A Brief History of Japan. Jonathan Clements

Nintoku (r. 313–99), who apparently died at age 145. Nintoku was a particularly powerful sovereign who commissioned a number of large public works, including dams to divert troublesome rivers. He also famously permitted his subjects a three-year moratorium on their duties, allowing his own palace to fall into ruins, its thatched roof leaking, while the rest of his country prospered. Such a story sits at odds with the material evidence of huge public projects, not least the 2,000 laborers who spent sixteen years building his supposed gravesite—the Daisenryō Kofun, the largest of all the “keyhole” tombs—in what is now Ōsaka.

      The Daisenryō Kofun is, in fact, supposedly one of the three largest tombs in the world, matched only by the famous grave of the First Emperor of China and the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Today it is set in a central pond that is itself ringed by two additional moats. Like many other surviving kofun tombs, it cuts a lush, viridian shock of the ancient past into the modern landscape. It is not open to the public; visitors are permitted to approach no closer than a shrine on the outskirts that looks across the pond. It takes an hour to walk around it, but all you see is a thickly wooded hill across the moat. The best view you will have of this and similar kofun will be from the air as your plane approaches Kansai or Itami airport. You see the endless metropolis stretching toward the hill and then a sudden stark, unexpected flash of green, unbuilt upon, so thickly overgrown with trees that no human can pass. The road curves around it; the locals ignore it. It is as if a piece of Japan had been walled off and abandoned 1,500 years ago, left to the wild.

      The Yamato state was powerful enough to establish cross-straits relations with the Korean state of Baekje by 369 CE, in which year there is a record in Baekje’s imperial chronicles of an imperial gift bestowed upon the “ruler of Wa.” It was an unwieldy ceremonial seven-branched sword. Korean chronicles also report multiple raids by the people of Wa; either pirate attacks or sanctioned military incursions, or both. Japan’s own chronicle, the Nihongi, is similarly focused on Korea during the period, noting that the state of Silla was expected to provide tribute to Japan, and that its failure to do so led to punitive raids around 365.

      The Gwanggaeto Stone, a monument unearthed in 1883 in what is now northeast China, refers to several events in the fourth century that suggest increased Japanese involvement on the Korean peninsula. It claims that around 391 CE, the “Wae robbers” came across the sea, “destroyed” the kingdoms of Baekje and Silla, and had to be met with armed resistance from the kingdom of Goguryeo.

      Unfortunately for all concerned, the provenance of the Gwanggaeto Stone is caught up in the politics of the time in which it was discovered, a mere two years after the face of Empress Jingū, or at least an artist’s best guess at it, had appeared on the newly issued one-yen banknote. The stone was found by a Japanese military officer, who was accused by later Korean scholars of doctoring the stone with a chisel to imply a significantly greater “Wae” presence on the mainland than was originally intended. It certainly seems odd that the stone would talk about the Japanese having “destroyed” both Baekje and Silla when both kingdoms were plainly not destroyed at all; and strange indeed that the same sentence has two missing characters, suspiciously etched away by unknown forces, which presumably once mentioned the state of Kara. It seems far more likely that the Japanese simply served as troops that came to the aid of one Korean kingdom in its battles with the others.

      The stone goes on to record some two dozen castle names, each presumably the site of a battle, before Baekje formed a new alliance with the “Wae” in 399 in an attack on Silla, for which Goguryeo was called in to the rescue. This would seem to dovetail with Baekje’s own annals, which record that King Asin’s eldest son, Prince Jeonji (Straight-Branch), had been sent to Yamato as part of a hostage exchange. This Jeonji would return home in 405 after his father’s death with an honor guard of a hundred Japanese troops—which turned out to be more than merely ceremonial when the prince discovered that his uncle had seized the throne. Jeonji and his Japanese escort then camped on an island, waiting for matters to take their course. During this interval, in an odd moment of historical inaction, the “populace of the kingdom” then killed the usurper for him. The same story, in a garbled form, appears in the Japanese Nihongi—but 120 years too early, adding further fuel to the idea that the dates in that narrative are all over the place. In repositioning the life of Empress Jingū, the compilers of Japan’s chronicles seem to have also dragged the lives of her son and grandson far away from their original placement.

