The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1: Ancient Japan
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THE YAYOI PERIOD 107
yet organized their social life around the cultivation of
rice.
The strong-
est federation, located in the Nara basin of central Japan, subsequently
developed into the Yamato state, whose leaders figured prominently in
the history of Japan and buried their predecessors in huge mounds
(kofun.)
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CHAPTER
2
THE YAMATO KINGDOM
The Yamato kingdom appeared on the Nara plain of central Japan
between about
A.D.
250 and 300 and, during the next three centuries,
passed through successive stages of vigor, expansion, and disruption.
Because its "great kings"
(dkimi)
1
were buried in large mounds, these
years are commonly designated the Burial Mound {kofun)
2
period.
That was when farmers converted vast tracts of virgin land into rice
fields;
immigrants from northeast Asia introduced advanced tech-
niques of production from the continent; soldiers rode horses and
fought with iron weapons; armies subjugated most of Japan and ex-
tended their control to neighboring regions on the Korean peninsula;
and kings dispatched diplomatic missions to distant courts of Korea
and China. But because no written Japanese records of that day have
been preserved, and Korean and Chinese accounts do not tell us much
about contemporary life on the Japanese islands, the Yamato period
has long been considered a dark and puzzling stretch of prehistory.
Until the close of World War II, Japanese historians tended to think
of this period as a time when the "unbroken" imperial line was mysteri-
ously and wondrously formed. But postwar scholars have discovered
new written evidence, seen historical significance in massive archaeo-
logical finds, and viewed the whole of ancient Japanese life from differ-
ent angles. Egami Namio, for example, used Korean sources and the
findings of archaeologists to develop the thesis that in this period
1 The Yamato rulers were called "great kings," a literal translation of the word
dkimi
found in
two fifth-century inscriptions, on a sword found in the Eda Funa-yama burial mound in
Kumamoto Prefecture and on a sword excavated from the Inari-yama burial mound in Saitama
Prefecture. Although we have no proof that the word was used during earlier years of the
Yamato period, the construction of huge mounds in the southeastern corner of Yamato after
the middle of the third century suggests the appearance of rulers who may well have been
called something like dkimi. Not until the Taiho code of 701 do we have evidence that a
Japanese ruler was called an emperor or empress
(tenno).
See Kamada Motokazu, "Oken to be
min sei," in
Genshi
kodai,
vol.
1
of Rekishigaku kenkyu kai and Nihonshi kenkyu kai, eds.,
Koza:
Nihon
rekishi
(Tokyo:
Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1984), pp. 233-4.
2 The word
kofun
(ancient mounds)
is
commonly applied only to the huge burial mounds built in
Yamato after the middle of the third century. Archaeologists have, however, found earlier
mounds to which they refer as
funkyu-bo
(knoll mounds).
IO8
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THE YAMATO KINGDOM 109
Japan came to be ruled by horse-riding warriors who had invaded the
islands from north Asia,3 and Ishimoda Sho reexamined ancient
sources and found a heroic
age.*
But our knowledge of what was really
occurring between the rule in the third century of Queen Himiko
(reported in the
Wei chih)
and the reign from 592 to 628 of Empress
Suiko (who reestablished relations with China) continued to be quite
hazy and imprecise.
Much new research has been done in the last two or three decades,
permitting us to see at long last the general outlines of a process by
which clan control in the third century was replaced by a sinicized,
bureaucratic state in the seventh century. Probably no other period in
Japanese history has been subjected to so much illumination in such a
short time. The new light has come from a number of directions.
First, numerous historians - freed from prewar restraints against the
critical study of Japan's sacred origins - have analyzed eighth-century
chronicles, attempting to distinguish myth from history and to assess
interactions between the two.5 Other historians have looked closely at
diverse sources and seen the rise and expansion of Yamato from a
"broad East Asian perspective.
