Was Yamatai Yamato? The Wei Record Read from Inside Japan

The capital where Himiko lived was a nation called Yamatai, but where this ancient seat of power stood, sometimes spoken of as a kingdom, remains unknown. That is strange. The Chinese of the time already had advanced techniques of surveying and a developed understanding of geography, and the Gishiwajinden (魏志倭人伝), though brief, even records the route by which the envoys reached Himiko and were received by her. Hearing this, one would think the location of Yamatai could be settled with ease, and yet it has never been fixed.

Yet the characters 邪馬台国, which write "Yamatai," are in fact a notation produced by several rounds of such errors. This means that the capital where Himiko lived was not called Yamatai at the time.

The name was produced, after a complicated history, at the end of confusion. Yamatai, in short, does not exist. We are looking for a kingdom that was never real, and that is why its location has never been found.

This is the background to the earliest split, made by the Confucian scholar Hakuseki Arai (1657–1725), who divided Yamatai into the Kinai theory (Nara) and the Kyushu theory. The two theories are still fiercely contested, with help from archaeology and other fields, but this is in truth a problem that neither history nor archaeology can solve.

Then what was the sound of the name of the nation Himiko ruled, before the scribal errors and misprints? Put another way, when the Wei envoys came to the archipelago in the 240s, what sound were they told was the name of the land where Himiko lived?

It was Yamato.

As I hinted at the end of the last piece, reading 邪馬台国 as Yamatai, as we do now, is a habit that took hold, over many scribal errors and misprints and the changes of the Chinese dynasties that held the records, before anyone knew it. What matters is that reading it Yamatai is wrong. The correct reading, in modern terms, is Yamato.

To sum up, the capital of Wakoku where Himiko lived was not Yamatai but Yamato, and no country or place called Yamatai ever existed in Japan. This Yamato was later written 大和 on the Japanese side and became the name for the southern part of the Nara Basin, and Himiko once truly lived in that land.

That is why no one can discuss it comprehensively, but what we can understand from this piece, at the least, is that Himiko was not the queen of Yamatai. She was the queen of Yamato.

First, in the Gishiwajinden material in the printed editions of the Records of the Three Kingdoms described above, the name of the kingdom appears as 邪馬壹国 and 邪馬一国. The character 壹 is now written 壱, but in old texts it was written 壹.

In these printed editions it is 邪馬壹 and 邪馬一, and since both 壹 and 一 are read ichi, it is read not Yamatai but Yamaichi. That reading is itself wrong, and the further problem is that every printed edition from the start has it wrong in the characters.

Why did such an error occur? Because the original had a confusingly similar Chinese character. It is 邪馬臺国. At a glance you cannot tell them apart, but set 邪馬臺 beside 邪馬壹 and you see the difference is between 臺 and 壹.

It was probably the result of complicated factors, the long age of manuscripts and differences of language as the Chinese dynasties changed, but the ground for saying the printed editions after the Northern Song are wrong is that every text written from the early fourth century to the end of the tenth, in the manuscript age of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, has 邪馬臺.

From the characters one can easily infer that the original sound Yamato for the ancient Japanese meant a land opened with the mountains as its gate, since 山 is mountain and 門 is gate.

I rather think the old name Yamato may come from the Jomon, and that it may come not from a word of farming people but from a word of seafaring tribes. The seafaring tribes of ancient Japan fixed their place at sea by a method called yama-ate, sighting by mountains, and, as befits an island country, told one another of fishing grounds by mountain landmarks. A trace of this is taken to be 山門, the prototype of Yamato, and when migrants bringing farming technology came later, its first meaning shifted toward land suited to farming.

The one who made an important point about this difficult and invisible history was the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi. He saw the origin of all Japan coming to be called Yamato in the fact that the power of 山門 in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture, in some age, made a great move east, and the name stuck to them.

The name of the tribe's place of origin was carried with it as the tribe moved, and in time the south of the Nara Basin came to be called Yamato.

Simply put, the Wei envoys crossed the sea to meet Himiko, went to Yamato, and saw and heard of the customs of the Wajin. In fact most scholars have taken that stance as a premise, and rarely consider that the envoys may not have met Himiko.

To go further, the Wei envoys may not even have gone to Yamato.

But there is room to doubt the view that takes all of it as what the envoys of the Wei saw and heard.

First, it is extremely unlikely that Ti Jun visited Yamato (now the south-central part of Nara Prefecture). The reason is plain: it was a very long way from the nation in northern Kyushu where he stayed to Yamato.

An envoy is not an explorer, and the purpose of the mission was to win the struggle for hegemony in China's Three Kingdoms, Wei, Wu, and Shu. So for Wei it was enough to gather information about Wakoku and the Wajin, of whom it had had almost none until then, and enough to confirm that they truly swore loyalty to Wei. Beyond that, Ti Jun's job was to deliver safely the treasures the emperor gave to Himiko.

The interesting thing is that the upheaval in Liaodong and the north of the peninsula reached the ears of Himiko, queen of Yamato, at once, and she sent an envoy to Wei.

Sima Yi finally took the Gongsun base, Xiangping, and executed Gongsun Yuan in August, but we must not miss that Himiko, in answer to these movements, asked Wei around June to be allowed to pay tribute.

The question then is what advantage it brought Wei to form a deep relation with far-off Wakoku. In a word, it was to finish off Wu, which had fallen at a disadvantage after Gongsun Yuan's betrayal.

So Wei, to investigate the reality of Wakoku, of which it knew little, sent envoys from Daifang Commandery on the peninsula, which it held in effective control, to find out what Wakoku was up to, and this is better seen as a strategic survey, to see whether Wakoku might become the next Gongsun. The record of the Gishiwajinden is rich in what would today be called folkloric elements, but it must be taken as one survey made to win the age of the Three Kingdoms.

In fact, Wei did not think of the location of Wakoku as an archipelago at the far edge of the eastern sea. Where, then, did Wei think Wakoku lay? It was the south.

This Chinese perception of south and not east could be a fatal problem for Wei at the time. For what it meant for Wei to think Wakoku lay in the south was that Wakoku was thought to be a country in the seas south of Wu.

At this point we must keep one thing in mind: we mistake East Asia if we look at it on a map like Google Maps.

What is interesting is that the shape of the archipelago itself is as accurate as today's, yet for some reason it is turned ninety degrees. And we must not miss that on this map, seen from the south of the Korean Peninsula, the northern end of the archipelago is Kyushu. That is, the archipelago is understood as a country long from north to south, turned ninety degrees, with Kyushu to the north. It carries the trace that for people going from the continent by way of the peninsula to the archipelago since ancient times, the main gate on the Japanese side was northern Kyushu. Put another way, for the people across the sea, the entrance to Wakoku was northern Kyushu, so Wakoku was thought to stretch south from there.

To go further, what we must grasp here is not to judge by the modern idea of a map's accuracy, but that a view of the archipelago built over more than a thousand years is superbly reflected.

I judge nationalism to be a problem of modernity, and I will think of ancient history as another dimension.

When the frame of nationalism that sets China, Korea, and Japan apart is dismantled, a grand history of the ancients that has never been thought of will come to the surface.

But Wakoku does not mean Japan today, and the Wajin do not mean the Japanese today.

Is this interesting Silla legend, together with the rise of Himiko, queen of Yamato, a medium that carries an old memory of East Asia? Or is it a record that has carved the lost form of East Asia?