共同幻想 11：歴史という問題Communal Illusion 11: The Problem with History

Through years of fieldwork I have come to feel in my body that "history" carries many problems. For me, fieldwork in Japan is directly connected to the nullification of modernity and serves as a powerful resource for thinking about the era to come. To begin with, the establishment of a modern nation-state required the creation of a national populace. Peoples who shared no historical context had to be forcibly unified. The method adopted by every country that achieved modernization was the unification of language. The West and Japan alike formed the foundations of modernization through this identical method, and China is currently employing it in pursuit of its own unification.

The common language prescribed by the center is then disseminated to children through a national education system and schools across the country. Simultaneously with the creation of a populace comes the creation of a state. Because the state must present an easily comprehensible narrative to an undifferentiated mass, indigenous character is inevitably discarded. If the indigenous histories, cultures, and spiritual traditions of each place were individually incorporated, a unified modern state could never be established. In the process of modernization, the context of place is ruthlessly destroyed. Place after place is discarded and a fabricated space controlled by the center is erected in its stead. This is the typical method of modern state creation. What is invariably born in this process is what I call "hollow history." By hollow history I mean a formation in which only the outer membrane of the thing called history has been shaped by the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars positioned at the center of the modern state, while the interior remains empty. In a sense, modernity can sustain itself only by fabricating a history without content and disseminating it relentlessly. This proved remarkably effective.

Behind the emergence of this structure lies the form of intellectual authority that was rapidly established after the Meiji period. Japan's modernization, or Westernization, began in the Meiji era from 1868 onward. The core actors who erected the outer membrane of the entity called "Japan" were graduates of the Imperial University, the present-day University of Tokyo. At the time, attending university was itself a rarity, and Imperial University professors held an authority virtually equivalent to divinity. In the preceding Edo period, education was delivered through Confucian study. No national school system existed. Across the country, countless private academies called shijuku operated as places where individual teachers taught the people of their village. This was not education in the modern sense. It was learning between human beings, master and disciple facing each other directly. In the Japanese Confucianism of the Edo period, outstanding teachers who gave each person the opportunity to think existed in great numbers in every region. The university system introduced after Meiji concentrated authority in specific professors. Because it was grounded in elitism and was not open to everyone, it inevitably reinforced hierarchies of authority. In other words, Japan possessed a tradition of excellent education, but the Meiji government forcibly abolished it. The purpose of that abolition was the creation of new authority by the new rulers.

In this process the "Japan" they narrated as hollow history was promoted primarily by Imperial University graduates and professors. It shaped the national image that would lead to the Second World War and eventually became fixed as the common understanding of the populace. The greatest problem of modern scholarship comes down to the blind conviction that its authorities adopted on their own, the belief that there must be nothing they do not know. The results produced by this meaningless delusion were devastating. It became the wellspring from which the rich cultural spirit of Japan was systematically extinguished.

From this point onward, discourse that spoke of "what is not Japan as Japan" was installed at the center of history without question, underwritten by institutional authority. This is a structural problem of academia, but the violence born in early modernity did not exist in the Edo period. Personally, I have always trusted what I feel on the ground when I move on my own feet and arrive at a site, more than any theory advanced by some authority somewhere. I am certain that nothing is more trustworthy. Anyone who goes to the actual site can easily see how far off the mark history in its conventional sense has landed. From this vantage point, Japan is not a place that can be told through a single origin, and it is not a unified state. The essence of what Japan is cannot be disposed of with the word "diversity." It must be called a "pluralistic world." To read the richness of Japan as a pluralistic world requires looking at it sincerely from an angle that is not the existing framework of "Japan." In a sense, this is the negation of the historical image constructed by modern Japan.

Within this problem-consciousness there is one theme I want to address in this article. It concerns the conventional wisdom surrounding the routes by which people crossed the sea to reach the Japanese archipelago. In standard Japanese history, the movement of immigrants across the sea is stated to have departed from the southern Korean Peninsula, passed through Tsushima and Iki Island, and arrived in northern Kyushu. Northern Kyushu was certainly a strategic coastal zone from ancient times, and the area was dotted with multiple powerful clans. Representative among them were the Munakata clan based in Munakata City in Fukuoka Prefecture and the Azumi clan based on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka. They were descendants of early powers that had mastered the sea, leveraging their geographic advantage to seize trade interests with China and Korea and rise to prominence. Before the prototype of a unified state emerged in the southern part of the Nara Basin in a later era, there was an age dominated by clans who controlled the seas of northern Kyushu. This has been forgotten by history. Most people underestimate the importance of understanding sea routes, but given that Japan is surrounded by sea on all sides, the impossibility of understanding Japan without this perspective is self-evident. This is not limited to ancient history. It is a major theme running through the entirety of Japanese history to the present, and without firmly holding this perspective, the cultural transmissions of every era cannot be decoded.

