A Brief History of Japan. Jonathan Clements

of ancient enmities, but are worth repeating for a glimpse of the stories the Japanese tell themselves about themselves.

      Although the later Nihongi is presented as a straight chronology of a thousand years of wars and deeds, it is far more likely to offer a cluster of separate family lineages that originally happened concurrently: the king-lists of old Yamato; the sagas of the ancestors of the Kyūshū nobility; the last legends of once-proud clans, now invisible beneath new names and alliances. At some point, many may have once regarded themselves as “kings” of one part of Japan or another—Kyūshū, perhaps; the coasts of the Inland Sea; and the Yamato foot-hills. The line from the Sun Goddess did not merely descend through the emperors, but through some nineteen other clans that claimed descent from her children. It may even conceal subtle differences between different kinds of newcomers—we can place no single great cataclysm that may have led to the largest influxes of migrants, but if there were several waves, it is very likely that they came from different Korean kingdoms—particularly Baekje and Silla, depending on which one had the upper hand. There are numerable dynastic spats, usually justifying the accession of a younger heir above his brothers (or, more usually, half-brothers). We might read these incidents as indicators of the tussles behind the scenes between powerful families seeking to influence the next emperor by trying to ensure that his mother comes from their bloodline. If the right fair maiden from the right clan attracted the emperor’s eye at the right time, his eldest son might be easily ousted in favor of the infant child of a new favorite, suitably steerable to ensure further influence at court.

      Certainly, in the ancient tales of sophisticated gods from Heaven locked in battle with snarling, belligerent gods of Earth, we have all the indicators of a story told by the winners in war for control of Japan. But we also have many signs of a story that has been mangled in transmission. With the benefit of digital archives and internet searches, I can tell you the details of my own ancestors stretching back just over a hundred years, but I can tell you of nothing before then save a few misty allusions and rumors. How much harder was it for the chroniclers of the eighth century, describing events up to a millennium in the past, with nothing to go on but hazy memories of lost scrolls?

      For generations to come, lineages of the Japanese nobility were divided into three categories: immigrants, the descendants of emperors, and the descendants of the “gods of heaven and earth.” Perhaps the three sacred treasures of Japan are intended to reflect this tripartite-structured Japan as mirror, sword, and jewel—the later arrivals of the mainland with their fancy Chinese mirror, the earlier invaders with their sword of conquest, and the indigenous people with their sacred comma-shaped jewel, regarded as a symbol of wisdom.

      Tales related to Jinmu may have been the ancient legends and tales associated with the Ōtomo clan, whose ancestral turf was close to the mainland in Kyūshū, and who were therefore liable to have been involved with the first of the conquering newcomers. But the tales of the tenth emperor, Sujin, seem to draw on the lore of the Mononobe clan, a powerful family that was largely outmaneuvered in the politicking of the early Japanese state, and which appeared to have strong connections to assimilated indigenous peoples. It’s not for nothing that Sujin is described as having a council of female shamans, setting a very different policy from the conservative Confucian-influenced newcomers. Sujin’s reign is a time of localizing and confining local kami, suggesting a poetic allusion to the incorporation and pacification of multiple neighboring clans, from whom he collects tribute in meat and textiles.

      Meanwhile, the tales of the fifteenth emperor, Ōjin, seem to cleave closely to the family traditions of the Soga clan, whose strong ties to mainland Asia are reflected in long tangents about diplomacy and cultural exchange.

      One day, someone may finally be able to reconfigure the Nihongi from its current single-strand thousand-year epic form into three or more interlocking sagas, each spanning the same period of two or three centuries, leading up to the historically verifiable moment in 552 CE when Emperor Kinmei (509–71) received a fateful gift of Buddhist treasures from Baekje. In its earlier pages, we see a muddled narrative of acculturation and conquest, as mountain fortresses riddled with kami and demons yield to the march of progress or flee before it. We also hear of the indigenous people, first mentioned as far south as Kyūshū, when Emperor Jinmu declares he has scared away the “Aimishi.” The word is a coinage, bits of classical Chinese stuck together in an attempt to make a sound that did not exist in that language.

      Eleven emperors later, the Nihongi reports on several campaigns of conquest and subjugation by Emperor Keikō, in which he sometimes runs into local barbarians whom he captures and sacrifices, and sometimes runs into locals who welcome him with open arms. The princess Kamu-nashi, for example, “chieftain of that whole country,” comes out to meet him waving a tree branch in truce on which were hung a sword, a mirror, and a jewel. Was the tree branch an actual banner-substitute for the barbarians, or was it a facsimile of the multi-branched ceremonial swords wielded by the Korean newcomers? Regardless, the princess enlists the help of Keikō in putting down “rebels” in her own domain—which, it is implied, is henceforth incorporated into his. Meanwhile, his soldiers embark upon pacification not only of the princess’s enemies, but of some new ones encountered on the way, such as the ominous, cave-dwelling Earth Spiders, who are clubbed with stone maces until the blood runs ankle-deep. His lieutenants report another land apparently in need of some civilizing:

      In the eastern wilds, there is a country called Hitakami [Sun Height]. The people of this country, both men and women, tie up their hair in the form of a mallet, and tattoo their bodies. They are of a fierce temper, and their general name is Emishi [Shrimp Barbarians]. Moreover, their land is wide and fertile. We should attack them and take it.

      Like the Earth Spiders, the Shrimp Barbarians have a name bestowed upon them by their enemies. Possibly it is a reference to their staple food; more likely it is some sort of reference to long whiskers on their menfolk. It could even derive from emushi, which may have been the natives’ word for a sword. The description of them in the Nihongi has enough parallels with accounts in Chinese annals, and with the archaeological record, to confirm what everyone has suspected all along: that the newcomers swiftly assimilated the Jōmon, killing them off or scaring them off their lands to trouble the next generation of conquerors.

      Generations later, Yūryaku (r. 456–79), the twenty-first emperor, would boast in a letter to the Chinese that he and his ancestors had conquered 115 barbarian “nations” of these “Hairy People.” The Japanese would still be discussing their Emishi neighbors in the time of the 38th emperor, Tenji (626–72), whose emissaries to China were recorded in the New History of Tang, and referred to “Shrimp Barbarians” (in Chinese, xiayi). On the borders of the land of Wa, say the Tang annals, there are great mountains (the Japanese Alps?), beyond which are the Hairy People.

      The land of the Shrimp Barbarians is a small country in the island of the sea. Its ambassadors have beards that are four feet long. They draw arrows back to their neck, and placing a gourd on the head of a person dozens of paces away, they hit it without fail.

      Talk of these Emishi disappears almost entirely from the historical record by the time Japan becomes more recognizable to the reader, even though they are integral to the country’s formation. Much of their culture was impermanent; they built in wood and adorned themselves with shells. They did, apparently, raise some impressive stone monuments, accounts of which occasionally crop up in later Japanese annals, but only as they are repurposed. Emishi henges and stone circles, menhirs and stone altars were once found all over Japan, although most of them were ripped up to form the foundations and battlements of medieval castles. The creation of one iconic image of Japan is likely to have involved the destruction of another.

      As collaborators, slaves, and mothers, the Emishi formed a substantial part of the Yamato population, while their ancient traditions, distorted and forgotten, surely formed the building blocks of what is still Japan’s official religion, Shintō, the Way of the Gods. Emishi folktales, and the ghosts of departed tribes, can be heard echoing in Japan’s place-names. Even the modern name of the island of Hokkaidō, the “north-sea-way,” may originate in a mishearing of a more specific term hoku-Ka’i-dō, “the north road to the Shrimp Barbarians.” In centuries to come, whenever the Japanese tried to assert a