火のないところに煙は立たぬWhere There Is No Fire, There Is No Smoke
This is a proverb that has been used in Japan since ancient times. It means that a rumor does not spread without cause. If a rumor arises, there must be some factual basis behind it. The proverb applies not only to rumors but equally to legends that have been transmitted in various parts of the world.
Even now, believing in such things is considered foolish or irrational. But that is because people place excessive blind faith in science. Science at best arrives considerably late to confirm as fact the location of a fire that was already burning. Science is not absolute truth. It is merely a supplement to what has already been told. But it is precisely in this role as supplement that the true purpose and power of science resides. When we stop treating science as the protagonist, the reality in what has been dismissed as unscientific, whether rumor or legend, becomes something anyone can feel.
I have been independently surveying the pluralistic world of Japan through fieldwork across the country. In the course of this work I have repeatedly encountered a legend that spans multiple regions. It is the legend of Xu Fu (徐福), known in Japan as Jofuku. The origin of the Xu Fu legend lies in a record found in the Shiji, the most important historical document in Chinese history, compiled by Sima Qian. The Shiji is thought to have been completed around 91 BCE during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Former Han dynasty. The Xu Fu legend, however, reaches back to the preceding Qin dynasty.
The Xu Fu legend is deeply connected to Qin Shi Huang (r. 221–210 BCE), the first emperor to unify China. More than a century separates the events from the compilation of the Shiji, and the upheaval of the transition from Qin to Han intervened. It is reasonable to assume that by Sima Qian's time these events had already taken on the character of legend.
The Xu Fu legend holds that Xu Fu, seeking the elixir of immortality to present to Qin Shi Huang, set out for a land across the eastern sea, leading as many as 3,000 people to the Japanese archipelago, where some of them settled. The exact number varies by version but the common understanding is that several thousand people crossed. The land across the eastern sea is the ancient Japanese archipelago.
On the Japanese side, the story begins with the aristocratic and monastic elite of the Heian period, who had access to Chinese texts and knew of Xu Fu as a matter of book learning. Of particular note is a record preserved on the Chinese side stating that Kanpo (寛輔), a monk of roughly the tenth century, told a Chinese monk that Japan possessed Mount Horai, the mountain Xu Fu had been seeking, and that it was Mount Fuji. Kanpo is almost unknown in Japan, but his account appears in the Yichu Liutie (義楚六帖), compiled in 954 by Yichu during the Later Zhou (951–960) of the Five Dynasties period. According to the text, Yichu heard the story directly from Kanpo in 958. The apparent discrepancy in dates is explained by the fact that the work was not actually published until around 973 during the Song dynasty, and the account was added during the intervening period.
Mount Horai is the mountain of immortality in the Chinese tradition. What matters here is that Kanpo equated Mount Horai with Mount Fuji. Among a segment of the Heian-kyo elite, the understanding that Xu Fu's destination was Mount Fuji had begun to circulate. This can be regarded as the starting point of the Xu Fu legend's narrative on the Japanese side. Mount Fuji, however, has no actual connection to Mount Horai. The association was newly created around this period. The reason is relatively clear. In Japanese texts concerning Mount Fuji that predate this tenth-century source, there is not a single passage linking the mountain to either Horai or Xu Fu.
For example, the Fujisan Ki written in his later years by Miyako no Yoshika (834–879), an aristocratic scholar of the early Heian period, depicts Mount Fuji as a divine realm where celestial maidens dance at the summit. But it makes no mention whatsoever of Horai or Xu Fu. The famous Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, whose date of composition is uncertain but is believed to have been completed by the early tenth century at the latest, also portrays Mount Fuji in association with the thought of the immortals, yet says nothing of Horai or Xu Fu.
In other words, Kanpo's anecdote was based on a new current that emerged in the late Heian period and was limited to the Heian-kyo elite. The background to why Mount Fuji began to be deified in this way will be addressed separately. For now the essential point is that this was something intellectuals began discussing on the basis of book knowledge. What truly sustained the Xu Fu legend was the oral tradition actually inherited in local communities. The Xu Fu legend in Japan has two distinct lineages. One is the Xu Fu image developed by the elite, who took knowledge from Chinese texts and connected it to the ideology of the ruling class. The other is the Xu Fu image held by non-elite peoples who transmitted from generation to generation the belief that they were Xu Fu's descendants.
In the Heian period the Xu Fu legend was nothing more than a piece of knowledge. But in the Kamakura period that followed, the legend gained reality. The reason was the emergence of an ideology that would later become the source of Kokugaku, the nativist school of thought with its anti-foreign bent that flourished in the Edo period. The foremost figure behind this ideology was Chikafusa Kitabatake (1293–1354), a court noble and historian. Kitabatake lived during the peculiar Nanbokucho period in which two emperors existed simultaneously, each waging civil war over the claim to legitimacy. The Northern Court and the Southern Court were established as rival imperial lines, and the power struggle among the ruling class played out around each. Chikafusa Kitabatake was a major figure on the Southern Court side and its de facto leader.
