History Is Written by the Center: The Japan Sea Side, the East and the Villages It Never Reached

What passes for Japanese history has largely been recorded as a narrative to justify and fortify the power of the central regime, while outlying regions—save for those in direct vassalage or alliance—have been treated as little more than an afterthought.

Yet when we take such a record as a comprehensive account of the entire archipelago, we end up ignoring the histories of the vast majority of its lands. If we treat what was set down on paper as absolute, the real history of Japan remains invisible.

The problem was made all the more intractable because Japan originally possessed neither a script nor a culture of documentary records.

Looking back, it was along the Sea of Japan, not the Pacific coast as today, that the archipelago first flourished.

Yet any history drawn without a full view of the Sea of Japan fails to convey the reality of ancient Japan itself.

To dismiss the Sea of Japan and interpret ancient Japan through a Pacific-centered lens alone is to profoundly distort reality.

The Sea of Japan, by contrast, had been since antiquity a bustling corridor of exchange with the Asian continent and the Korean Peninsula—a hub of commerce, but also a threshold of geopolitical tension.

From the standpoint of self-preservation, the central regime was never inclined to idealize the Sea of Japan as its political heart. Instead, they found their ideal ground in ancient Yamato: a basin so sheltered that, in an era haunted by the prospect of continental invasion, it was virtually impenetrable.

Although heavily colored by later embellishment, it served as a symbolic tale meant to claim that imperial authority had reached Tohoku since ancient times.

As general, Hirafu commanded 180 warships, advancing northward along the Sea of Japan toward Akita and Tsugaru.

In reality, many Emishi continued to resist and rebel, in a recurring cycle of submission and defiance.

The capitulations depicted in the Nihon Shoki were idealized portraits of fragile truces and alliances, framed from the court’s self-serving vantage point to justify the rulers' authority.

Why did the ancestors of these communities choose to live tucked away in the deepest folds of the mountains, out of sight of the plains below?

Look further back into antiquity, and the vast basin of the Yoshino River, running from the foot of Mount Tsurugi out to the plains, was a crossroads for people who had come across the sea, a zone where groups of extraordinarily diverse origins overlapped. Why some of them climbed into such deep, forbidding mountains remains an open question, yet the descendants of ancient clans indispensable to Japanese history still live here today.

Once close to the Yamato court, those clans lost out in struggles for power and were erased from the official chronicles, leaving behind their own quiet histories in the mountains. History may well be written by the victors, as the saying goes — yet there is a side of ancient Japan that the history written by the victors of Yamato can never explain.

Everyone knows that the young people who leave for the cities are never coming back, and an air of quiet resignation has settled over the mountains.

One man I spoke with today, now nearing ninety, told me with quiet sorrow that an area home to more than 6,500 people in the late 1950s now holds barely 400 — almost all of them old, their children gone to the cities for good, leaving no way to keep the village alive. Given the age of the residents, by the time 2030 arrives, countless villages across Japan will simply cease to be viable.

Yet the day they can no longer fend for themselves and have to move into a nursing home down in the valley, the culture of this mountain will end on the spot.

In fact, before people cut a road here, nature had already formed this route.

This route functioned as the main road for carrying Wakasa fish to Kyoto, an inland city that could not get fresh seafood, and in recent years it has become known as the "Mackerel Road" after Wakasa's famous mackerel. Long before that, the fault itself had formed this road. It lies behind the choice of the Kyoto basin as the capital in 794 as well. A wing of the prosperity that supported Kyoto then lay here, in Wakasa.

In the Heian period it was therefore called a miketsukuni (御食国), a "land of the imperial table," which sent seafood as tribute to the court in Kyoto and supported the "sea" of Kyoto's food supply.

Yet the Jomon of Osumi have scarcely been investigated, and deciphering their world remains an uphill task.

Deprived of the chance to be studied and retold, its culture is already slipping into oblivion. The living memory of the Hayato still breathes quietly beneath daily life in Osumi, yet the public occasions to inherit and voice it have all but disappeared.

It is one of the lasting damages of modern homogenization—a malady that touches not only Osumi, but places like Tohoku as well.