倭人考 8On the Wajin, Part 8

Approaching this question is difficult, but from my own sense of the evidence the Jomon people left very few traces of worshipping the sun. There are certainly remains in various locations showing that they observed the movements of the sun, but observation belongs to a different dimension from worship and cannot simply be called solar faith. This perspective is based on my own judgment, and from the Jomon sensibility it might be more accurate to say that their foundation was a belief in which all natural beings possessed a soul.

The Ainu, who are thought to have inherited Jomon beliefs to a reasonable degree, held a faith grounded in the perception that divine power, kamuy, dwelled in all natural beings. They called the sun “Tokapcup-kamuy” and the moon “Kunnecup-kamuy”. In Ainu belief the sun is positioned as a goddess and the moon as a god. This point, however, contains considerable room for debate. The question is whether the relationship between goddess and god in Ainu faith was a legitimate inheritance from the beliefs of the Hokkaido-lineage Jomon who were the primary ancestors of the Ainu, or whether it was the result of faith being transformed through complex tribal admixture.

Solar deities around the world are divided between male and female, and the background in many cases involves transformations of belief through intermixing with other peoples. No blanket statement can be made. My own view is that the female quality of the solar deity in Ainu belief was most likely born from a transformation that occurred through admixture with tribes from the Honshu region of the Japanese archipelago.

It may seem strange to ask whether an ancient tribal people like the Jomon possessed solar worship at all. But the fact remains that at a certain point in time an extreme intensification of solar worship began on the Japanese archipelago. From the perspective of Jomon belief this would have appeared quite alien, and the evidence for its alien character is particularly visible in the qualities brought by immigrant arrivals from abroad. For example, ritual implements that do not appear in the Jomon period have been excavated in succession from Yayoi-period sites. These implements were essential tools of solar worship.

It was immigrants, without question, who brought solar worship to the ancient Japanese archipelago and laid the foundation for the new religion that would be born with the enthronement of Himiko, the queen of Yamato. This suggests that the Jomon people, with their rich history of more than ten thousand years, may not have possessed this kind of faith. The reason would be that in contrast to the Jomon animistic worldview, the newcomers held an attitude that explicitly separated the sun from the rest of the natural world and made it the object of worship. A faith premised on this kind of initial separation was something the Jomon could not have accommodated, and it therefore speaks to the arrival of people carrying a new set of values who crossed the sea and began to settle on the Japanese archipelago at some point in time.

One legend transmitting this ancient memory survives across the sea on the Korean Peninsula. The place is the coastal area near Pohang on the eastern shore. I believe the tribe based along this coast, a tribe whose character was defined by ritual, was the group that brought solar worship to the Japanese archipelago. Who were they?

As a basic premise, this tribe belonged to Silla in the ancient Korean Peninsula. Silla was a kingdom with a long history stretching from 57 BCE to 935 CE, and over that span it exerted considerable influence on the Japanese side. Silla's major expansion came in the fourth century, and in the latter half of the seventh century it formed an alliance with the Tang dynasty rising to power on the Chinese side, destroyed Baekje and Goguryeo on the Korean Peninsula, and by 676 had unified most of the peninsula. The upheaval on the Korean Peninsula had a profound impact on Japanese politics, and during this period vast numbers of refugees poured into the Japanese archipelago.

Silla was a region that had actively maintained maritime contact from an early period with areas on the Sea of Japan side of the Japanese archipelago such as Izumo and the Hokuriku coast. Ancient maritime traffic tends to be underestimated because it leaves few physical traces, but it is self-evident that multiple sea routes between the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula had been established since antiquity. The traces are abundant along the Japanese coastline alone. The conventional understanding places the main route of migration from the Korean Peninsula to Japan as passing through Tsushima and Iki Island before landing in northern Kyushu. But this was the main route. It does not mean no others existed.

Since the modern era, however, the relationship between Japan and Korea has been burdened by a debt of mutual nationalism that neither side has managed to discharge. Historical facts of this kind tend to be unilaterally ignored, and productive discussion has not yet been achieved. On the Japanese side, acknowledging the influence of Korea is difficult, and any fact touching on the lineage of the emperor is rejected absolutely. On the Korean side, the mirror image holds. Japan’s history is claimed to have been largely created by Korea. What follows from importing modern nationalism into the study of ancient history becomes clear when you look at the Japan-Korea problem. That it shows no sign of resolution is a source of deep regret.

