共同幻想 10：魏の使者が見た倭Communal Illusion 10: Japan as Seen by the Envoys of Wei

Ti Jun, the Wei envoy who landed in northern Kyushu in 240, and Zhang Zheng, who stayed in Yamato for several years beginning around 247. The oldest records of the Japanese side dating to the 240s are the observations of these two men, transmitted through the Wei military's effective control of the Daifang Commandery on the northern Korean Peninsula to the Chinese imperial court.

What can be determined at this point is only that the Wei envoys set foot in the specific regional confederation they had long called the Wa kingdom (倭国) and met the people they called the Wa (倭人). But the Wa kingdom does not mean present-day Japan, and the Wa people do not mean present-day Japanese. An uncanny fusion of illusions was taking place in mid-third-century Japan, and as this series has shown, that fusion was perfectly synchronized with the movements of the Three Kingdoms period on the Chinese side.

In the history of the hegemonic struggle among the three kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu, the Gongsun clan had risen to power on the Liaodong Peninsula by threading the gaps between them. They eventually came to control parts of the Lelang and Daifang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula and expanded their influence. The rise of the Gongsun on the Liaodong Peninsula was welcome news for Wu, which needed at all costs to advance into North China to contain Wei. Wu promptly dispatched envoys to demand that the Gongsun pledge submission to the Wu emperor. But for the Gongsun, diplomacy with the great power of Wei next door was a far more pressing concern than a distant state with no shared interests. The Gongsun executed the Wu envoys and presented their remains to Wei.

This act of discourtesy and betrayal toward Wu's diplomatic overture sent immediate shockwaves from the ancient Korean Peninsula all the way to the ancient Japanese archipelago. We underestimate the historical awareness of the ancients out of our own selfish arrogance, but this region of East Asia has been connected since antiquity. The notion that each area developed its history in isolation is an impossibility.

The Gongsun's recklessness transformed the geopolitical situation in ancient China. In 233 the Wu emperor Sun Quan had dispatched a massive fleet carrying 10,000 soldiers and a fortune in treasure to Liaodong, offering the Gongsun patriarch Gongsun Yuan the title of King of Yan and seeking to conclude a formal military alliance. For Wei, whose operations had been based primarily in North China, this was a geopolitical crisis. Until that point Wei had only needed to watch Wu to the south in the Yangtze region and Shu to the west in the Sichuan Basin. Wei controlled the northern half of the Yellow River basin including the Central Plains, the historical heartland of Chinese civilization, and held a relatively advantageous position for monitoring both Wu and Shu. But Wu's scheme to ally with the Gongsun behind Wei's back meant that Wei would be surrounded on virtually all sides. If a military alliance among Wu, Shu, and the Gongsun were concluded, it would be the end.

In this precarious situation, Wei was saved by the betrayal of Gongsun Yuan himself. But it was now forced to make a major shift in its strategy for unifying China.

First, on the iron principle that a man who betrays once will betray again, the Wei emperor Ming immediately appointed Gongsun Yuan as Grand General and extracted a pledge of loyalty to the Wei throne. For Gongsun Yuan a direct war with Wei was not realistic, so he allowed himself to be co-opted. But simultaneously in 238 Wei ordered its key minister Sima Yi to lead a force of tens of thousands in a military invasion of Gongsun territory. Combat began in Liaodong around June of 238. The Daifang and Lelang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula were swiftly seized. By August Gongsun Yuan had been executed.

Word of this upheaval across the sea in 238 reached Queen Himiko of Yamato almost immediately. Whether the political decision that followed was the product of deliberation among the multiple male kings of the various tribes who held real power within Yamato, or the result of a divine oracle delivered through Himiko's trance, is uncertain. My own reading, based on the character of Yamato in this era, is that it was the queen's oracle. What matters is that when the Yamato side detected the upheaval in the Three Kingdoms, what took place was not an immediate political strategy meeting to determine the future. It was a ritual in which the question was put to the gods.

When the oracle delivered its result and Himiko, as the consensus of Yamato, resolved to pledge submission to the Wei emperor, it can be said that Japanese history was set in motion in a certain sense. The queen of Yamato was discarding the possibility of submitting to the emperors of Wu or Shu and publicly declaring a position of vassalage to Wei. Realistically, submission to Shu, far removed from Yamato, was difficult to conceive. But Wu was in close proximity to the southern part of the Japanese archipelago and had maintained intense contact since the Jomon period as a deeply connected region. In the midst of all this, the gods determined that the next hegemon of China would be Wei. Receiving this divine will, Himiko immediately decided to dispatch envoys to the Wei emperor.

With the conferral of the title "Queen of Wa, Friend of Wei" (親魏倭王) by Emperor Ming, Himiko officially entered a status resembling that of a tributary state within the Wei sphere. Wei then dispatched envoys from the Daifang Commandery on the Korean Peninsula to investigate the realities of this Wa kingdom it knew little about. This is better understood as a strategic survey to determine whether the Wa kingdom might become the next Gongsun. The Gishi Wajinden is rich in what we would today call ethnographic content, but it must be grasped as one component of an intelligence operation aimed at winning the Three Kingdoms struggle.