6
Religious historians, mythologists,
3 Egami Namio, in his Kiba
minzoku
kokka (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1967), used archaeological,
mythological, and historical data on early non-Japanese peoples of northeast Asia to support
his conclusion that Sujin was a Korean king who invaded Japan with horse-riding soldiers
during the first half of the fourth century and that the Yamato state was founded in the last half
of the fourth century when the Kyushu center of power was moved to central Japan. His basic
thesis has been further developed, with an extensive use of Korean sources, by Gari Ledyard
in "Galloping Along with the Horse-Riders: Looking for the Founders of
Japan,"
Journal of
Japanese Studies 1 (1975): 217-54. Recent archaeological investigations of ancient mounds
located in southeastern section of the Nara plain suggest that Yamato came into existence long
before the final years of the fourth century, but they provide no convincing evidence that this
kingdom was created by foreign invaders. This and other weaknesses of the Egami thesis were
revealed in Walter Edwards, "Event and Process in the Founding of
Japan:
The Horserider
Theory in Archaeological
Perspective,"
Journal of Japanese Studies 9 (Summer 1983): 265-95;
and in Edward Kidder, Jr., "The Archaeology of the Early Horse-Riders in Japan," Transac-
tions
of
the
Asiatic Society of Japan 20,3rd series (1985): 89-123. Egami nevertheless sharpened
interest in continental cultural influence on Japanese life during the Yamato period.
4 In his Nihon no kodai kokka (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), Ishimoda Sho concluded that
Japan's heroic age came between the third and fifth centuries. Ishimoda made important
contributions that have been clouded by disputes over the definition of terms and periods and
overshadowed by massive amounts of new archaeological data.
5 Ueda Masaaki provides an excellent summary in his Okimi no seiki, vol. 2 of
Nihon
no
rekishi
(Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1975). Important studies can be found in Kodai, vols. 2-4 of Asao
Naohiro, Ishi Susumu, Inoue Mitsusada, Oishi Kaichiro, et al., eds., Iwanami koza: Nihon
rekishi
(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975-76). Cornelius J. Kiley carefully analyzed kinship and
state development in his "State and Dynasty in Arcahic
Yamato,"
Journal
of Asian Studies 33
(November 1973): 25-49.
6 A pioneer work is Kito Kiyoaki's Nihon kodai kokka no keisei to
higashi
Ajia (Tokyo: Azekura
shobo, 1976). Suzuki Yasutami has outlined recent studies of early Japanese history from an
East Asian perspective, in his "Ajia shominzoku no kokka keisei to Yamato oken," Genshi-
kodai, vol. 1 of Koza:
Nihon-rekishi
(Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1984), pp. 193-232.
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IIO THE YAMATO KINGDOM
and folklorists have also helped us understand that even agricultural
production and military expansion were then intertwined with the
worship of kami (deities). See Chapter 6. But by far the greatest
contributions have been made by archaeologists who have meticu-
lously investigated thousands of burial and village sites all over Japan
and compared their findings with the results of excavations made in
Korea and China.
7
Other scholars have reexamined these new data
and detected, in their search for meaning and wholeness, distinct
patterns of social and cultural change.
8
Utilizing the results of such research, we can now identify three
major currents of change in the Yamato period. The first, lasting for
around 150 years, took place when the Yamato kingdom flourished.
The second, with its high tide appearing in the
fifth
century, came when
the expanding power of the Yamato kings was manifested in overseas
military campaigns, in the construction of impressive mounds contain-
ing iron weapons and horse gear, and in the development of extensive
irrigation systems. The third current, coming in the turbulent sixth
century, arrived when Yamato's
kings,
faced with setbacks at home and
threatening situations abroad, became preoccupied with such imported
administrative techniques
as
reading and writing, bookkeeping and the
registration of householders, and higher forms of Chinese learning.
YAMATO VIGOR
Although the Yamato kingdom seems to have had no official relations
with Chinese or Korean courts during its first century and a half of
vigorous growth, evidence from archaeological sites reveals deep and
wide-ranging continental influence.
The situation in
northeast
Asia
After the breakup of the later Han empire in
A.D.
220, a number of
short-lived kingdoms arose in different regions of
China.
Two were in
contact with queens who ruled petty states in western Japan before the
rise of Yamato in central Japan: the kingdom of
Wei
(221 to 265) that
exchanged missions with the famous Himiko, and the Western Chin
(265 to 317) that was in contact with Himiko's female successor. But
7 Major studies of the last decade are listed in the archaeology sections of An Introductory
Bibliography for Japanese Studies (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1974-84), vols. 1-4, pt. 2.
8 An especially valuable recent study is Shiraishi Taiichiro's "Ninon kofun bunka ron," in
Genski-kodai, vol. 1, pp. 159-232.
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YAMATO VIGOR III
the collapse of Western Chin at about the time Yamato came into
existence was hastened by invasions of nomadic tribes from the north,
a disruption that was followed by the rise and fall of one kingdom after
another and that continued until the close of the sixth century. For the
last two or more centuries of the Yamato period, no Chinese ruler was
in a position to exchange diplomatic missions with kings as far away as
Japan.
