possible so that each reader, myself included, can re-edit the picture on the basis of a lifetime's worth of experience.

There is no end to what can be thought about Himiko, but in this piece I want to focus on the ritual dimension that defines her character. According to the Gishiwajinden, the foundational text, Queen Himiko is described as a figure who wielded [鬼道] (Kido). Kido is a complex concept, so I will proceed using the Japanese reading throughout.

Himiko's Kido appears to have been widely practiced as a custom among the Wa people. It was performed when conducting ceremonies or undertaking journeys. The basic content of the ritual involved burning bones and divining fortune from the pattern of the cracks. The outcome was read from the traces left by the burning, and that outcome was understood as the will of the divine. There is, however, a difference between the Chinese and Japanese sides. In ancient China the standard method was [亀卜] (Kiboku), divination using the shells of turtles. In ancient Japan the standard was [鹿卜] (Rokuboku), divination using the scapulae of deer. Rokuboku was also called [太占] (Futomani). After Himiko's era the court side shifted to turtle-shell divination under Chinese influence, but outside the court the two methods coexisted, forming the prototype of divination in Japan. All of these arts were transmitted as secret knowledge passed from master to a single successor. No one outside a restricted lineage could wield them.

In the ancient rite of Rokuboku, the scapula of a male deer was heated over charcoal made from the wood of a tree called hahaka, a variety of cherry. Descriptions of this method appear in the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720, indicating that it was a well-established ritual tradition. Visitors to the city of Nara on a Japanese sightseeing trip will be familiar with the countless deer living in Nara Park. These deer are regarded as divine, a status conventionally traced to the mythology of the nearby Kasuga Taisha, where the principal deity Takemikazuchi is said to have descended from present-day Ibaraki riding a white deer. But beneath that mythology lies the older consciousness of ancient people who treated the deer as sacred because it provided the material for Rokuboku, the critical medium of divine judgment. In Yayoi-period rituals, shamans dressed in the garb of birds offered deer as sacrifices to the gods.

In that era people with shamanistic abilities, figures akin to what we might now call prayer healers or sorcerers, were present in many regions and are assumed to have been active in practices such as curing disease. But Himiko was an existence on an entirely different plane from these ordinary shamans. To begin with, her enthronement was carried out through a process of collective elevation by multiple male kings. This collective elevation is generally understood to have occurred because a number of male kings commanding different tribes in ancient Yamato were warring over hegemony and a fear arose that all the tribes would annihilate one another. Himiko was provisionally installed as a queen to end the conflict. But this framing of a queen installed to end wars is a modern and arbitrary interpretation. It unconsciously presupposes the modern construct of men as the agents of war. That may be valid as a modern reading, but the Yayoi period shows evidence of female military units, which renders this monolithic interpretation invalid.

It is better to see the collective elevation of Himiko as driven by a collision over faith. If the problem had been purely one of ending armed conflict, the appearance of a single leader with sufficient charisma would have sufficed. But Himiko's emergence carries an unmistakably strong ritual dimension. Her appearance signals the birth of a new religion that had not previously existed in ancient Japan. The crucial point is that this new religion was not created by Himiko. Its seeds had already been shared and nurtured among the tribes governed by the various male kings. But for this religion to be established, a queen rather than a king needed to be enthroned. The Gishiwajinden records only a limited picture of the Wa kingdom, but across Japan as a whole the governance of tribes by queens was in fact a fairly common form.

If the estimated dates for Himiko's enthronement and death are roughly correct, she lived to a relatively advanced age and her enthronement took place while she was still a girl. This is corroborated by the fact that after Himiko's death disorder erupted again, and it was a girl of thirteen named Toyo, drawn from Himiko's kin, who was subsequently elevated to the queenship. After her enthronement Himiko spent virtually her entire life strictly isolated from the secular world by the male kings who had collectively installed her. She lived in a realm from which all ordinary daily life was forbidden. The purpose of this was to devote her entire life to governing a troubled land, because she was the supreme intermediary of divine will, the means by which the intent of the gods was made known. In practice Himiko's residence was permanently guarded by soldiers, and the Gishiwajinden records that after her enthronement almost no one saw her. In other words, though she was called the queen of Yamato, she was not a figure who appeared before the people.

A caution is needed here. Himiko was not a figure born from her own charismatic personality. To think so is a continental impulse rooted in the framework of grand organized religions, something fundamentally different from the Japanese side. The male kings of the tribes in Yamato's central region, who desired the formation of a stable hierarchy grounded in divine will, continued to hold power. The real question lies in the superhuman spiritual capacity needed to achieve the cohesion and inclusiveness of this new religion.

