第一章 太陽之子
公元前400年－公元710年
CHAPTER 1
Children of the Sun
400 BCE–710 CE
THE FIRST EMPEROR
Dissatisfied with the multitudinous deities who had taken over the newly created land of luxuriant rice fields, Amaterasu the Sun Goddess sent her grandson Ninigi down to rule over them. To establish his authority, she gave him the three sacred regalia: a bronze mirror, a sword, and a curved jewel.
Ninigi landed on Mount Takachiho in Kyushu. He took a beautiful goddess, Princess Flowering Blossom, to be his consort, but her father demanded that he take her ugly sister as well. When Ninigi refused, the father cursed their offspring, decreeing that their lives would be “as brief as the cherry blossom.” Thus, the race of mortals was born.
Three generations later, Ninigi’s great-grandson, Jimmu, battled his way to the center of the country and established his capital there and, on February 11, 660 BCE, founded the empire of Japan.
THE YAYOI: AGRICULTURE BRINGS WEALTH AND WARFARE
In 57 CE, an envoy from a place the Chinese called the Land of Wa—“Dwarf Country” or “Land of Subject People”—made an epic journey by ship, ox cart, and sedan chair to Luoyang, the magnificent capital of the mighty Chinese empire, bearing tribute. Emperor Guangwu of the Later Han Dynasty accepted this distant territory as a tributary and presented the envoy with a solid gold seal, inscribed “to the King of Na in the land of Wa.” Amazingly, the small square seal was found in 1784, buried in a field in northern Kyushu. The Chinese record of this visit is the first written reference to the land that would become Japan. It would be another five centuries before the Japanese adopted writing.
While the Jōmon carried on their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, on the Korean peninsula farmers were scratching a living from the soil, growing rice in dry fields. Their great neighbor China had had agriculture, metal tools, and writing for a thousand years, and some of these developments had spread to Korea. But Korea’s colder climate made it harder to grow rice.
Eventually, some of these impoverished farmers began to cross the straits to Kyushu. They established settlements and traded with the Jōmon. Kyushu was warmer and swampier than Korea and rice grew better there.
In other parts of the world, hunter-gatherers quickly took up farming. But the prosperous Jōmon didn’t need to.
Then, around 400 BCE, life suddenly and dramatically changed. As the Jōmon population declined, Korea’s farming population boomed, and waves of immigrants began to arrive in greater numbers than ever before. Some were refugees fleeing the constant warfare in Korea.
The newcomers were taller, more lightly built, and with slenderer faces than the Jōmon. They brought with them bronze and iron tools and began making wooden shovels, hoes, and ploughs and digging and irrigating paddy fields. And thus, the Iron Age arrived.
Like the Jōmon, the newcomers made pots. Theirs were more austere than the Jōmon pots: clean, functional, smooth shapes, fired at higher temperatures to a reddish-brown color. Archaeologists dubbed the new lifestyle Yayoi, after the Tokyo district where their pottery was first discovered in 1884.
The Jōmon also took up rice cultivation, but little by little the newcomers took over. Some intermarried, but eventually the Jōmon remained mainly in the north. The Ainu of Hokkaido are often thought to be their descendants and preserve aspects of their culture, including face tattoos. The Yayoi who came over from Korea went on to populate the archipelago. Most modern-day Japanese are descended from them.
As agriculture developed, people moved from the forests to the fertile plains and formed permanent farming communities. Some drained the paddies to grow millet, barley, and wheat in winter. They introduced many other crops, along with domesticated pigs. All this triggered a population explosion in Kyushu, and from there farming quickly spread across Japan.
The Yayoi lived in wood and stone houses on stilts with thatched roofs. They forged farming tools, weapons, armor, and bronze mirrors with elaborate designs on the back. They also made dōtaku, big ceremonial bronze bells.
Agriculture brought trouble. While the prosperous Jōmon had had plenty of food to go round and had been fairly egalitarian, the Yayoi began to hoard their rice. It became a form of wealth. People could trade it, and those who had more had power over those who had less. In this way, a class system developed, with overlords, commoners, and slaves. From about 100 BCE, they started burying their elite in splendid graves, together with luxury goods such as glass beads, jade and bronze swords, and mirrors.
As the population grew, villages grouped together. Hundreds, then thousands of people settled on the plains and on hilltops. By the first century CE, there were more than a hundred small kingdoms. The best swampland and plains suitable for growing rice filled up and there was fighting, then wars, over land and water.