In the end it was the Northern Court that is regarded as having prevailed. But it is now widely known that legitimacy actually belonged to the Southern Court. The Northern Court's imperial line and its ruling class usurped the throne from the Southern Court, which held the rightful claim to succession, and then declared themselves legitimate. The proof of imperial legitimacy in Japan's imperial line is a set of treasures inherited since the mythological age known as the Three Sacred Treasures. The Southern Court's line possessed them.
Because the Three Sacred Treasures guaranteed imperial legitimacy, the Northern Court fabricated replicas, and a fierce struggle over legitimacy escalated between the two sides. At this juncture Chikafusa Kitabatake, the effective leader of the Southern Court, wrote a book to argue for the legitimacy of the Southern Court's imperial line. That book was the Jinno Shotoki (神皇正統記), completed in 1339. In the section on the reign of the seventh emperor, Korei, Kitabatake included a passage to the effect that Xu Fu came from Qin and died in Japan.
Emperor Korei is one of the early emperors whose historical existence is doubted, and his dates of reign are unknown. One conventional dating places his reign at 342–215 BCE, but this is based on the modern fabrication that positions the enthronement of the first emperor Jimmu in 660 BCE and cannot be directly trusted. However, it is a fact that some figure corresponding to Emperor Korei was placed in the approximate era of Qin Shi Huang's reign and linked to the Shiji's record that Xu Fu came to Japan. It goes without saying that the Western calendar (Gregorian calendar) was not in use during Kitabatake's lifetime. These dates were determined by scholars from the Meiji period onward and have nothing to do with him.
But this is not mere fantasy. What matters is that through a work written by Chikafusa Kitabatake to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Southern Court, the Xu Fu legend was incorporated into Japan's official historical narrative. From this point forward the legend took root in Japan, meaning it has captivated a segment of the Japanese people for nearly seven hundred years.
As consciousness of the emperor's legitimate lineage intensified among the ruling class during the Nanbokucho period, the legend of Xu Fu dispatched by Qin Shi Huang became linked to Japan's official history. This generated a question driven by curiosity. If Xu Fu died in Japan as Kitabatake claimed, who are his descendants?
It was the Hata clan that came to be legitimized as Xu Fu's descendants in this current. I have touched on the Hata clan in the On Dogen series as well. They were an immigrant clan of continental origin who possessed a range of technologies and expanded into regions across Japan. In Japanese the name is written 秦氏. The 氏 means clan, so the question is the character 秦 (Hata). People of the time associated this clan with the Qin dynasty because the character is the same. More precisely, the Hata were understood as descendants of people from the Qin era. This interpretation is also recorded in a Chinese text as part of the account told by Kanpo. By that point Mount Horai had already been equated with Mount Fuji, so the narrative held that Xu Fu ultimately reached Mount Fuji and that all his descendants were the Hata clan. The fact that traditions concerning the Hata were known among the Heian-kyo elite at least by the late Heian period must not be overlooked. Because as I have discussed in the On Dogen series, the true architect of the relocation of the capital to Heian-kyo was the Hata clan.
There is an enormous amount to discuss regarding the Hata, but for now it is sufficient to hold this understanding as a base. After the Northern Court prevailed in the Nanbokucho period and the Muromachi period began in 1338 with Shogun Takauji Ashikaga establishing the Muromachi shogunate in Kyoto, the theory that the Hata were Xu Fu's descendants gradually gained currency.
It is convoluted, but the Xu Fu dispatched by Qin Shi Huang was incorporated into the historical disputes over the emperor's legitimacy, and the legend entered a turning point at which it began to intersect with history. In the Edo period that followed, the spread of learning produced literate people in communities across the country. The skills of reading and writing, previously limited to a small elite, extended to the non-elite. As a result, the people in local communities who had transmitted through oral tradition the belief that they were Xu Fu's descendants began to receive attention. The foremost among these places is the city of Shingu in the southern part of Wakayama Prefecture. Shingu is a sacred site of the Xu Fu legend. As early as the Edo period the domain lord of Kishu, Yorinobu Tokugawa, erected a tomb for Xu Fu. The domain venerated Xu Fu as an institution.
The traces of this remain today. Shingu is rich in Xu Fu lore. Regrettably, when the Meiji period arrived after the end of the Edo period, oral traditions and legends were dismissed as unscientific and unverifiable. As ethnic nationalist historiography intensified before the Second World War, the fact that people from the Chinese side had joined the making of Japan became intolerable to a fabricated narrative of a single, uniform origin, and such theories were deliberately attacked. But the tradition of being Xu Fu's descendants, transmitted for generations among the villagers of Shingu, survived without interruption to the present day. Even now the people who have lived in Shingu for generations maintain an awareness of themselves as Xu Fu's descendants.
