Who Were the Wa? A People That May Never Have Existed as One

Let me also make one point clear at the outset to prevent misreading: wajin is not a proper noun designating a specific ethnic group within Japan. It is a term that came into use by historical convention after a certain period, and what it points to remains vague and abstract.

The real question is not whether the wajin existed, but what the word wajin actually refers to in the first place.

That word was wan. Although Japan long had no script of its own, its people possessed an acute sensitivity to the spoken sound of words, as seen in the tradition of kotodama (言霊). When the Wei envoys—who came from a culture of advanced writing and state record-keeping—repeatedly heard the people of these unfamiliar lands utter the sound wan, they transcribed that sound into Chinese characters as the name of the people and realm within Himiko's sphere. That transcription of wan as Wa (倭, or 委) is the prototype.

Because this name was merely a Chinese bureaucratic label created by transcribing the sound wan with which a certain group of people in the archipelago referred to themselves, it does not mean that a single distinct ethnic group called the Wajin existed. It was administrative terminology used by the Chinese court to classify the peoples of the four quarters—and by the same token, it means there was no unitary state called Wakoku.

The sound Wan uttered by the people the Wei envoys collected as material may have been the common language of people belonging to this sphere, but its meaning, as I said, did not designate a lofty concept of a state. It meant only "we." Native words must have been deeply rooted in each region, so the various words represented by this "Wan = we" show a picture of "one of the ancient common languages" used by the several forces of the countries that had raised up Himiko, to communicate with one another.

The terms were not universal. They stayed limited to the place and region where they were used then, so the "Wan" they spoke did not point to all the tribes and peoples living across the Japanese archipelago in the present sense.

We can say at least that, in this age, the sound Wan was written in the official language of the Wei as 倭 or 委 (Wa), and that from it came, as bureaucratic terms of the written record, Wajin (倭人) as the idea of a people and Wakoku (倭国) as the idea of a territory. In other words, "Wajin" and "Wakoku" were not names that the people living on the Japanese side had consciously used for themselves.

What matters here is that when the Wei envoys set the Wajin and Wakoku down in writing, they fixed an abstracted meaning without mercy, with no regard for the inner world of the local people. The power of writing and of the written record is the ease with which it removes the problems of the mind, and in the same stroke it erases the essence of history and builds a history in its place.

All the envoys did was hear the word Wan often in the limited number of nations they visited.

The proof lies not in texts alone, but in physical evidence: the gold seal of the King of Na, a designated National Treasure of Japan. Inscribed with the five characters 漢委奴国王 (Kan no Wa no Na no Kokuo), this gold seal was bestowed in 57 CE by Emperor Guangwu of the Later Han upon the king of the land of Na (奴国) in Wa (委/倭). Crucially, the problematic term Wakoku (倭国) does not appear on the seal. Had a unified state called Wakoku existed, the inscription would read 委国王 ("King of Wakoku"); instead, it reads 委奴国王—the King of the land of Na in Wa, granted by Han. In short, Wa originated as an old designation for a shared sphere encompassing multiple countries.

For the ancient Chinese court, it was little more than a name for the region inhabited by foreign peoples in the farthest east. Because the ruler of Na was one of those polities and stood in close contact with Emperor Guangwu, the king of Na held a leading position within that shared sphere of Wa in the archipelago prior to the rise of Himiko.

Because Chinese civilization had developed early on a vast continental scale, witnessing the rise and fall of dynasties and constant dealings with surrounding peoples, the Chinese court had to maintain its rule across a world open on all four sides. It therefore developed an elaborate system for defining the peoples of the four directions as foreign tribes and arraying them in categories of alliance, submission, or hostility. The classic expression of this worldview was the concept of the Siyi (四夷), the foreign peoples of the four quarters surrounding the central dynasty: the Beidi (北狄) to the north, the Dongyi (東夷) to the east, the Nanman (南蛮) to the south, and the Xirong (西戎) to the west.

Because the Wei envoys visited the archipelago during the Three Kingdoms period—an era when state allegiance and ethnic consciousness were sharply heightened in China—their observations of Japan were framed entirely by these continental categories. That is the defining feature of the Gishi Wajinden. It was right here, in my view, that the first misrecognition occurred, opening a rift between the Chinese terms Wakoku and Wajin and the reality on the Japanese side.

The Gishi Wajinden assumes that an ethnic group called the Wajin formed a state called Wakoku, which is a thoroughly Chinese, continental interpretation.

All we can judge at this point is that the Wei envoys set foot in a particular union of regions that they had long called Wakoku, and met there the people they called Wajin. But Wakoku does not mean Japan today, and the Wajin do not mean the Japanese today.

In conclusion, it is never possible to take the various terms based on the origin "Wan = we" as I have explained here to mean the whole present land of Japan, or the more than 120 million Japanese.

The thirty countries on the Japanese side in contact with Wei were also extremely limited and confined to western Japan, and Wei had no contact with eastern Japan at all. The Weizhi does not describe eastern Japan. It says only that "east of the queen's country there are also countries, where Wajin live," but this is told as what the people of Wakoku said, not what the envoys saw, so we can see that the record holds only for a very limited place.

The emotional reaction that began then moved, over a long span of years, toward discarding the name "Wa" from "Wajin" and "Wakoku." The movement eventually reached the present name of the country, "Nippon," and the name of the people, "Nipponjin," but at its origin lay an emotional reaction.

To understand the essence of this problem, hard for people since the modern age to grasp, I think we should notice that in leaving "Wa" the word the ancient rulers chose was the name "Yamato." Please take this as being adopted as a sound.

Probably almost no Japanese has thought about it, and they will notice that it is indeed odd to read it Yamato, because the characters themselves are "ateji" (当て字), phonetic substitutes.

It is not a mere difference of notation. It is an important technique for shifting the concept itself.

I will stop here for today, but the question of Wa (倭) outlined here is in fact the starting point of a current that leads, by way of the question of Yamato, to the name Nippon.