At Yoshinogari, once a huge Yayoi settlement in northern Kyushu, archaeologists discovered stone and bronze weapons, caches of arrowheads, headless skeletons and others with arrowheads embedded in their skulls and limbs. There, 1,200 people once lived, surrounded by a protective moat. Inside were more fortifications, watchtowers and fences with gates, communal kitchens, a meeting house, and an inner enclosure where the ruler lived.
After seed sowing in the fifth month and harvest in the tenth, the Yayoi held festivals where they offered prayers and fermented rice liquor to the gods and the ancestral spirits. Shamans led the ritual dancing, wearing bronze mirrors that reflected the sun’s rays and were perhaps used for divination and magic, marking them out as being in touch with higher powers. From early times, the shamans were all-important in ensuring the well-being of the tribe. It made sense to choose a shaman as ruler, and many of these were women.
Yoshinogari watchtower: The Yayoi lived in a time of wars and needed to watch out for enemies.
HIMIKO, SHAMAN QUEEN
In 238 CE, a diplomatic mission from the land of Wa arrived in the capital of the Chinese Wei dynasty, bringing tribute of four male slaves and six female slaves, plus two rolls of cloth, each 20 feet (6 m) long. The Chinese dynastic chronicles record that the emperor responded: “You live very far away across the sea; yet you have sent an embassy with tribute. Your loyalty and filial piety we appreciate exceedingly. We confer upon you therefore the title ‘Queen of Wa Friendly to Wei,’ together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon. We expect you, O Queen, to rule your people in peace and to endeavor to be devoted and obedient.” He sent Queen Himiko a gift of a hundred bronze mirrors.
Himiko, “Sun Priestess” or “Daughter of the Sun,” is the first name in Japanese history to come floating up through the mists of time, though it’s not known whether she really existed or is legendary. There is no mention of her in the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki, Japanese histories assembled centuries after her time, but her life is recorded in detail in the Chinese annals contemporary to her.
According to those annals, Himiko was a shaman and a woman of extraordinary powers. In 190 CE, when she was twenty, thirty small kingdoms made a truce after years of civil war, formed a confederation, and chose her to be their queen. The Chinese records say that she came from a long dynasty of female rulers and was a virgin who never married but “occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people. Thereupon they placed her on the throne.” The Chinese called the land of Wa the Queen Country, a country ruled by queens. Himiko’s people called it Yamatai.
Himiko was the mouthpiece of the gods. She represented them on earth and intervened with them to ensure good harvests, prosperity, and peace. To maintain her mystery, she kept hidden. Her palace was surrounded by towers and stockades like the fortifications at Yoshinogari and guarded by a large army. A thousand women attendants waited on her, along with one man who served her food and drink and was her spokesperson.
Himiko established rigorous laws and customs and had them strictly enforced. Under her rule, Yamatai prospered, with a taxation system and thriving trade. Her younger brother was her second-in-command, maintaining diplomatic relations with China.
Himiko ruled for sixty years and died in 248 CE, when she was eighty. She was given a magnificent send-off. “A great mound was raised over her, more than a hundred paces in diameter, and over a hundred male and female attendants followed her in death,” say the Chinese records.
After her death, a king took the throne, but the people refused to obey him. There were assassinations and murders. Finally, they chose a thirteen-year-old girl named Iyo, a relative of Himiko. Under this teenage shaman queen, order was restored.
Some say Himiko’s land of Yamatai was around Yoshinogari, others that it was the Nara region, soon to become the heart of a unified Japan.
KOFUN PERIOD (250–538 CE): THE RISE OF YAMATO
Outside Nara is a tree-covered hill the shape of a keyhole, a perfectly symmetrical, round tumulus with a triangular extension. It rises steeply out of the paddy fields, bordered on one side by a lake. It’s the oldest kofun (ancient grave) in Japan. Pottery found inside has been dated to 250 CE, the time of Himiko’s death, and scholars think it may be Himiko’s tomb.
Terra-cotta haniwa of a sixth-century warrior in a fitted jacket with a flared skirt, helmet, and sword
After Himiko’s death, burial mounds began to spring up in the Nara region, across Honshu and eventually down to Kyushu. There are some twenty thousand, built over three hundred years. Many are surrounded by moats. Inside is a burial chamber containing a coffin or coffins, surrounded by treasures—jewels, mirrors, weapons—along with attendants: not living attendants as Himiko had, but haniwa, large terra-cotta figures with mask-like faces. Through them we can imagine the variety of people who would have been around at the time. There are warriors in armor, dancers, female shamans holding offering bowls, belted wrestlers, and musicians playing drums, zithers, and bells, along with steep-roofed houses, boats, lovingly crafted horses with manes and bridles, boars, and monkeys, surrounding the dead with familiar artifacts, recreating the world that they came from, and ensuring they would feel at home in the next.
