倭人考 9On the Wajin, Part 9

In the previous article I touched on the possibility that a solar faith brought by immigrants gave rise to a new religion in ancient Japan and that it was Himiko, the queen of Yamato, who emerged as the high priestess of that faith. Archaeology does suggest that Himiko may have been a shaman deeply involved in solar worship, but before turning to that evidence there is a different question I want to consider in this piece. When the Wei envoys were dispatched to Yamato, did they truly have an audience with Queen Himiko?

This is one of those truths that remains invisible as long as we focus only on the Gishiwajinden as a written document. And since no other text exists on which to rely when searching for the real Himiko, understanding this point turns out to be of considerable importance for approaching the true image of ancient Japan. The straightforward reading is that the Wei envoys crossed the sea to meet Himiko, traveled to Yamato, and recorded what they observed of the Wa people's customs. In fact, the great majority of scholars have operated on this premise, and it is rare for anyone to consider the possibility that the envoys never met Himiko at all.

To push the point further, it is possible that the Wei envoys never even reached Yamato. If that is the case, what exactly is the image of the oldest Japan, a land ruled by a queen, recorded in the Gishiwajinden? This is not mere fantasy. But there is room to question the assumption that everything in the text derives from the envoys' direct observation.

It is certain that around 240 a Wei envoy landed in northern Kyushu, the gateway to the Japanese side. This envoy's name was Ti Jun [梯儁]. What is important is that the man who dispatched Ti Jun was not the Wei emperor but a figure named Gong Zun [弓遵], who served as the governor of the Daifang Commandery [帯方郡] in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. At the time, the Daifang Commandery was under the effective control of Wei. Behind this lay a grand geopolitical dynamic engulfing the whole of East Asia.

In June of 238 Himiko of Yamato had dispatched envoys to Wei bearing tribute. The reigning emperor at that time was Ming, the second emperor of Wei (r. 226–239). Because the Ming emperor placed great political importance on Himiko's approach, by December of 238 he had moved to bestow an extraordinarily generous array of gifts upon her. However, because Ming died in February of 239, these gifts were not actually delivered to Himiko until 240. The envoy dispatched to present them to the Wa kingdom was Ti Jun, acting on orders from Gong Zun at the Daifang Commandery. A further caution is needed. While the Gishiwajinden is based on Ti Jun's records, it also incorporates the records of a second envoy named Zhang Zheng, who is said to have stayed in Yamato for several years beginning around 247.

The conventional approach treats the records of these two men as the definitive basis of the Gishiwajinden's account of the Wa kingdom (Wakoku) and the Wa people (Wajin). But this assumption itself is quite precarious. To begin with, the likelihood that Ti Jun actually visited Yamato, the region corresponding to the present-day south-central part of Nara Prefecture, is extremely low. The reason is straightforward. The distance from the polity in northern Kyushu where he was staying to Yamato was enormous.

An envoy is not an explorer. The purpose of the dispatch was to gain an advantage in the hegemonic struggle among the three kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu that constituted China's Three Kingdoms period. For Wei it was sufficient to gather information about the Wa kingdom and the Wa people, about whom almost nothing had previously been known. It was sufficient to confirm that the Wa truly pledged loyalty to Wei. And above all, Ti Jun's job was to deliver the emperor's gifts to Himiko safely.

Himiko, amid the Three Kingdoms period in China, had chosen Wei's Emperor Ming from among the three states, dispatched her envoys, and offered formal tribute. This was because the multiple chieftains who held real power in Yamato judged that pledging allegiance to Wei was the strategically sound course. As we have seen, Himiko was installed by the chieftains of multiple tribes and did not make this decision unilaterally. That said, the political judgment may well have come through a divine oracle delivered to Himiko.

The overriding reason Wei needed to reach across the Korean Peninsula to the distant Wa kingdom was that the complex geopolitical risks surrounding Wei had intensified. The state that posed the greatest threat at the time was Wu.

To sketch the spatial relationships of the Three Kingdoms broadly, Wei controlled the northern half of the Yellow River basin in North China, including the Central Plains (Zhongyuan), the historical heartland of Chinese civilization. Shu was based in the Sichuan Basin in China's southwest. Wu controlled the region from the middle to the lower reaches of the Yangtze in South China. Translated roughly into modern terms, Wei's sphere encompassed Beijing, Xi'an, and Luoyang. Shu's encompassed Sichuan Province and Chongqing. Wu's encompassed Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Wuhan.

