When Miko Ruled: The Yayoi Order Before Male Kings

From my own research I think the concept of hi comes from the Jomon. Himiko, the queen of about the third century who appears in the Records of Wei (the Weizhi), the valuable Chinese source describing the oldest Japan, is also not a queen with the proper name "Himiko." It is hi-miko: a miko (巫女), a shaman, who bears hi. So I think Himiko was succeeded generation after generation, as the emperors were, in a form like succession to the throne.

According to the Nihon Shoki, it was Omononushi who spoke through the mouth of Yamatototohimomosohime, declaring to Sujin that if he desired the pacification of the realm, he must revere and properly worship Omononushi. The crucial point is that this divine decree was mediated through the ecstasy of an ancient female shaman, a miko (巫女). Here the fault line between the shamanic queen-culture of the Yayoi and the patriarchal king-culture of the Kofun period becomes visible. Yamatototohimomosohime stood as a ruler in the mold of a Yayoi tribal queen, while Sujin belonged to the emerging world of Kofun male kingship. The two figures drew upon fundamentally distinct ritual systems and cultural lineages, rooted in entirely separate worlds.

Put simply, it is highly probable that the shaman Yamatototohimomosohime was herself an autonomous queen commanding a specific tribal federation. For generations, scholars in Japan have argued that Yamatototohimomosohime was none other than Himiko, the shaman-queen of Yamatai recorded in the Gishi Wajinden section of China's Records of the Three Kingdoms—a conclusion that my own field research leads me to share. After male warrior-kings established hegemony across Yamato, the ancient shamanic queens of the Yayoi were retroactively absorbed into the patriarchal imperial genealogy. Grasping this structural synthesis is the master key to decoding the mythology of ancient Japan.

My own sense, based on my research so far, is that the mystery peculiar to the fourth century lies in the "interval" in which the ritual character of the third century mutated into the military character of the fifth, and I presume that tribal migrations on a very large scale took place. These great movements were not confined to the Japanese archipelago but included China and the Korean Peninsula as well. Put simply, the fourth century was the turning point at which the real power of the chieftains who led the tribes began to shift from ritual to armed force. What symbolizes this are the giant serpentine sword and the shield-shaped bronze mirror discovered at the Tomio Maruyama Kofun.

In the third century, by contrast, tribal rites led by shamanesses using pure bronze mirrors were conducted mainly in western Japan, and nothing shaped like a shield, nothing suggesting armed force, existed. This suggests that the tribe living in the area of the Tomio Maruyama Kofun near Mount Ikoma lived at the juncture between the Yayoi and Kofun periods. In other words, it points to the possibility that peoples of entirely different origins mingled in this land.

The most solemn rites were conducted on the third floor of the elevated sanctuary. Here, the chief priestess entered a state of sacred trance to divine the will of the gods, accompanied by a musician playing the koto, while a male official—likely her brother—waited at her side to receive and proclaim the divine oracle. Sacred regalia of bronze mirrors, curved jade beads, and swords served as instruments to bridge the mortal and spirit realms, attended by an entourage of junior priestesses. This ritual choreography aligns precisely with the accounts of Himiko’s court, where the queen governed from secluded seclusion while her brother conveyed her pronouncements to the populace. Himiko was thus not merely a political sovereign, but the supreme medium atop a confederation of matriarchal ritual networks, many of whom traced their ancestral origins across the seas to Northeast Asia.

The chief priestess of Yoshinogari resided permanently within the sacred quarter, shielded from the sight of ordinary folk. Her dwelling was an elevated structure whose near-square proportions distinguished it from standard stilted granaries. It stood sealed from the outside world without windows, illuminated even at midday by flickering oil lamps—an austere practice of ritual isolation that resonates with ancient continental and early Japanese traditions of the secluded medium.

Long before the Dragon Palace legend hardened into folklore, it was maritime priestesses like Toyotama-hime who served as its living archetype. Standing here, one senses that presence most powerfully at the inner sanctuary (okumiya, 奥宮), hidden in the dense jungle at the island's core. Behind the inner sanctuary lies an ancient ceremonial clearing where archaeological remains dating back to the Yayoi period have indeed been unearthed. When you check the orientation, the ritual site faces due east. Unlike the present main hall, the true heart of the ancient sanctuary was this hidden inner site, where rituals forbidden to outside eyes were conducted. That it looked eastward is deeply suggestive: east is the direction of Yamato.

Especially notable is the skeleton of the woman buried at the center of the south side of the Tsukiyama Kofun. She was probably a chief, a central figure among the local tribe, which suggests that the Bungo Amabe had a woman as chief. The grave goods also included items that call to mind trade with Amami and the Ryukyus, farther south. That indicates that the ancient Bungo Amabe may have formed part of a trade network linking Kyushu with Amami and the Ryukyus, and that their network was quite wide. This kind of exchange, peculiar to sea tribes, is deeply connected with the later myths of Amami and the Ryukyus and with the culture of the southern islands, and it is extremely important for understanding how widely the culture of the sea people spread in the archipelago.

By taking the hard places of navigation one by one, and joining practical trade to spiritual belief through the rites of priestesses, the Amabe grew into a presence the Yamato court could not ignore, and came to appear in the histories as the "Amabe." Later a new clan called the Azumi, which bound together the Amabe of many regions, was established, and its base is said to have been Shikanoshima in Fukuoka Prefecture.

While I was praying at the shrine this morning, I happened to meet an elderly local woman, and in the grounds she taught me a great deal, from old traditions to the customs of the place. According to her, the tradition that Yakami-hime descended from an immigrant tribe has long been handed down in the village. In my view of ancient history, a tribal form that deifies rites performed by priestesses is one of the marks of the Yayoi period, with its height around the early Yayoi. By my own theory, Yakami-hime would be a goddess of that age.

Specifically, the restriction of the throne to "male-line males" was written into law for the first time in 1889 (Meiji 22), with the enactment of the former Imperial House Law and the Constitution of the Empire of Japan. Before that point, throughout the long history of the emperors, there was neither an explicit rule confining the succession to the male line nor any permanent policy forbidding female sovereigns. On the contrary, female emperors repeatedly took the throne in response to the needs of their times. Today, both in Japan and abroad, it is widely assumed that an emperor must be a male-line male, but that assumption is a modern invention, not the whole of Japanese history.