Nintoku’s keyhole-shaped tomb covers more ground than the Great Pyramid.
Some of the dead were mounted warriors, buried with their weapons and armor. Their helmets, saddles, and decorative horse trappings are bound with patterned silk and hung with gilded pendants, intriguingly similar to those found in North Asia. There are crowns, bronze shoes, and gold and silver jewelry, and agricultural tools such as hoes and spades. One giant tomb in Kyushu overlooking the sea contains the remains of a queen in her late thirties or forties, with ceremonial mirrors, jewels, swords, spears, and stone axes to mark her status and power. The most spectacular of all, the mausoleum of Nintoku, the legendary sixteenth emperor, must have required years and sophisticated construction techniques to build. These rulers were powerful enough to marshal armies of workers and to be celebrated after death with pomp and splendor.
The country was still filled with warring clans, whose chieftains competed to have more and more grandiose burial mounds. The most powerful were the Yamato, perhaps descendants of Himiko’s Yamatai, who lived on the fertile plains around modern-day Nara. They began to subdue other clans, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by giving rival chieftains titles and positions in their administration and thus drawing them into their orbit. The arms and armor they were buried with show they had the military strength to do so. Powerful female shamans paid homage to the gods of rival clans, absorbing them into their pantheon. Thus, the Yamato started to build an empire.
For 150 years after Himiko’s death, the Chinese annals contain no reports of the land of Wa. Presumably the people were too busy fighting to send tribute. Then, between 413 and 502, five successive Yamato rulers sent emissaries to the all-powerful Chinese court, petitioning the emperor to recognize their royal status. These rulers called themselves Great Sovereigns. The kingdom of Yamato was now a single state, which stretched from Central Honshu all the way down to Kyushu.
China, with its bureaucratic structure, writing, and philosophical systems, was the supreme power in East Asia. It was the dazzling cultural hub from which outlying countries such as Japan strove to learn. It embodied civilization. On the Korean peninsula, the Three Kingdoms of Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo were battling for supremacy, and for much of this period there was civil war in China among the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Refugees began to flood into Japan, bringing with them Chinese ideas, culture, technology, and goods.
They also brought Chinese writing and learning. The Yamato court began to use Chinese as its official language. Chinese became the language of scholarship and the mark of an educated person, like Latin in the West.
Literacy opened up Chinese medicine, the Chinese calendar, astronomy, and Confucianism, and Japanese scholars evolved ways of using Chinese characters to write the very different Japanese language. Horse riding and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques, along with important developments in agriculture, were also imported from the Asian mainland.
Many of the Korean and Chinese settlers were master artisans. The highest-ranking and most talented were given provinces and high positions at court, which helped to strengthen the Great Sovereign’s hand against the fractious clans who made up his domain. By the ninth century, a third of the nobility claimed descent from the continent, like William the Conqueror’s French nobles.
But the next import from the continent was to be even more epoch-making.
ASUKA PERIOD (538–710 CE): THE BUDDHA MEETS THE KAMI
In 538 CE, an embassy arrived from the kingdom of Baekje, one of the three warring Korean kingdoms, requesting military support. The king sent artisans, monks, artifacts, and a momentous gift: a bronze statue of the Buddha, along with ritual banners and a collection of sutras, urging the Great Sovereign to adopt this “most excellent” of doctrines.
The Buddhism that arrived in Japan had traveled along the Silk Roads from India to China and Korea, and was colored by those cultures. Mahayana Buddhism, the Great Vehicle, was far more elaborate and complex than the austere teachings of the historical Buddha, Gautama, and of Theravada Buddhism, the Lesser Vehicle, which flourished in Ceylon. In the Mahayana tradition, the Buddhas were beings who appeared in human form and were worshipped in temples, and there was a body of doctrine laid out in scriptures.
In fact, the Japanese already had a religion. For them, Japan was the land of the gods. They worshipped the kami, the myriad gods who had been born from Izanagi and Izanami and who imbued all of nature. There were gods in the rocks, in trees, in mountains, and they protected families, clans, and whole kingdoms. They had no form and there was no formalized system of worship and no sacred texts. The most important god was the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu.
The Great Sovereign Kinmei was the first historical (as opposed to legendary) ruler of Yamato and is known to history as Emperor Kinmei, though the term tennō, “emperor,” had not yet come into use. He was under the thumb of his powerful advisers, the Soga and Mononobe families.