Since the traces of seafaring peoples vanish beneath the waves, they are difficult to detect through the terrestrial evidence of archaeology and similar fields. Put differently, virtually everything narrated as Japanese history is history seen from the perspective of the land. It harbors the enormous problem of lacking the perspective of the sea, which is an even more critical factor. To touch that world, let us begin with these two clans. The key to understanding the Munakata lies in their enshrined deities. The key to the Azumi lies in the distribution of their name and the form of their worship. And an intriguing tendency shared by ancient sea-related clans must not be overlooked. The pattern of venerating trinities of deities appears repeatedly. To regard this as mere religious ornamentation is a mistake. From the number three, the memory of the very act of crossing the sea can be read.

At Munakata Taisha, the home shrine of the Munakata clan, a goddess is enshrined on each of three islands within the sacred domain. Tagorihime at Okitsu-miya on Okinoshima, Tagitsuhime at Nakatsu-miya on Oshima, and Ichikishimahime at Hetsu-miya on the mainland side. Okinoshima lies 50 kilometers offshore from the Kyushu mainland, Oshima 11 kilometers, and Hetsu-miya was once a separate island but is now connected to the mainland. I believe this arrangement of three shrines is not simply a matter of religious sanctuaries. It transmits in stages the memory of the sea route taken when crossing from the Korean Peninsula to the Munakata side. Arrivals would call at each island in sequence, performing purification rituals at each stage. Only after completing the final purification could they land at the Munakata headquarters. A protocol of "three purifications" existed along the ancient sea route. Only those who had fully purged the defilement of a foreign land could merge with the local deity and be recognized as kin. It goes without saying that the peculiar modern concept of "race" did not exist at the time. A person who had crossed the sea became one with the deity of the land at the moment the purification was complete. The remnant of this concept of spiritual kinship survives today as the three-shrine system of Munakata Taisha. Okinoshima, the site of the first purification, remains a sacred domain where entry is still forbidden.

The Munakata faith is called the faith of the three goddesses, Tagorihime, Tagitsuhime, and Ichikishimahime. The worship of these goddesses extends across the entire country. Famous examples include Itsukushima Shrine on Itsukushima in Hiroshima Prefecture and Enoshima Shrine on Enoshima in Kanagawa Prefecture. These transmit the traces of the Munakata clan's movements. The fact that the three Munakata goddesses are enshrined in locations throughout Japan reveals that the clan were not merely gatekeepers of the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu. They were a people who expanded over a wide area through the sea routes.

At Shikanoumi Shrine, the home shrine of the Azumi clan, the approach differs from the Munakata. Rather than enshrining three deities on three islands, they divide the sea itself into three layers, Soko, Naka, and Uha (bottom, middle, and surface), and enshrine a deity at each. The deified forms are Sokotsuwatatsumi, Nakatsuwatatsumi, and Uhatsuwatatsumi. These three are explicitly identified in mythology as the ancestral deities of the Azumi. "Watatsumi" is their ancestral deity, broadly meaning the god of the sea, and appears in mythology. The name "Azumi" itself is thought to be an abbreviation of the old word "Amatsumi" (sea-spirit), meaning the clan name and the enshrined deity are one. In the modern sensibility, Soko, Naka, and Uha tend to be understood as a vertical top-to-bottom axis. But that is a modern misreading. As with the Munakata, this should be seen as transmitting in three stages the memory of the sea route from the Korean Peninsula to Shikanoshima.