And now the very science that so long dismissed the legend as fantasy has begun to acknowledge that the Xu Fu legend may be historical fact. The catalyst for the scientific verification of Xu Fu's possible existence was the discovery of Xu Fu Village in China in 1982. But the most compelling development is the latest report, presented in February 2026 at the 2025 China Archaeological New Discoveries conference. This report documents the excavation of a massive elevated architectural foundation dating from the Qin through Han periods at Langya Terrace (琅琊台) (the summit of Langya Terrace Mountain in Huangdao District of Qingdao), the very site identified in the Shiji as the legendary place where Xu Fu met Qin Shi Huang, reported that the elixir of immortality could be found on Mount Horai across the sea, and departed with a fleet carrying several thousand people.
This discovery corroborates the possibility that the Shiji's account transmits the historical reality of a state-level project under the direct authority of the Qin emperor, and it brings to light the fact that Langya Terrace was a massive maritime base during the Qin era.
Furthermore, in September 2025 a Qin-era stone inscription more than 2,200 years old was discovered in Maduo County in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province. According to the latest research, the inscription records that an official bearing the Qin-era title of Wudaifu named Yi (翳) led a group of fangshi, practitioners of the ancient Chinese arts of magic and medicine who advocated theories of longevity, on an expedition to collect medicinal herbs at Mount Kunlun in the west, under orders from Qin Shi Huang. Mount Kunlun was the sacred mountain of the west for Qin Shi Huang, because there was no sea to the west of the Chinese continent. In other words, the possibility that Yi was the leader of the survey team dispatched westward and Xu Fu was the leader dispatched eastward in search of the elixir of immortality has already entered the stage of empirical verification within China. Xu Fu is no longer a merely legendary figure.
No definitive evidence of Xu Fu's existence such as a tomb or a signed inscription has yet been found. But now that a massive base has been confirmed at Langya Terrace, the place from which Xu Fu is said to have set sail, and now that it is clear that Qin Shi Huang invested enormous resources there, the tradition of Xu Fu's descendants passed down for generations by the people of Shingu has begun to carry considerable reality. Science has also finally begun to demonstrate "scientifically" that the people who have lived on the Japanese archipelago did not come from a single source. For some this was always obvious without waiting for scientific confirmation. But as genetic research advances rapidly the evidence is moving toward certainty. What deserves the most attention is the juncture between the Yayoi and Kofun periods in ancient Japan. The evidence suggests that massive waves of immigration from the Chinese side poured into the Japanese archipelago during this era.
My view is that within the ancient memory layered into the Japanese archipelago, Xu Fu represented the vanguard of the tide of immigration during the era of Qin Shi Huang, and that over the following centuries a period of mass immigration into the Japanese archipelago ensued. Whether Xu Fu possessed individual historical existence in the sense we now understand requires careful thought. My own view is that Xu Fu was not a single individual. Legends also tend toward embellishment, and how to read this dimension is the key issue.
It must also not be overlooked that in the Xu Fu legend the fleet that crossed to the Japanese archipelago carried several thousand men, women, and children of all ages. If the purpose was to search for the elixir of immortality under Qin Shi Huang's edict, it would have sufficed to dispatch only specialists. The deliberate inclusion of people of all ages aboard the fleet suggests that this may transmit the memory of an emigration from China during the Qin era. In fact, not a single account survives of Xu Fu returning to China after arriving in Japan. It is better to consider the possibility that Xu Fu came to Japan with the intent of naturalizing and that the premise from the very beginning was never to return home.
Who was Xu Fu?
I had long found the traces of the Xu Fu legend I encountered in various regions puzzling. The reason for that strange unease has now become clear through these Chinese findings. It involves the enigmatic question of Xu Fu's real existence, but what has become clear within me is how people traveling from the continent by sea could have reached the remote location of Shingu on the southern coast of the Kii Peninsula.
And by bringing to light the ancient maritime route between China and Japan that vanished beneath the waves, a second secret preserved in the southern Kii Peninsula is disclosed. It involves the history of a distant country whose people, the Dravidians who built the ancient Indus civilization, were driven from their homeland amid great waves of migration. The Dravidians fled southward and some crossed to Sri Lanka. But some moved eastward, passed through the Chinese continent, and reached ancient Japan. The Dravidians who crossed to the Japanese archipelago found in a certain place a landscape that recalled the homeland they had lost, and they began to venerate it as their sacred site.
That place is Kumano Nachi Taisha, one of Japan's most famous scenic destinations after Mount Fuji and Kyoto. It is possible that they crossed aboard the fleet associated with Xu Fu's voyage. And it is conceivable that while traveling with Xu Fu toward what is now Shingu, they saw Nachi Falls and were reminded of their homeland, designating this land as a Dravidian sacred site. At this time they brought with them to Japan the ancient Dravidian wisdom of Ayurveda. When we speak of immigrants in ancient Japan the focus inevitably falls on those who came from the Korean Peninsula and the Chinese continent. But that leads only to a distorted picture of ancient Japan's reality. Maritime immigration and exchange from Southeast Asian countries and from peoples like the Dravidians was extremely active. And the wisdom of the Dravidians was reinterpreted in Japan over time, eventually becoming a wellspring of knowledge that exerted an enormous influence on the early state.
When Xu Fu ceases to be a legend, the picture of ancient East Asia will be transformed. But for science to catch up with the memory carried by East Asia, countless barriers remain to be overcome.