I set nationalism aside as a problem of modernity and treat ancient history as belonging to a different dimension. Within the kingdom once called Silla, the legend transmitted in the coastal region near Pohang becomes important. The memory of antiquity still resides in place. In this area there is a bay called [迎日湾] (Yeongil Bay), meaning the bay of greeting the sunrise, and it was deeply connected to the solar worship of the Silla powers.

Indeed, the Samguk Yusa, a historical text containing detailed records of Silla, preserves a legend that transmits this ancient memory. It is the legend of Yeonorong and Seoonyeo. The legend is set during the reign of Adalla, the eighth king of Silla. Since Adalla's reign is dated to 154–184, the period overlaps with the estimated time of Himiko's enthronement on the Yamato side. The exact year of Himiko's enthronement is unknown, but the 170s or 180s are considered most likely. There are also accounts that the Wa queen Himiko dispatched envoys to Silla during Adalla's reign. As I have written previously, however, interpretation varies greatly depending on which stage and which manuscript of the Chinese Records of the Three Kingdoms is adopted as the base text, and the reality is difficult to pin down.

The Samguk Yusa itself is a privately compiled historical work edited in the late thirteenth century, second in antiquity among surviving Korean historical texts only to the Samguk Sagi, completed in 1145. Its compiler was Iryeon (1206–1289), a renowned Buddhist monk of the late Goryeo period. When discussing events of the second-century Silla we must therefore be aware that more than a thousand years separate the events from their recording. The background to the compilation was Iryeon's dissatisfaction with the Samguk Sagi, edited by the Confucian Goryeo bureaucrat Kim Busik (1075–1151). Because Kim Busik had faithfully followed Chinese historiographical methods, the ancient Korean legends, myths, and traditions had been ruthlessly excluded. Iryeon independently excavated a variety of documents and other sources, collecting the old Silla traditions in particular. But since Iryeon was also a Zen monk with an interest in furthering the spread of Buddhism, the deeper strata are not always easy to see. The Samguk Yusa is less a work of formal historiography than something closer to what we might now call a folkloristic compilation of oral traditions, privately edited. Viewed from another angle, that is precisely what makes it important.

Formal histories in East Asia were fundamentally state enterprises constructed on the Chinese model. At the same time, people outside the establishment, neither bureaucrats nor scholars, who were dissatisfied with this monolithic approach sometimes independently produced private records. In Japan this dynamic manifested at the national scale in the forms of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. The Nihon Shoki, faithful to Chinese historiographical methods, and the Kojiki, constructed on the basis of ancient Japanese legends, myths, and traditions, possess entirely different worldviews.

In the Samguk Yusa, Iryeon recorded a legend he had unearthed from Silla. It is the legend of Yeonorong and Seoonyeo. According to the legend, in the year 157 during the reign of King Adalla, a married couple living at [迎日湾] rode upon a rock and crossed to [日本], where they became king and queen. After their departure the sun and moon of Silla lost their light. But when a silk cloth woven by Seoonyeo was brought back to Silla and a ritual was performed with it, the light returned. A point that must not be overlooked is that because the Samguk Yusa was compiled in the late thirteenth century, the destination of this Silla couple is written not as [倭国] (Wa) but as [日本国]. I do not know how [日本国] (Nippon) was pronounced on the Samguk Yusa side at that time, but the fact that thirteenth-century general knowledge forms the basis cannot be ignored.

The key point, however, is that the legend does not state that Yeonorong and Seoonyeo moved to the Wa kingdom. The Wa kingdom before Himiko's enthronement was a highly limited and scattered confederation of regional polities on the Japanese archipelago side. It was not equivalent to the Japanese archipelago itself. When considering where Yeonorong and Seoonyeo may have arrived, we must therefore be careful not to default unreflectively to the conventional assumption of a landing in northern Kyushu. If they crossed directly from [迎日湾] to the Japanese archipelago, the likely point of arrival would have been on the Sea of Japan coast, in the San'in region or beyond.