The traces of the Azumi clan's movements extend even more broadly than the Munakata's. A distribution of place names stretching from northern Kyushu through the Seto Inland Sea, Kinki, Tokai, Shinano, Kanto, and Hokuriku still transmits their trajectory. Their reach into Nagano, deep in the mountainous interior, is particularly symbolic. As if to convey this ancient trace, Hotaka Shrine, which enshrines a god of the sea, stands in Azumino in Nagano Prefecture, a mountain basin at 500 to 800 meters elevation. The very place name Azumino is a remnant of the Azumi clan. The enshrined deities are Hotakami, the ancestral deity of the Azumi, and his father Watatsumi. At the annual autumn festival in September, despite the shrine's location deep in the mountains far from any coast, a ship-shaped float six meters tall makes its appearance. From the perspective of food culture as well, the people of Azumino still eat a seaweed called egokusa. This food culture uses the same ingredient as a regional dish of Fukuoka Prefecture where the Azumi's home base is located, making it proof that the food memory carried by a seafaring people into the heart of the mountains has survived for more than a thousand years. At Hotaka Shrine a rebuilding ceremony is conducted once every twenty years. Tradition holds that sand from Shikanoshima was used in the foundation during these ceremonies. An invisible thread connecting Shikanoshima and Azumino, sea and mountain, remains unbroken to this day.

At first glance one might wonder how such a large-scale migration was accomplished, but the route of the Azumi's advance into Shinano is clear. From their base on Shikanoshima, through northern Kyushu, along the Sea of Japan to the area around Itoigawa City in Niigata Prefecture, and then up the Hime River, which flows from Itoigawa directly into Azumino. Itoigawa is a quiet place today, but during one period of the Jomon era it was a kingdom that held hegemonic power, having achieved great prosperity through Japan's sole jade trade route. While Yamato had a queen named Himiko, this land had a goddess named Nunakawahime who united the local tribes. The jade trade network they established extended, remarkably, as far north as Hokkaido and as far south as Tanegashima off the coast of southern Kyushu, even during the Jomon period. This demonstrates that maritime trade was highly active from the Jomon onward. When we consider that the Azumi moved along this maritime trade network, it becomes clear that they were not simply seafaring fishermen. They were the agents of an ancient wide-area network that controlled logistics and information.

Nor did the sea clans operate exclusively on the sea. Wielding navigational skills beyond our imagination, they expanded into the interior along seas and rivers. At the same time, though rarely noted, the Jomon people themselves crossed the ocean and traveled to Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Valuable prewar ethnographic surveys record that fishermen in Wakayama had a custom of seasonal migration to Australia in search of fishing grounds, and that fishermen from the northern tip of the Noto Peninsula in Hokuriku made seasonal migrations to the Izu Islands off the Kanto coast. These were memories of ocean currents, tides, and seasonal winds passed down through the generations from the Jomon period. Tragically, they were rapidly lost after the modern era. Apart from records collected by folklorists from the prewar period through the early postwar years, they have been completely lost.

Considered against this history, it becomes clear that the people who substantively drove and shaped Japanese history were the sea clans. When Japanese history is viewed from this perspective the "view from the sea" takes priority, and the monolithic thinking characteristic of conventional history is inevitably discarded. It is true that the Genkai Sea zone of northern Kyushu served as an information and trade network. But that is only one facet of the reality. To deepen this understanding, let us turn first to the Gishi Wajinden.

The Gishi Wajinden, a partial record of early third-century Japan compiled on the Chinese side, names thirty polities on the Japanese side. But although thirty polities are listed, the locations of most are unfortunately unknown. This is connected to the fact that in the later era when Yamato-side powers grew dominant and the court was being formed, the other regional powers weakened and were eventually forgotten. My view is that the names of polities that submitted to the Yamato court were successively replaced, their old indigenous words overwritten by the language of the Yamato court.

It is possible to provisionally identify the locations of some former polities. For example, the kingdom that the Chinese during the Han dynasty recognized as the paramount power on the Japanese side was the polity of Ito, located in the coastal area around present-day Itoshima City in Fukuoka Prefecture. It was a strategic hub for international trade. Looking east from Itoshima one finds the Azumi's Shikanoshima, and beyond that the Munakata base. It is easy to infer that the king of Ito rose to power by employing the sea clans. To the west along the coast lay the powerful polity of Matsuro, identified with the Matsuura region around present-day Karatsu City in Nagasaki Prefecture. In the area identified as Matsuro around present-day Karatsu, remains of wet-rice agriculture dating to approximately 900 BCE have been discovered. This indicates that long before the Gishi Wajinden's account, this land was already serving as a receptacle for cultural influx via the sea. It was also the main theater of combat during the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Japan.