      The Kojiki similarly has a lot to say about Korean matters, seemingly out of chronological order, noting, “Also, many people came across the sea from Silla. Thus the mighty one…conscripted them to build dikes in the manner of overseas and thereby made ‘Baekje Pond’.” The story matches neatly with the tales of dam-building and large public works in the realm of the emperor Nintoku, who died in 399, but similarly places them over a century too early. Also placed way too early in the Kojiki is the account of a Korean prince called Sunspear arriving in Japan with strings of jewels, mirrors, and scarves with magical powers.

      The Baekje annals are a veritable Yamato love-in during King Jeonji’s reign. In 409, the Yamato court sends King Jeonji a gift of “night-shining pearls” (thought to be a poetic term for any kind of glittering gem). In 418, Jeonji sent Yamato a gift of ten rolls of white silk. And horses—always horses, a promise backed up by the archaeological record of Yamato graves.

      Although imperial graves may not be opened, some were stumbled across by accident and subjected to rescue archaeology in modern times. Early tombs from this period contain peaceful items: comma-shaped stones denoting authority, forked ceremonial swords, and mirrors from distant China. Some of the latter may even have been the self-same mirrors mentioned in the Chronicle of Wei, passed on as heirlooms and eventually buried with particular aristocrats. But from around 500 CE, the contents take a turn for the warlike. We suddenly find aristocrats buried with axes and swords, armor and helmets. From the 450s onwards, the graves of Japanese aristocrats are also found containing saddles, bridles, and other items associated with horses—both horses and cattle having been introduced from the mainland.

      Nor should we assume that the newcomers considered themselves to be forever free of their mainland attachments. There is evidence in chronicles from both sides of the Korea Strait that the Yamato people traded with their cousins for military manpower, scribes and ironware. Yamato’s Hanzei emperor (r. 406–11) applied to the Chinese court to be officially called the “Supreme General Who Maintains Peace in the East, Commanding with a Battle-Ax All Military Affairs in the Six Countries of Wa, Baekje, Silla, Imna [Mimana/Kara], Chin-Han, and Mok-Han.” This suggests that, for a moment at least, a Japanese ruler considered himself to be the overlord not only of Japan, but of much of southern Korea. The Chinese fobbed him off with just plain “General Who Maintains Peace in the East,” but did eventually grant a similar title to his son, the Ingyō emperor (r. 412–53), shortly before his death.

      By the sixth century, the administration in Yamato was robust enough to plan ahead for disaster relief—the first reference to public granaries in the Nihongi dates to 536 CE, the year in which the European chronicler John of Ephesus wrote: “The sun became dark, and its darkness lasted for eighteen months.” Korean chronicles spoke of a decade of wars and invasions. In Japan, the aged Senka emperor issued a telling decree: “Food is the basis of the Empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving and cold?”

      His words, in the Nihongi, allude to starvation conditions on the Korean mainland, and the prospect of a new refugee crisis calling for food supplies to be sent to north Kyūshū. Soon afterwards, the Japanese annals record ambassadors from the mainland offering “tribute,” and conversations among the Yamato courtiers about the prospect of seizing the opportunity to invade the mainland.

      In 552, the king of Baekje caused a stir by sending some special gifts across the strait: a bronze statue of Buddha chased in gold, along with attendant banners; and a stash of sutras, the precious Chinese translations of the original Buddhist scriptures. This was not the first time that Buddhist items had reached Japan, but previous missionaries or contacts had achieved little. This king was looking for some serious cooperation in his quarrels with the neighboring kingdom of Silla, and plainly hoped that Buddhist artifacts would go