The Soga favored reform. They had consolidated their power by marrying their daughters into the imperial family, with the result that most of the rulers were the sons and husbands of Soga women. They were descended from Korean immigrants and saw Buddhism, the religion of China, as the essential foundation stone of a civilized society.
Conversely, the Mononobe and their allies, the Nakatomi family, opposed any change in the system. They made up the elite imperial guard and monopolized the rites and rituals to honor the kami. They declared that the kami would be angry if the Japanese worshipped foreign gods.
So the emperor decided to test the new religion by authorizing the Soga to perform rituals before the statue. Almost immediately, an epidemic broke out, clear evidence that the kami were offended. The Mononobe ordered the statue to be tossed into a canal and had the newly built Buddhist temple burned to the ground and three Buddhist nuns flogged. As if in response, a bolt of lightning destroyed the entire imperial palace, killing those who had thrown away the image.
Eventually, the rival factions clashed in a three-day battle at Mount Shigi in 587. The Soga were driven back. It seemed that Buddhism and its supporters had lost.
Then a thirteen-year-old youth stepped in to turn the tide, not just of the battle, but the course of Japanese history. He cut down a sacred nuride tree, carved a tiny image of the Four Buddhist Heavenly Kings out of it, and tied it to his forehead, vowing to build the Heavenly Kings a temple if the Soga were victorious. In the battle that followed, the Mononobe leader was killed. In this way, Buddhism was established as the dominant religion of the court.
The young man’s name was Prince Umayado, the Prince of the Stable Door; his mother had given birth to him outside the imperial stables. He was Emperor Kinmei’s grandson. He has gone down in history as Prince Shōtoku, “Saintly Virtue,” and is revered as the founder of the Japanese state and one of Japan’s most brilliant rulers.
The victorious Soga chieftain, now chief minister, appointed artisans from the Korean kingdom of Baekje to oversee the building of Japan’s first Buddhist temple, Asuka Temple, with three main halls surrounding a five-story pagoda. The great hall was dominated by an austere bronze Buddha image, stern but tranquil, seated in lotus position, deep in meditation. It was the first Buddha statue ever made in Japan.
Asuka Buddha, created by Tori Busshi, “Tori the maker of Buddha images,” the greatest sculptor of his day
The heart of the Yamato kingdom was the beautiful plain of Asuka, a place of lush paddy fields and gentle hills south of modern-day Nara. There was no fixed capital yet. When an emperor died, the entire court left the palace and built a new one so that the new emperor would not be jinxed by the spirit of his predecessor. The capital moved with the emperors from one place to the next.
After Kinmei’s death, his daughter became empress. As the regent, Prince Shōtoku held the reins of power. He was a great statesman, intellectual, and patron of the arts and introduced Chinese culture on a sweeping scale.
In the past, power had been distributed between the clan chieftains. Shōtoku drew up Japan’s first constitution on Buddhist and Confucian lines with the emphasis on ethical government and brought in a Chinese-style system of court ranks based on merit. He sent Japan’s first official embassy to China, to the newly established Sui dynasty, to study Chinese political systems, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Determined to set Japan on an equal footing with China, he drafted a letter from the empress to the Chinese emperor, addressing it “From the sovereign of the land of the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting sun.” The emperor was reportedly furious at such audacity and refused to reply. Shōtoku also wrote two chronicles of Japanese history that formed the basis for later histories of Japan.
As a devout Buddhist, he commissioned more than forty temples, magnificent buildings with splendid interiors and awe-inspiring rituals, robes, incense, and chanting, which made a deep impression on everyone’s imagination. Hōryūji, the oldest surviving wooden structure in the world, houses a beautiful statue of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, gazing down with an expression of unearthly tenderness.
Shōtoku had laid firm foundations. But it took a spectacular coup d’état to bind what was still a confederation of fairly autonomous kingdoms into a unified imperial system.
COUP D’ÉTAT
In 645, Nakatomi no Kamatari met the empress’s nineteen-year-old son, Prince Naka, over a game of kemari, court kickball. Kamatari was the chieftain of the Nakatomi clan, old allies of the Mononobe who had been defeated by the Soga half a century earlier. Both men hated the Soga, who were now so strongly entrenched that it seemed they would carry on ruling in the name of the imperial family forever. The two started meeting in a wisteria arbor, supposedly to study Chinese texts.
One summer’s day, the court assembled for an important ceremony. Prince Naka made sure the palace gates were barred, bribed the guards, and hid a spear in the audience chamber. Then in front of everyone, including the empress, he hacked the young leader of the Soga to pieces. The empress abdicated forthwith, having been defiled by being in the presence of death.