Northern Kyushu has been a place of intense international exchange since antiquity. Even today, traveling through the region one can feel through the place names, the faces of the people, and their temperament that an extraordinarily complex intermixing took place. But here we must pause. The Gishi Wajinden is a record of relative positions from the starting point of the Daifang Commandery on the Korean Peninsula, which was under Wei's control. It is not a comprehensive account of the entire Japanese archipelago. This perspective is almost entirely absent from Japanese history, which treats the text as if it were the oldest historical record of all of Japan. But that is absolutely impossible.

As a basic premise, China during the Three Kingdoms period was divided into Wei, Wu, and Shu. Wei controlled the northern half of the Yellow River basin including the Central Plains, the historical heartland of Chinese civilization. Shu was based in the Sichuan Basin in the southwest. Wu controlled the region from the middle to the lower reaches of the Yangtze in South China. Because these three states operated from entirely different spheres of influence, the "Japan" seen from Wei and the "Japan" seen from Wu may well have referred to entirely different regions. Wei in particular observed the Japanese powers from the Daifang Commandery on the Korean Peninsula after seizing control of it. It is natural that polities in northern Kyushu would be densely recorded. Wu, on the other hand, controlled the areas corresponding to southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong provinces. Its capital was present-day Nanjing. Suzhou was called "Wu Commandery" at the time and was the heartland of Wu, the historical homeland from which the kingdom took its name going back to the Spring and Autumn period.

In fact, the customs of the Wa people described in the Gishi Wajinden contain unmistakably southern elements. Tattooing, the application of vermilion to the body, the wearing of poncho-like garments, and descriptions of skill in underwater fishing are all cultural characteristics of regions with long-standing ties to Wu, specifically southern Kyushu, Amami, and the Ryukyus. They have nothing to do with northern Kyushu. The people of these regions spoke of themselves as having Wu origins well into later centuries, and I believe they were at one time part of the same cultural sphere as Wu. In other words, the Gishi Wajinden was not compiled exclusively from the perspective of Wei. Records from the regions with long-standing ties to Wu, including southern Kyushu, Amami, and the Ryukyus, have clearly been mixed in. The Gishi Wajinden is a record of "a part of Japan as seen from Wei's perspective." It is not a picture of the entire Japanese archipelago of that time. Yet Japanese history holds no such perspective and proceeds as though all of China saw all of Japan from a single vantage point. Given the differences between the spheres of Wei and Wu, the Japan visible to each must have been different.

To make this understanding more concrete, let us move forward slightly in time and look at a case whose historical reliability is higher.

When considering this history, the case I focus on most closely is the route taken by the Tang monk Jianzhen (688–763), who on his sixth attempt finally succeeded in crossing to Japan in the mid-eighth century to transmit the Ritsu school of Buddhism. Jianzhen's sixth voyage departed from Suzhou in Jiangnan China, crossed the East China Sea directly, and arrived at Akime in present-day Bonotsu-cho, Kagoshima Prefecture. This was not the northern Kyushu route via the southern Korean Peninsula. Bonotsu was once counted among Japan's three great ports and functioned as a strategic hub for East China Sea trade from ancient times. After arriving, Jianzhen traveled north by land and sea to Dazaifu in northern Kyushu, stayed for a time, and then proceeded to Nara. Dazaifu had long served as a formal immigration checkpoint, and it was customary for arrivals to pass through it. But the "landing point" prior to Dazaifu was not the Genkai Sea of northern Kyushu. It was the southwestern coast of Kyushu. This is a fact of great importance. Today its significance is entirely ignored.

Even more important is the fact that the Japanese envoys to Tang China, who became active in this period, fundamentally used the East China Sea crossing route. The route of the envoys to Tang underwent major changes over time. In the early period from 630 to around 665, the northern route hugging the Korean Peninsula coast was used. This is the conventional sea route from the southern Korean Peninsula to northern Kyushu. But at a certain point this route was closed. The cause was the upheaval that struck the Korean Peninsula in the seventh century.