These three states were locked in a power struggle. For Wu, Wei was the mortal enemy it had to fight across a shared land border. Sun Quan (r. 229–252), who had taken the throne as Wu's first emperor, devised a plan to contain Wei by forming an alliance with the Gongsun clan, which had risen to power in Liaodong behind Wei's northern flank. The aim was a maritime encirclement that would squeeze Wei from both north and south.

The Gongsun clan had emerged as a new power amid the upheaval of the Three Kingdoms. In 233 Sun Quan dispatched a massive fleet carrying 10,000 soldiers and a fortune in treasure to Liaodong. He offered the Gongsun patriarch Gongsun Yuan the title of King of Yan and sought to conclude a formal military alliance. But Gongsun Yuan calculated that Wei, his immediate neighbor, posed a far more obvious threat than distant Wu. He killed the Wu envoys and delivered their heads to Wei. Wei was delighted. Emperor Ming rewarded the gesture by appointing Gongsun Yuan as Grand General.

But a man who betrays once will betray again. Anticipating the next betrayal, Emperor Ming in 238 ordered his key minister Sima Yi to lead a force of tens of thousands in a military invasion of Liaodong. The Gongsun clan was destroyed. Liaodong and the northern Korean Peninsula became territories under Wei's direct administration. At this point Wei formally reorganized the Liu Xia and Daifang commanderies on the Korean Peninsula, which had been partly controlled by the Gongsun, as direct Wei territories. The shockwaves of this upheaval, reaching as far as the Korean Peninsula, reverberated across the sea and sent tremors through the Japanese side.

What is fascinating is that word of this upheaval in Liaodong and the northern Korean Peninsula reached Queen Himiko of Yamato almost immediately, and envoys were dispatched from Himiko's side to Wei. The timeline runs as follows. Under Emperor Ming's orders, Sima Yi departed the Wei capital of Luoyang around January or February and commenced combat operations in Liaodong around June. Sima Yi's campaign was fought overland, but simultaneously a Wei official named Liu Xia moved by sea to seize the Daifang and Lelang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula, which had been under Gongsun control. Sima Yi ultimately captured the Gongsun stronghold of Xianping and executed Gongsun Yuan in August. That Himiko petitioned Wei for the right to present tribute around June, in concert with these developments, must not be overlooked.

＊An alternative theory holds that Himiko dispatched her envoys in 239 rather than 238, which would mean that the tribute was offered not to Emperor Ming, who had died in February of 239, but to his successor Cao Fang (r. 239–254). In either case, what is clear is that the Yamato powers learned of the upheaval across the sea at a remarkably early stage and acted swiftly on the judgment that submission to Wei, rather than to Wu or Shu, was advantageous.

With the destruction of the Gongsun clan and Wei's effective control now extending to the northern Korean Peninsula, Wu's plan collapsed entirely. Wei furthermore decided to confer upon Himiko, the queen of the Wa kingdom who had presented tribute the moment she grasped the situation, the title of [親魏倭王] (Friend of Wei, Queen of the Wa) along with a gold seal with purple ribbon and other gifts. Whether this conferral was made by Emperor Ming or by Cao Fang is uncertain, but at a minimum Wei had succeeded in bringing the Wa kingdom into submission following the Lelang and Daifang commanderies. As I have noted in this section, however, the Wa kingdom does not mean present-day Japan. It was a limited sphere. It was in this context that Ti Jun was dispatched as an envoy to the Wa kingdom.

The question then becomes what advantage Wei stood to gain from cultivating a deep relationship with the distant Wa kingdom. The succinct answer is that it served to deliver the final blow to Wu, which had been driven into a weakened position after Gongsun Yuan's betrayal. But the dynamics at work here are tangled in a labyrinthine complexity of historical circumstances and are not easily decoded.

The reason is that these maneuvers contained something beyond mere political strategy. They contained the worldview of Wei itself. In fact, Wei did not conceive of the Wa kingdom's location as an archipelago at the far eastern end of the sea. Where then did Wei believe the Wa kingdom was? The answer is to the south.

This Chinese perception of south rather than east could have been a critical problem for Wei. If the Wa kingdom was understood to lie to the south, it meant that from Wei's perspective the Wa kingdom existed in the seas to the south of Wu. Even if the intention was not quite the same as Wu's plan to encircle Wei through an alliance with the Gongsun, Wei deepened its relationship with the Wa kingdom, which it believed to be in close proximity to Wu, in order to eliminate the possibility that Wu might ally with the Wa side.

But as we know today, Japan does not lie to the south of China. If that is the case, who constructed this worldview in the first place? That is what I will explore next.