And yet Chinese cultural achievements continued to affect Japanese
life in fundamental ways. Political dislocation within China may have
accelerated the outward flow of Chinese techniques and knowledge.
The incursion of nomadic tribes from the north seems to have forced
many cultured Chinese with ties to defeated regimes to seek refuge in
Korea and possibly Japan. Moreover, the destruction of Chinese colo-
nies in Korea at the beginning of the fourth century was clearly fol-
lowed by an exodus of Chinese to the islands of Japan. Although the
channels of cultural flow from China in those early years cannot be
accurately charted, it is becoming increasingly clear that most conti-
nental advances were introduced through Korea. Still, the imports
were definitely Chinese in origin and character. It is thus generally
agreed that in these first years of the Yamato period, as well as in
earlier and later times, Japan lay within the Chinese cultural orbit.
In
313,
just four years before the collapse of the Chinese court of the
Western Chin, the old Chinese Lo-lang colony in north Korea was
destroyed by Koguryo, the first of the three independent Korean
kingdoms to emerge during the fourth century. Shortly after that,
Paekche became prominent in the southwest, having amassed enough
military power by 371 to invade Koguryo, enter the enemy capital,
and kill its king. But Koguryo survived and became stronger. After
being subjected to this humiliating defeat, Koguryo introduced forms
of Chinese learning and control (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Chi-
nese penal and administrative law) similar to those that, about two
hundred years later, transformed the upper layers of Japanese society.
Then during the last half of the fourth century, a third Korean king-
dom appeared. This was Silla, the closest of the three to Yamato, on
the southeast part of the peninsula.
Very little is known about political or military relations between
these Korean kingdoms and Yamato during the first half of the fourth
century, but in 414 a stone monument was erected in north Korea, on
which was inscribed an eighteen-hundred-character memorial to King
Kwanggaet'o of Koguryo who had died the previous year. The inscrip-
tion's middle section, in which the king's exploits are detailed, con-
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112 THE YAMATO KINGDOM
tains praise of his 399 victory against Japanese invaders. Although
there is considerable disagreement about what was actually written
and meant there - some scholars even claim that Wo (Japanese: Wa)
did not refer to people residing on the Japanese islands - the reference
suggests that Yamato had gained enough strength by the end of the
fourth century to dispatch armies across the Tsushima Straits to Ko-
rea.
9
Overseas military activity of this type is corroborated somewhat
by traditions and myths concerning a female Yamato ruler, the famous
Queen Jingu, who must have lived at about that time and who is said
to have received help and guidance from various kami while personally
leading an expeditionary force against the Korean kingdom of Silla.
10
New archaeological data provide convincing evidence that many
areas of cultural life on the Japanese islands were being profoundly
altered at that time by innovations introduced through the Korean
peninsula, giving the entire Yamato period a Korean and northeast
Asian coloration that is clearly seen in artifacts, burial practices, ritu-
als,
myths, and language, a coloration surely not created by sporadic
military expeditions or diplomatic missions alone but by sizable migra-
tions as well. Therefore when concluding that Japan lay within the
Chinese cultural orbit in that early part of the Yamato period, as well
as before and later, one should remember that contact with the Chi-
nese center was mainly through the sinified kingdoms of Korea.
Ancient mounds
Because our principal source of information about Japanese life during
the Yamato period comes from burial mounds built for deceased lead-
ers,
historians have given special attention to their nature, contents,
and distribution. Scholars who have studied burial practices all over
the world note, first, that large mounds were constructed for deceased
rulers in other parts of the world when and where kingdoms were
emerging under hereditary rule. In China, for example, huge mounds
9 See Ueda, Okimi no seiki, pp. 191-205 for a review of evidential problems. Lee Chin-hui,
"K6tai-6 hi to shichishito," in Kodai Nihon to
Chosen
bunka (Tokyo: Purejidentosha, 1979),
pp.
95-132, criticized traditional Japanese interpretations; Takeda Yukio reexamined earlier
views in "Kokaido-6 hibun shinbo nenjo no saigimmi," in Inoue Mitsusada hakushi kanreki
kinen kai, ed., Kodai shi
ronso
(Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 48-84.
10 The Nihon shoki devotes Book 9 to her reign, Sakamoto Taro, Ienaga Saburo, Inoue
Mitsusada, and One Susumu, et al., eds., Nihon koten bungaku laikei (hereafter cited as
NKBT) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967), vol. 67, pp. 330-61. W. G. Aston, trans., Nihongi,
Chronicles
of Japan from
the Earliest Time to
A.D.