Here a powerful question surfaces. Why did Wei need to establish an alliance with a Wa kingdom so far away?

Even considering the dynamics of the Three Kingdoms, the Gongsun's movements were confined to Liaodong and the northern Korean Peninsula, so it was natural for them to be a concern. But the Wa kingdom lay further south beyond the Korean Peninsula and across the sea. What possible political advantage could a relationship with such a country have offered the Wei emperor? This point is critical.

One possibility I entertain is that the question of where the Wa kingdom was located had been understood since at least the Han dynasty, before the Three Kingdoms period began. For Wei, based primarily in North China, the geographic location of the Wa kingdom was a matter of concern. Depending on where the Wa kingdom actually was, it might need to be brought under effective control. And in fact, Wei thought in precisely these terms. The Wa kingdom's existence was not an immediate threat to Wei, but in an era where anything could happen, as the Gongsun affair had shown, a single miscalculation could become the decisive blow that brought down Wei's hegemony. It must not be forgotten that in China at this time there were strategists of extraordinary skill, versed not only in Confucianism but in the arts of political and military calculation. They waited with patience for an opening in the enemy's defenses.

For example, though he had already died by the time this upheaval engulfed all of East Asia, the influence of Zhuge Liang (181–234), the brilliant strategist of Shu, lived on in his successors. I have loved the Romance of the Three Kingdoms since childhood and have read it many times. Even in the popular understanding, the impression remains that Liu Bei (161–223), the founding emperor of Shu, was depicted as a man of outstanding Confucian character. The true nature of Wei, which tends to be cast as the villain, is far from certain. But from the perspective of Wei's rulers, an adversary like Shu was extremely troublesome. In practice, however, the state that posed the real problem for Wei was Wu, which shared a continental border.

There is one thing we must be careful about here. We must not look at present-day East Asia through a map like Google Maps and assume that is how it was.

Below is an old map.

For those of us accustomed to the precision of modern world maps, this probably looks incomprehensible. It was created in 1402 during the Joseon dynasty and is known as the oldest surviving world map. Its full title is the Honil Gangni Yeokdae Gukdo Jido (混一疆理歴代国都之図), commonly abbreviated as the Gangnido (疆理図).

The map is currently held by Ryukoku University in Kyoto. An inscription at the bottom records its provenance, which has been largely identified. According to this inscription the map originates from two maps brought back to Joseon in 1399 by Kim Sahyeong, a bureaucrat dispatched to the Ming dynasty as a Korean envoy. These were the Shengjiao Guangbei Tu (声教広被図) by Li Zemin and the Hunyi Jiangli Tu (混一疆理図) by the Buddhist monk Qingjun. The two maps were combined and supplemented with depictions of Korea and Japan. What is fascinating is the world depicted in this map. It stretches from Africa, Europe, and the Middle East in the west to China, Korea, and Japan in the east, from Russia and the Mongolian Plateau in the north to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the south. The base maps are believed to have been produced in the Chinese territories under Mongol rule during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Mongol Empire stretched from the Korean Peninsula to Burma and Thailand, and to have circulated among the general population.

What I want the reader to focus on is the strange elongated archipelago running north to south in the lower left of the map. That is the Japanese archipelago. What is remarkable is that while the shape of the archipelago itself is surprisingly accurate by modern standards, it has been rotated ninety degrees. And what must not be missed is that on this map, seen from the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, the northern end of the Japanese archipelago is Kyushu. The Japanese archipelago is understood as a country stretching from north to south with Kyushu at its northern tip, rotated ninety degrees. This preserves the memory that for people traveling from the continent through the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago since ancient times, the point of entry on the Japanese side was northern Kyushu. For those living across the sea, the gateway to the Wa kingdom was northern Kyushu, and from there the country was understood to extend southward.

What matters is that this perception was still being transmitted in the early fifteenth century. To push the point further, what we must grasp here is not a modern judgment about the accuracy of the map. It is that a perspective on the Japanese archipelago formed over more than a thousand years is brilliantly reflected in it. The reason I place such importance on this point is that the fact that Wei conferred upon the Wa kingdom the official royal title of "Queen of Wa, Friend of Wei" as a matter of political strategy suggests that the politicians and bureaucrats on the Chinese side, not only in Wei but more broadly, may already have held this perception of the Wa kingdom's geography.

What image of ancient East Asia begins to come into focus for the reader?

What I want you to consider as we move to the next piece is this. The reason Wei in the Three Kingdoms period judged it important to bring the distant Wa kingdom into a relationship of submission through alliance as it pursued the unification of China is brilliantly expressed in this map.

I will explore this further next time.