A Brief History of Japan. Jonathan Clements

ambassador closer to the emperor, and us on the wrong side of them. How is this righteous?”

      General Wu was a swift tactician. He had to be—not only on the battlefields of his younger days, but in the intricate placements of court ceremony. The rules of the Chinese palace had to reflect the positions of the world, with the Chinese emperor central and his subjects aligned in proper order of protocol. Some might have regarded Ōtomo’s complaints as disruptive and rude, but General Wu saw them as earnest entreaties that the ceremony should proceed according to the truth of All Under Heaven. If Silla had been wrongly placed, then it would have been discourteous for Ōtomo not to point it out before the emperor presided over an incorrect ritual. In the scant moments before the Xuanzong emperor was due to arrive, he ordered the retinues from Silla and Japan to swap places.

      There was a flurry of rustling robes as the ambassadors darted to their new positions. Such incidents were not unknown at the court, and had even resulted in ambassadors coming to blows, but the Sillan envoy seemed to know his place, and he rushed down the line with little more than a glowering glance at Ōtomo.

      The Xuanzong emperor arrived, oblivious, and took his position at his throne to the usual orchestral accompaniment. The time then arose for the ambassadors to present him with their tribute.

      Ōtomo was now the first, dropping to his knees and touching the ground with his forehead, not once, but twice.

      “The outer subject of the Land Where the Sun Rises dares to present such a gift,” he proclaimed, as his servants marched forth with their approved items to be handed to the emperor’s own servants.

      Then, as was customary for New Year’s Day, he shouted the words “Long Live the Emperor!” three times.

      He had just announced to everyone that Japan knelt before the glory of China. But the Japanese people back home didn’t need to know that. His complaint over positioning had also announced to every other country that Japan was superior to them—bigger that Silla, better than Parhae, more loved than the Caliphate. He’d make sure everybody knew that.

      After Prince Shōtoku’s death in 622, his former Soga allies were left without stern opposition, and were increasingly pushy in their manipulation of the imperial family. Within a generation, they were attempting to replace the imperial line with their own—a plot that risked compromising Shintō belief in its entirety, since the emperors held their position in part because, as direct and pure descendants of the Sun Goddess, only they were able to communicate with her.

      Before his death, Prince Shōtoku heard the news from China that the Sui dynasty, in which he had invested so much faith and hope, was already falling apart. The Sui emperors had driven their people to the edge with wars of conquest and sweeping reforms, spending money that they did not necessarily have. But Shōtoku also lived just long enough to hear that all was not lost; the Sui emperors had been replaced by their cousins, the sons of the duke of Tang. This new Tang dynasty would be substantially more enduring, and would lead to many more contacts across the strait. A strong, unified China, however, could mean a China with a greater interest in political expansion. Sure enough, it was not long before the Tang Chinese were interfering in the squabbling kingdoms of the Korean peninsula, forming an alliance with Silla and allowing the small state to push against Japan’s ally, Baekje.

      Back in China, the poster boy of the early Tang dynasty was the emperor Taizong (r. 626–49), supposedly the second ruler of his line, but actually so proactive in his father’s revolution that he was just as much the founder of the dynasty. Although he was not his father’s eldest son, Taizong had secured his position in the succession by declaring war on his own brothers and leading armed soldiers against them in a palace putsch. It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that the story of his palace coup would reach Japan, along with all the more genteel elements of Chinese civilization such as Buddhist statues and sutras.

      Although there was a precedent for such behavior in Japanese history, and the country had no need for Chinese inspiration, the story of Taizong may have been a template for the enemies of the Soga clan. Prince Shōtoku’s constitution did not prevent enemies of his clan from having his son murdered. But in 645, the long domination of the Soga family was brought to a crashing halt by a Japanese prince who barged into his mother’s throne room to murder a Soga paterfamilias at the imperial court. When his assassins hesitated, Prince Naka no Ōe took matters into his own hands, badly wounding the hapless Soga leader in front of the empress before pleading his case. When the shocked Empress Kōgyoku backed out of the room, supposedly to consider his appeal, the prince’s allies finally plucked up their courage and hacked their victim to death.

      Kōgyoku was a widow on the throne, powerless without the support of the Soga, who were outnumbered now by her son’s allies among the Nakatomi clan. She tried to abdicate in favor of her son, but the prince instead made her put her brother on the throne so that he could continue to run things without the burden of ceremonial responsibilities. It was under his regency that Japan received another basket of radical decrees, the Taika Reforms, taking Shōtoku’s constitution out of the realm of airy theory and into more concrete, practical solutions.

      Taika means “great change.” Although the reforms were credited to a specific emperor, they derived much of their power from the observations and ideas of an entire generation of Japanese scholars who were newly returned from two decades of studying in China and involved in the establishment of a university in Nara. A series of proclamations, issued on New Year’s Day of 646, established that all land was now the property of the emperor, and that its administrators ruled it merely on his sufferance. This was perhaps the most revolutionary change, although many of the provinces didn’t notice for a while. The reformers did not dare to unseat local headmen, but instead rebranded both them and their responsibilities. Instead of running their own, autonomous holdings, the headmen were now obliged to send quotas of tribute to the court.

      Census takers and recordkeepers were appointed to keep tabs on the use of what was now understood to be imperial land. As appointees, long-term rulers of various districts could now be fired if they failed to fulfil their duties, which now included the sending of taxes and conscript soldiers. This last item was to prove to be the most controversial, and seems to reflect a growing fear among the Japanese that they would soon face conflict in Korea and a possible invasion from the mainland. Able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and fifty-nine were registered as soldiers, although this was often the sum total of their military “‘service,” and they returned home again to their fields. The new rule was so unpopular that many young men effectively abandoned their homes in order to avoid being drafted.

      Ten years later, upon the death of her replacement, Kōgyoku would be placed back on the throne and renamed Empress Saimei. It was only with her death in 661 that her murderous son finally ascended the throne himself after a generation of ruling from behind it. Now in his forties, the former prince Naka no Ōe adopted the imperial name Tenji (r. 661–72). As Japan’s thirty-ninth emperor, Tenji faithfully adhered to the codes set by his predecessors, largely because he had been their secret instigator: the Taika Reforms are remembered as being acts of his mother, even though he was instrumental in their imposition.

      The kingdom of Baekje fell in 660, embroiling the Japanese in a long scheme to back their allies on the mainland by lending military support to an attempted restoration. Empress Saimei had in fact died at a temporary capital on Kyūshū while supposedly overseeing the plans for the great expedition; Tenji was only crowned after bringing his mother’s remains back to the central plain.

      In August of 661, Tenji sent out a fleet carrying 5,000 soldiers ready to support the restoration of his chosen Baekje pretender. Several months later, another 37,000 soldiers were committed to the operation, which would at least explain what happened to all the conscripts netted in the Taika Reforms. It was, however, arguably to be the biggest military disaster in Japanese history until the Second World War. Despite vastly outnumbering the ships and men from Silla and Tang China, the Japanese armada wasted its manpower on ill-judged assaults, and was soon boxed in on the river Geum, where its numerical advantage was squandered. Accounts differ as to the scale of the defeat, but mainland chronicles estimated 10,000 Japanese dead and 400 ships lost. “The flames and smoke rose to scorch the heavens,” reads one of the last entries