6*97
(hereafter cited as Aston) (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1956), pt. I, pp. 224-53. The Kojiki treatment is in bk. 2, NKBT 1.229-38;
translated by Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, and
Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 262-71.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
YAMATO VIGOR 113
were erected as early as the closing years of the Spring and Autumn
period (721 to 481 B.C.). In Korea, too, they were constructed for the
burial of kings who ruled each of the three kingdoms that arose and
flourished in the fourth century A.D., just when Yamato was expand-
ing under rulers who built enormous mounds for their deceased prede-
cessors. Although the mounds of each region had their own special
character, those erected in Japan and Korea (especially in Paekche and
Silla) during the fourth century were enough alike to suggest both a
parallel process of political centralization and a continuous and direct
flow of cultural imports from Korea to central Japan.
These large mounds did not suddenly appear in Japan at the begin-
ning of the Yamato period, however. Shiraishi Taichiro reports that
rather large ones were constructed on hills or knolls - a characteristic
feature of the early Yamato mounds - during the last part of the
previous Yayoi period. These were usually square in shape and sur-
rounded by moats, not unlike those found at that time and earlier in
China and north Asia. Toward the middle years of Yayoi - still a
century or so before the rise of the Yamato kingdom in central Japan -
such knoll mounds
(funkyubo)
were built in a zone extending from
Chugoku and Shikoku in the west to the Kanto plain in the north-
east.
11
Tsude Hiroshi points out that the digging of moats around
knoll mounds in middle Yayoi times had been paralleled by the prac-
tice of surrounding a village with a ditch, dirt wall, or board fence and
that this had been a Chinese custom since the disturbed centuries that
preceded the founding of the Han dynasty in 206
B.C.
Tsude surmises
that although these defenses in Yayoi Japan may have been installed to
protect a village against floods and wild animals, they were also meant
to protect the village from human enemies. Such defense works sug-
gest that individual relationships within the community were already
becoming close, and external relations tense, long before third-
century Chinese chronicles report endemic military strife on the Japa-
nese islands.
12
The knoll mounds of late Yayoi were not only quite large, ranging
between forty and eighty meters long, but had other characteristics of
a Yamato period mound. In addition to being built on a knoll or hill, a
few had the keyhole shape long thought to be a unique feature of the
later Yamato mounds. Moreover, many pre-Yamato knoll mounds had
horizontal stone cists for the burial of
one
particular person, and some
11 Shiraishi, "Nihon kofun bunka ron," pp. 161-2.
12 Tsude Hiroshi, "Noko shakai no keisei," in
Genshi-kodai,
pp. 131-6.
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114 THE YAMATO KINGDOM
were surrounded by clay tubes of
a
type later called
haniwa.
1
^
Such a
late Yayoi knoll mound has been found at the Makimuku site in
Sakurai in Nara Prefecture (quite close to the early Yamato burial
mounds) and also as far east as Ichihara in Chiba Prefecture. Some
historians are inclined to think that these large knoll mounds should
be classified as Yamato, but Shiraishi believes that they were made for
leaders at a pre-Yamato stage of centralization, for leaders who had
brought several agricultural communities (possibly all those in one
valley) under their control but had not yet accumulated power and
authority equal to that of a Yamato king. And yet these earlier knoll
burials leave the impression that an ideology of hereditary control had
begun to emerge, for they were clearly places to perform rites centered
on sacred ties between living and deceased as well as between rulers
and their divine ancestors.
1
*
The Shiki
center
Most of what we know about the first century of the Yamato period
comes from archaeological discoveries made in the southeastern corner
of the Nara plain, in the Shiki area at the base of Mt. Miwa (see Map
2.1).
These discoveries were made largely at, or in the neighborhood
of, six mounds built between about
A.D.
