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 unique sense of Japaneseness, a declaration that they were somehow different or superior to the cultures of the mainland, they would cast aside the inheritances of Chinese bronze and Korean steel, silk brocades, Buddhism and Tang architecture, Chinese literature and poetry…and what would they be left with? Strip away China and Korea, and you also strip away many of the ancestors of the Japanese themselves. The very core of the Japanese spirit, its very essence even today, is the ghost of the Emishi.
Yamato Takeru, said to have flourished in the first century CE, was a prince of the proto-Japanese who killed his own brother and was banished by his father to the borderlands, where he vanquished various enemies. His aunt, the chief priestess at Ise Shrine, gave him the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven that was once ripped from the tail of a dead serpent by the god Susano’o. Trapped in burning grassland by a treacherous local warlord, Yamato Takeru used the sword to slash his way out of the fire, thereby giving it the name by which it would be known thereafter: Grass Cutter (Kusanagi).
But while Yamato Takeru was legendary, his time saw communications from real residents of Japan with the elites that then claimed to rule China. In 238 CE, emissaries arrived in China from Himiko (“Princess of the Sun”), the queen of Yamatai, a kingdom likely to have been on the Kansai plain west of Japan’s Central Alps. They are probably responsible for much of what ancient chroniclers have to say about their homeland, which is described as a mountainous territory to the “southeast of Korea”—the Korea Strait being the shortest and most obvious means of reaching it.
Much ink has been spilled over Himiko, who may have been a witch-queen “deft in the way of the gods,” or possibly a sun-priestess and figurehead. Himiko may not even have been a name, but a title, a contraction of the Japanese for “majestic woman,” himemikoto. It may even have been a corruption of a term in Japanese that refers to a sister–brother pair ruling as a princess and prince: hime-hiko. Whoever she was, her interest in communicating with an unseen Son of Heaven more than a thousand miles away betrays a respect for and awareness of China that may have derived from contacts with the edges of the Chinese realm.
Despite all the descriptions of Queen Himiko in Chinese accounts, there is no mention of her in the chronicles commissioned by the rulers of Japan in the early eighth century. Had she already been forgotten, or was she hidden in the ancient accounts under another name? Perhaps she was Heaven Shining (Amaterasu), the capricious Sun Goddess who dominates early Japanese legend. Perhaps she was Divine Merit (Jingū), the ancient warrior-queen who was said to have been possessed by the Sun Goddess, and who supposedly led a successful war against Korea. Perhaps she was one of several shamanic seers mentioned in the kingly list as helpmeets to male rulers.
To the authors of the Chronicle of Wei, a third-century Chinese annal, Himiko was the queen of what was probably the largest of some thirty kingdoms in the archipelago, with a population of 70,000 families. Although there has long been disagreement about the precise location of her domain, the fact that the vast bulk of the Kofun-era tomb mounds are in the Ōsaka–Nara area suggests that she lived there, somewhere in the watershed of the Yamato river. The ancient place-names of the area evoke a Tolkienesque time of simplicity: the Gateway to the Mountains (Yamato) river pierces the hills that divide the plain from north to south at a place called the Great Pass (Ōsaka). To the north is the Good Flat Ground (Nara). At the edges: Mountain Back (Yamashiro), the Splendid Land (Iga) and the Sacred Streams (Ise). The many rivers of the area flow down toward the Riversides (Kawachi), where they meet the sea at the Wavecrest (Naniwa) and the Clear Coves (Suminoe).
The Chinese chroniclers mention a veritable Scrabble-bag of twenty other forgotten kingdoms in Japan, with names like Shima and Ihaki, Kokata and Kanasana. These names seem to have been meaningless to the Chinese, assembled from characters that approximated the sounds in a language that