In this way, the imperial family regained political power. Prince Naka made his uncle emperor but held on to power along with his co-conspirator, Nakatomi, to whom he gave the name Fujiwara, “Wisteria Arbor,” to commemorate their meetings. He set about instituting a program of reforms known as Taika, “Great Change,” giving the emperor absolute power over the land and all its people, including the former clan chieftains, on the basis that “There are not two suns in the sky or two lords on the earth.” It was a bloodless revolution. He set up three ministries to advise the throne: the minister of the left (the highest post), the minister of the right, and the minister of the center, the chancellor.
He also introduced a sweeping land reform, taking over all the land and distributing it equally to the farmers, at a stroke removing the powerbases of the clan chieftains and creating a centralized imperial state. The flaw was that while farmers received equal tracts of land, Prince Naka gave the aristocracy larger areas based on rank, office, and service, so they ended up just as privileged as before. Temples and shrines also began to accumulate private estates.
The prince instituted a tax system adopted from China, levying taxes on the harvest and on silk, cotton, cloth, thread, and other products, and introducing military conscription and a corvée tax requiring farmers to work on public building projects.
And finally, he banned the old custom of tomb burial. Instead of the traditional grave mounds like Himiko’s, Buddhist temples and cloisters with white walls, vermilion columns, and sweeping roofs, multistory pagodas, and colorful palaces sprang up across the Asuka plain. Skilled immigrants poured into the city, many from the Baekje kingdom in Korea.
But the relationship with Baekje was doomed, and its end brought about a whole new era.
KOREAN ADVENTURE
In 660, Baekje, Japan’s long-time ally, was conquered by the rival Korean kingdom of Silla in alliance with the newly established Chinese Tang dynasty. Baekje loyalists appealed to Japan to help them restore their king.
Empress Saimei immediately assembled a large military and naval expedition and made herself commander in chief. This was Prince Naka’s mother, who had reascended the throne. She traveled down to northern Kyushu and set up her capital at Asakura, facing across to Korea.
But just as the last Yamato troops were setting sail for Korea, she fell ill and died. Prince Naka had her remains carried back to Asuka, where she was buried. Dressed in white mourning, he oversaw the expedition from the temporary palace in Asakura.
Without the inspiration of their empress, the Japanese were doomed. At the Battle of Baekgang, Japanese ships took on the formidable forces of Tang China and Silla. Four hundred ships sank and ten thousand Japanese were killed, while the Silla cavalry decimated the Baekje restoration troops. It was the end of Baekje and a disaster for Yamato, which lost its territory on the Korean peninsula and a key ally, and its link to continental technology and culture. It now turned toward China, which had a central government and a strong Buddhist establishment.
Tang China was the most cosmopolitan country in the world, with a vast empire and trade routes extending all the way to Rome. Traders and envoys from throughout the civilized world rubbed shoulders in Chang’an, the magnificent Tang capital. As this vibrant culture spread eastward, exciting advances were to occur in Japan.
Prince Naka, now thirty-six, succeeded his mother and took the title tennō, “emperor.” As Emperor Tenji, he presided over an extraordinary cultural flourishing. The introduction of Chinese civilization led to a tremendous explosion of pent-up Japanese energies in every field. In Tenji’s literary-minded court, poets composed passionate love poems and paeans to the mountains and seas of Japan. Courtiers enjoyed gigaku, masked drama performed to music, staged at the court and in Buddhist temples.
Marvelous frescoes in the late-period Takamatsuzuka and Kitora burial mounds depict elegant court ladies with rosebud mouths and swept-back hair in silk jackets with full sleeves over red-white-and-green-striped skirts and courtiers in lacquered black caps and long-sleeved coats over wide-legged hakama trousers, who would not have been out of place in the Tang Chinese court. There are also star maps and paintings depicting the animals of the four directions—the blue dragon, white tiger, red bird, and black snake-entwined tortoise—following Chinese astrological rules.
It was during this period that the name Yamato—the land of Wa (Wa being the derogatory Chinese term meaning “dwarfs”)—was replaced by Nihon, the Land of the Rising Sun.
Emperor Tenji died in 672. In 708, Empress Genmei, Tenji’s daughter and Japan’s fourth great empress, decided the time had come to establish a fixed capital. She chose a place called Heijō-kyō, a more spacious area with better access to the provinces where the court was now trying to expand its control. And so a radical new period in Japanese history began.