250 and 350 and in the
following order: (1) the Hashihaka in the city of Sakurai, 280 meters
long; (2) the Nishitonozuka in the city of Tenri, 230 meters; (3) the
Tobi Chausu-yama of Sakurai, 207 meters; (4) the Mesuri-yama of
Sakurai, 240 meters, (5) the Ando-yama (now referred to as the Sujin
tomb) in Tenri, 240 meters; and (6) the Shibutani Muko-yama (known
as the Keiko tomb), 310 meters. Although these six mounds, like a
few earlier knoll burials, have the famous keyhole shape as well as
horizontal stone chambers, they also have other features that permit us
to associate their construction with the emergence of
the
Yamato king-
dom. First, they are exceptionally large: Each of the six is at least
twice as large as any mound found in Korea. Second, they all were
13 A spectacular pre-Yamato knoll burial was found at the Tatetsuki site near Kurashiki in
Okayama Prefecture. The main portion of the square mound is forty meters across but has
projections on opposite sides that increase its width to between seventy and eighty meters. At
the top of the mound are five stone pillars with carved surface designs, and the mound is
surrounded by two rows of rocks with small stones spread between. It was for multiple
burials but had a special place for a wooden coffin that included various jewels and an iron
sword. Kondo Yoshiro's report is summarized in Shiraishi, "Nihon kofun bunka ran," p.
162.
14 Ibid., pp. 163-5. No clear connections have been made between pre-Yamato knoll mounds
and the "country of Yamatai" mentioned in the
Wei
shu,
or between Yamatai and Yamato.
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YAMATO VIGOR
115
.v
. -
Map 2.1 Shrines and burial mounds, Yamato. (Based on Nihon
rekishi
chizu,
1986, Map 8.)
built, one after another, in the Shiki area. And third, they contained
impressive coffins made of split bamboo and pine and are surrounded
by large numbers of
mirrors,
weapons, tools, and ornaments. In sum,
the discovery of
a
series of such huge mounds built in the same Shiki
area roughly between
A.D.
250 and 350 leaves little doubt that they
were for successive rulers of a new and expanding Yamato kingdom.
Earlier Yayoi knoll mounds had been for leaders of federations of
agricultural communities, but these later Yamato mounds, even in the
early part of this period, were for a line of powerful priest-kings who
stood high above all people in an increasingly large part of the Japa-
nese islands.
1
'
Studies made by Tsude Hiroshi help us understand that the rise and
rapid growth of Yamato was made possible by a sharp increase in
agricultural production. His investigations of developments in the use
of iron for making agricultural tools, techniques for leveling off and
irrigating fields for wet-rice agriculture, and the expansion of upland
15 Ibid., pp.
170-1.
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Il6 THE YAMATO KINGDOM
farming lead him to conclude that the last part of the third century was
a time of explosive agricultural growth.
16
This seems to have enabled
Yamato kings to marshal the human and physical resources needed for
constructing huge mounds, undertaking ambitious military campaigns
into distant parts of the country, and extending their control, before
the close of the fourth century, to territory as far away as the Korean
peninsula.
At the Makimuku site in the present city of Sakurai, where two of
these six burial mounds are located, pottery had been found dating
back to preagricultural times, that is, several hundred years before the
first Yamato mounds were built. About 150 meters west of these pre-
Yamato digs, archaeologists have found two irrigation ditches about 6
meters wide and between 1.3 and 1.5 meters deep in which were
several early Yamato pots.
17
Such finds suggest that stable communi-
ties had existed in this part of the Nara plain before the appearance of
the Yamato kingdom and that the rise of Yamato was indeed abetted
by a sharp increase in rice productivity resulting, in part at least, from
the introduction of improved methods of keeping rice fields flooded
during the growing season.
As has been generally true of the rise of kingdoms in other parts of
the world, the birth of
Yamato
around the last half of the third century
was intimately connected with the worship of local deities (kami),
giving the Yamato kings both sacral and secular functions. By study-
ing myths that were continuously recast and revised before existing
versions were written down at the beginning of
the
eighth century and
by searching for the meaning of materials excavated from neighboring
religious sites, historians are beginning to detect a pattern of interac-
tion between the rule of early Yamato rulers and the worship of the
kami believed to reside on Mt. Miwa.
Ancient myths and traditions indicate that Mt. Miwa was (and still
is) a sacred mountain where particularly powerful kami were wor-
shiped, and now archaeological investigations reveal that all six of
these burial mounds were built at the foot of Mt. Miwa. Even before
historians were certain that Yamato's earliest kings had any special
connection with the kami residing on Mt. Miwa, they had become
interested in the Omiwa Shrine - the major religious institution for
the worship of the Mt. Miwa kami - as this was clearly a place where
ancient rites have been preserved. These historians seem to have been
16 Tsude, "Nogyo shakai no keisei," pp.
121-31.
17 Archaeological findings are summarized in Ueda, Okimi
no
seiki,
pp. 56-87.
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