Furthermore, the Wa kingdom of 157 predates Himiko's enthronement. According to the Gishiwajinden, Yamato at that time was unstable, with control lost and a great war among the male kings of various tribes under way. In this unstable era a tribe from Silla carrying solar worship crossed to the Wa kingdom and eventually became king and queen. The narrative is profoundly compelling. Drawing on all my own research to date, I believe this legend carries an ancient historical reality that cannot simply be dismissed as fiction.

As noted above, however, from the standpoint of Japan's modern ideology the theory that one strand of the Japanese lineage involves Silla is utterly unacceptable. Conscientious scholars have argued for it time and again, but every such effort has been suppressed, and in mainstream academia the idea is completely ignored. Equally, from the standpoint of Korea's modern ideology, the claim tends to be made in the opposite direction, that the ancestors of the Japanese emperor were simply Silla, stated as monolithic fact. The problem must therefore be distinguished from nationalism. If the history of East Asia is ever to be opened with integrity, it will require the cooperation of people in Japan, Korea, North Korea, and China who are capable of thinking about nationalism as a separate question. The people who take on that work will most likely come from outside academia.

It should go without saying that Japanese does not equal Silla. What can be understood at a minimum is that on the Silla side in the mid-second century, an initial understanding that the Silla and the royal lineage of the Wa kingdom were connected may have been shared. Whether this connects to Himiko as part of the Wa royal lineage is far from certain. Multiple kings were scattered across the Wa side at the time, and linking the legend directly to Himiko is difficult. But the importance of this legend comes down to the fact that Yeonorong and Seoonyeo were an ordinary couple living on the coast, not members of the Silla royal lineage. In other words, the possibility that a non-royal tribe from the Silla side flowed into the royal lineage on the Wa side cannot be dismissed. More significant still is that in the legend the one who first departed Silla and entered [日本国] was the future male king Yeonorong, and it was afterward that his wife Seoonyeo followed him. What exactly is this legend transmitting?

My view is that Yeonorong and Seoonyeo are not individuals but symbols of a tribe. A portion of a tribe with a ritual character, living in the region overlooking [迎日湾], the sacred site of Silla's solar worship, crossed to Japan on already-established sea routes and did not return. A concerned segment of the tribe then followed, and together they became king and queen. The location of the Wa-side royal seat where Yeonorong and Seoonyeo settled is not specified in the legend, so we must resist the impulse to connect them immediately to the solar goddess Amaterasu or to Himiko. If this tribe from the vicinity of Silla's [迎日湾] were crossing to the Japanese archipelago, they would not have taken the main route through Tsushima and Iki Island to northern Kyushu. They would have crossed directly, passing through Izumo or the Oki Islands and continuing toward the Hokuriku coast.

A provisional summary would look like this. Yeonorong and Seoonyeo in this Silla legend were unrelated to the royal lineage of King Adalla, but for Silla they carried the tribal significance of guardians of the sacred site of solar worship. A portion of this tribe became the leading force that brought solar worship to the Japanese archipelago. Their base was [迎日湾], the sacred site for greeting the sunrise. Some among them, carrying the ritual practice of solar worship that had developed there, crossed the sea and reached the Japanese archipelago. After a gap in time, a subsequent group arrived. These tribes of differing lineage entered into what might be called a mythological marriage and built the foundation that led to the Wa royal lineage. A mythological marriage is not the union of two individuals. It is symbolized by alliance, cooperation, or submission between tribes.

With all of this as a premise, the Silla legend begins to align with compelling realism alongside the establishment of the new religion grounded in solar worship that coincided with Himiko's enthronement. That faith was what the Wei envoys recorded as [鬼道] (Kido), and my own view is that it was of foreign origin.

Does this compelling Silla legend and the rise of Himiko as queen of Yamato serve as a medium transmitting the ancient memory of East Asia? Or is it a record that has imprinted the lost face of East Asia itself?

When the nationalist frameworks of China, Korea, and Japan are dismantled, a grand history of the ancient peoples that has never before been considered will rise to the surface.