In the process of the Tang-Silla alliance's drive to unify the Korean Peninsula, Baekje, the kingdom on the southern peninsula that had maintained close ties with Japan since ancient times, was destroyed in 660. The royal house and loyalists of Baekje appealed to Japan for aid. The Japanese side dispatched a military force of tens of thousands to the peninsula under the banner of restoring Baekje. But in 663, when a naval battle erupted at Hakusonko (the Baekgang) in present-day Chungcheong Province in South Korea, the Japanese-Baekje restoration army suffered a devastating defeat from which it never recovered. In the upheaval surrounding this defeat, massive numbers of Baekje refugees fled to Japan. Their primary arrival route was naturally through northern Kyushu. This major event accelerated the movement on the Japanese side toward constructing a ritsuryo state modeled on the civilized Tang. What matters for this article is that the sea route via Silla, which had expanded its power across the Korean Peninsula, became officially difficult to use.

With Silla's ascendancy over the peninsula, the Korean Peninsula route became effectively unusable. From 702 onward the court primarily used a route from the southern tip of Kyushu via Tanegashima, Yakushima, and Amami. From the latter half of the Nara period onward, the route shifted to a direct East China Sea crossing launched from the Goto Islands off western Kyushu. The great event of the Hakusonko defeat in the seventh century thus transformed the transit route from a Korean Peninsula passage to a direct East China Sea crossing. What deserves attention is that the departure point for this alternative route was the area around Bonotsu, the very place where Jianzhen had landed. This was not a route hastily developed in response to seventh-century political circumstances. It should be understood as the reactivation of a sea route that had already existed.

The most critical point in this context is that the Suzhou area from which Jianzhen departed was the heartland of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period (222–280). That the hub from which eighth-century envoys traveled and Jianzhen crossed the sea overlapped with the ancient sphere of Wu cannot be coincidental. It is entirely natural to assume that direct trans-East China Sea traffic between China and Japan had already existed since at least the Han dynasty, before the Three Kingdoms. Returning to the question of arrival routes, the route from the southern Korean Peninsula via Tsushima and Iki to northern Kyushu was not the only ancient sea route. It was a main route specific to the sphere that maintained relations with Wei. Separate powers under Wu's influence very likely crossed the East China Sea directly. In that case the arrival points would have been quite different, and the history of immigrant intermixing, which has been concentrated on northern Kyushu in conventional thinking, demands fundamental reassessment.

In fact, transmission legends of foreign arrivals survive in many locations along the Sea of Japan coast, testifying to the pluralistic nature of ancient maritime traffic. When the Japanese archipelago is viewed from the perspective of the sea clans, this plurality becomes even more vivid. Just as the Azumi, based on Shikanoshima in northern Kyushu, settled deep in the Shinano interior via the Itoigawa route, ancient movement wove through sea and river and mountain. Just as the Munakata constructed a ritual network linking the three islands of the Genkai Sea, they were not merely transporting goods. They were creating religious space itself along the sea routes.

The conventional wisdom of Japanese history that the Genkai Sea of northern Kyushu was "the sole gateway to East Asia since the remotest antiquity" is nothing more than a shoddy historical view that took the framework of history constructed from Wei's perspective and homogenized it in the modern era. It is a groundless account assembled at desks in Tokyo universities, without fieldwork and without a feel for the land. I do not trust the words of anyone who has never felt the wind of a place or set foot on its soil, because I am certain that bodily experience is the most powerful source for reading history. But this distortion has spread in every direction across modern Japan. The Japan formed through this all-encompassing error is not Japan. This is not limited to Japan. But whenever anyone speaks of "Japan," I feel there is a need to reflect on whether what they are actually describing truly captures the essence.

The Genkai Sea was certainly one of the main routes. But simultaneously there existed a route crossing the East China Sea directly, a route running along the Sea of Japan coast, and a route from southern Kyushu via the southern islands. The ancient Japanese archipelago was a mosaic-like pluralistic world composed of layers of peoples who had arrived by different routes. And the Kuroshio Current, born in the waters east of Luzon Island in the Philippines where the North Equatorial Current turns northward, was one of the oldest sea routes, connected since the Jomon period.

What rendered this pluralistic world invisible was the demand of modernity for the narrative of "a single Japan." Now that grand narratives have lost their power to hold on a global scale, what we truly must do is not exaggerate the old narrative and keep it alive as a zombie. Nor is it to destroy it with an alternative narrative. What we must do is move our feet, feel the wind, and from that direct encounter open the essence of the pluralistic world, thereby buffering the grand narrative.