In the Yamato governed by Himiko, political authority was delegated to her brother. Himiko herself held none. Yet because every political judgment was conducted through the mediation of divine will, Himiko's religious power inevitably grew. The link between the queen-priestess Himiko and her brother who held political authority was a single man, the only male permitted to come and go from Himiko's quarters. The Chinese side interpreted this man as a servant and assumed Himiko had no husband. That interpretation is incorrect. This figure corresponded to what we would now call a husband.

The words Himiko received from the gods through divine oracle were the will of the gods themselves. Transmitted through the mediation of this husband to Himiko's brother, the political directives carried the force of divine command and could not be defied. This form of governance can be said to have been established with Himiko's emergence, though whether Yamato was truly its point of origin remains an open question.

The Gishiwajinden describes this religion as [鬼道] (Kido) and states that Himiko served [鬼神] (Kishin). This is an extremely difficult area, but in modern interpretation [鬼] (Oni) tends to be translated as devil or demon. That reading is entirely wrong. Even on the ancient Chinese side, [鬼] (Oni) was not equivalent to devil or demon. It was a profoundly multivalent concept that only later became associated with something closer to the demonic.

The original meaning of [鬼] (Oni) on the Chinese side was the dead, or the spirits of the dead. But this did not mean the dead in the sense we now understand. It carried a temporal gap, referring to the remains of the dead in the state of exposed bone. Over time this original meaning came to encompass the spirits of ancestors, which were then conceived as a force regulating the lives of descendants in the present world. This concept merged with mountains and rivers, with yin and yang, with heaven and earth, and eventually through the lens of celestial worship came to be imagined as something like a presiding force of the cosmos. This is of course an extremely compressed account of changes spanning thousands to tens of thousands of years. But it is fair to say that [鬼] (Oni), deriving from this original meaning of the dead, branched into demons and evil spirits and malevolent beings, and that from there a wide variety of existences were absorbed back into the category of [鬼] (Oni).

With this multivalent character as a premise, Himiko's [鬼] (Oni) and [鬼神] (Kishin) should be understood as spiritual beings possessing the power to regulate the human world, deities close to the awe-inspiring spiritual presences that serve as objects of ritual. The [道] (Michi, Do) in [鬼道] (Kido) carries a nuance something like a system of sacred teachings. This suggests that a new religion with its own mythological world had been established in Yamato. Whether the Wei envoys actually witnessed this religion firsthand is a separate discussion, but the account was most likely recorded from what they heard from the Wa people.

What draws my curiosity is how this new religion suddenly came into being in Yamato. And what kind of faith and ritual practice did it possess? The Gishiwajinden alone cannot answer these questions, but by investigating from multiple angles it is possible to approach the reality. The reason is that the establishment of Himiko's Kido is not unrelated to the birth of the Japanese mythological goddess Amaterasu. Amaterasu was later absorbed into the concept of a solar deity, but her primordial identity was a goddess who illuminated the sea, with her origins in a deity of the maritime tribes. In the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and the present-day Ise Grand Shrine where Amaterasu is enshrined, she is positioned as a goddess. But other documents and oral traditions reveal that in an older layer she was a male deity.

My own view is that when solar worship flowed into Japan and an effort was made to systematize it as ritual, a primordial transformation occurred in which Amaterasu shifted from male to female. If it had been nothing more than a simple solar cult, there would have been no need for the male kings of Yamato to install Himiko as a queen. One of the male kings could simply have assumed the role of high priest of the new religion. But the male kings of Yamato in this era did not take that approach. They went to the deliberate effort of collectively elevating a girl and enthroning her as queen. This transmits an ancient memory that when male kings attempted to channel the will of the solar deity, it did not work. It suggests that the enthronement of Himiko achieved a religious unification that could not have been accomplished otherwise. In other words, the dominant solar-worship faction in the Yamato region of the Japanese archipelago very likely possessed a religious teaching that placed a female shaman at the apex of ritual.

And what makes this even more compelling is that this faith did not originate on the Japanese archipelago. It was a faith brought in by someone from the outside. The tribe that served as the main carrier of this solar worship were immigrants whose origins lay beyond the Japanese archipelago. The traces of this ancient memory have been preserved in a single truth, one painstakingly brought to light through the extraordinary effort and research of earlier scholars. But this truth has been obstructed by nationalism and various ideologies. It remains unrecognized, known only to a small number of people as a limited and marginal truth.

Who were the people that brought solar worship to the ancient Japanese archipelago? A legend that speaks to that question survives to this day in a land beyond the sea.