A Brief History of Japan. Jonathan Clements

been touched by tragedy, and corpses still lay strewn about like scattered straw.”

      “There is nothing more to be done,” reads the Nihongi. “This day the name of Baekje has become extinct.” There are those who believe that the people of Baekje and the people of Japan had such a close ethnic and linguistic affinity that they were indistinguishable from one another. The fall of Baekje led to one last influx of several thousand refugees from the mainland, including the surviving members of the Baekje royal family, who were welcomed as noble relatives. Their ranks were carried across to the Japanese court, and their descendants formed a new clan in Japan, the “Kings of Baekje” (Kudara no Konishiki), whose leaders would be significant players in Japan’s subsequent northern frontier wars. Thereafter, however, Japan was cut off from its main source of mainland culture. Several decades of absorbing every aspect of Sino-Korean society came to a sudden halt, while the Japanese considered the likelihood of a counterattack from across the Korea Strait.

      In fact—and not for the last time—the breadth of the Korea Strait proved just wide enough to prevent military actions, and the Japanese were left in peace. By the 670s, Silla and Tang China had gone to war with each other; Silla had forced the Chinese out of Korea; and the flashpoint lay between those two powers, on their shared border, rather than being directed across the Korea Strait at Japan. The Japanese, however, took more than twenty years to work this out, and spent the next generation making preparations for an invasion that never came.

      In 667, Emperor Tenji moved his capital up to Ōtsu on the western shore of Lake Biwa. The Japanese capital moved fifteen times in the seventh century, in part because early Japanese towns relied heavily on wood as building material and fuel, and the depletion of nearby forests may have made it more economical to simply switch locations every few years. But Tenji’s move, which took him into the ancestral heartland of Korean émigré clans loyal to the throne, may have also been a strategic move, creating a more defensible position to ward against possible invasion from the mainland.

      We must read between the lines of Emperor Tenji’s odd behavior in the seventh century, as he appeared to broker dynastic ties with his own half-brother, a man who had shocked the court at Tenji’s own coronation banquet by pointedly stabbing the floor with a spear. Tenji had grabbed at his sword and had to be restrained by his chief minister—hardly a sign of a happy family. As if the imperial clan were not already perilously inbred, Tenji arranged marriages between many of his children and their own cousins, seemingly in an attempt to establish a new tradition. Tenji wanted his successor to be entirely imperial, descended in both the maternal and paternal lines from former emperors without any outside influence.

      He didn’t get quite what he wanted. The half-brother himself seized the throne from Tenji’s son and heir, ruling from 673 to 686 as the fortieth emperor, Tenmu. He was married to his own niece, Emperor Tenji’s daughter, who would succeed him in her own right to reign from 686 to 697 as Empress Jitō. Under their reigns, Buddhism was pushed even further onto the Japanese people, in part as a new means of establishing control in the outlying regions: temples were set up; repeated rituals that also emphasized the power of the sovereign were promoted; and the copying of sutras was promised. By the time Empress Jitō died, her court was directly funding 545 temples in the Yamato region.

      The Tang dynasty did not merely inspire Japanese princes to take matters into their own hands and Japanese empresses to rule in their own name. It also led to one of the farthest-reaching and longest-lasting cultural impacts upon Japan. Instead of the trickle of rumours and artifacts from Korea, the Tang dynasty led to direct Japanese contacts with the Chinese capital at Chang-an (modern Xi’an), and an onslaught of culture and trends.