names such as Devil-Slave (Kina), Naked (Luo), and Black Teeth (Heichi). Nor is there anything but the vaguest of schematics suggesting where these countries were. The discrepancy between the Chinese league (li) and a far shorter Korean variant has left all distances impossibly confused, but a little triangulation of distances, geography and archaeology suggests that Himiko’s realm was somewhere near the Kansai plain, the site of today’s Ōsaka and Kyōto. Her biggest rivals in the kingdom of Kuna to her south, in what is now Wakayama, are described as fine swimmers and divers, habitually barefoot, with bodies and faces heavily tattooed to ward off sharks and dragons.
Her envoys reached China confident that sorcery would keep them safe. They would travel with a “bearer of mourning,” a designated guardian tasked with remaining chaste, unwashed, and ungroomed as a charm against their safe return. He would be richly rewarded if they came back unharmed; executed on presumption of failed duties if they did not.
Amid the sparse prose of the Chronicle of Wei there are several comments that would echo through the ages. The people of Himiko’s realm, it said, were notably long-lived, often reaching 100 years old. When high-ranking persons walked on the road, commoners were expected to back away into the roadside bushes. Their archers held their bows “below the middle,” evoking images of the distinctive top-heavy Japanese bow. And when her people expressed assent, wrote the Chinese chroniclers, they said “Hai”—as they still do today.
The ruler of the Chinese coasts was pleased to receive emissaries from such a faraway place, and sent a typically condescending thank-you note, in which he appointed Himiko as queen (even though she already was one), and sent her multiple bolts of wool and silk—including some crimson brocades decorated with dragons—a hundred bronze mirrors, and two long swords.
The bearer of mourning plainly did his job, because the ambassadors made it home, returning with another letter from Himiko sometime later that thanked the Chinese for their gifts. The Chinese were asked to arbitrate in a dispute between Yamatai and Kuna, although it is unclear whether a letter from a distant, unseen potentate would have any effect on a local dispute.
Himiko then died.
Classical Chinese is so terse that proximity can imply causality—the text may be intended to suggest that she died because of the dispute, meaning that the emperor’s decree was useless and led to her execution in a coup. Or she may have just died before the message arrived, being notably old by this point. Either way, she was replaced by a teenage girl, confusingly recorded as “a priestess of Himiko”; the Chinese chronicles dispassionately report that a hundred women were sacrificed at Himiko’s funeral.
Over the next few centuries, later Chinese chroniclers would occasionally write about the land across the sea, but it is unclear to what degree they were merely embellishing the assertions made in the Chronicle of Wei. The Book of the Later Han returned to the topic of Himiko, long after her death, to describe her as a shaman-queen with a thousand female attendants and a single male squire who “served her food and drink and communicated her words.” This text also openly assumed that the Japanese aristocracy were descended from the Chinese First Emperor’s legendary expedition—an account that was plainly believed by at least some contemporaries. Further confusion has been caused by the compilers of the Nihongi, who seemed determined to make their narrative fit those few moments of the historical record that could be confirmed through comparison with Chinese chronicles. Excited by tales of the witch-queen Himiko, these compilers appear to have taken the accounts of Empress Jingū, for example, and shoved them in several chapters earlier than they really should have been mentioned, so that a female ruler of Japan would appear in the same period in which such a figure was reported by the Chinese.
Archaeology offers further evidence of the life and culture of these Yamatai peoples. Excavations all over Japan, not merely in the south, point to a culture of foragers initially living close to the coasts and rivers, where their seasonal diet relied heavily on marine produce in the winter months. The seafood, however, would suddenly decline. The late Jōmon period saw a drastic fall in the number of indigenous inhabitants, caused not by war but by a drop in temperature that restricted access to the two main foodstuffs that sustained them in the winter—shellfish and nuts. Northern Honshū, in particular, seemed to have suffered an apocalyptic decline in population from which it took centuries to recover. The population elsewhere rose again thanks to an increased focus on the cultivation of grains, particularly a new arrival from the mainland—rice.
The period from 250 to 700 CE, roughly concurrent with Europe’s Dark Ages, is known in Japanese climatology circles as the Kofun Cold Stage, a dip in temperatures substantially worse than that known in Europe as the “Little Ice Age.” Global temperatures fell, with a mysterious “dry fog” recorded in both China and Europe that reduced the impact of solar radiation for over a decade in the mid-sixth century and led to widespread famines and outbreaks of disease. Japanese weather, too, turned colder and wetter; several archaeological sites have been preserved because they were abandoned after floods.
This period dealt substantial damage to the surviving indigenous peoples of Japan, but allowed the more technically advanced immigrant communities to flourish. By 200 CE, the arrival of iron had brought swift changes to the Japanese realm. The locals continued to build with timber, but were able to access far more of it with the new efficiency of metal tools. Just as modern Japanese cutlery reflects a scarcity of metal—knives and metal implements are used in the kitchen, but not at the table—most of the Yayoi people continued to work with wooden tools, attesting to the rarity of early iron objects. However, many of these wooden tools themselves, such as shovels and rakes, became more widespread and efficient because of the availability of iron tools to make improved versions. Architecture, too, became straighter, as fences and beams were hewn with truer blades. Land was swiftly cleared, and the primeval forests were decimated in the quest for materials, but this also allowed for the development of agriculture on a larger scale.
The trees stayed on the mountainsides, where they kept the soil in place and allowed for reliable amounts of water flowing down the slopes into the new rice paddies. Japan’s volcanic soil was relatively poor for agriculture, but could be tricked into producing higher yields by flooding the fields. Communities that could grow their own food could forge ahead, as could those that stored surplus produce “for evil years.”
The Ise Shrine, one of the most sacred sites in Japan, is particularly useful for understanding the ancient country. Ever since the shrine was first rededicated by Empress Jitō around 692 CE, it has existed in two forms: the “original” wooden thatch-roofed building, and a copy under construction alongside. The shrine is rebuilt as an exact copy of itself every twenty years, echoing a similar narrative of demolition and renewal that seemed to accompany changes in omens or dynasties among the Japanese of the distant past. It also gives us a clue as to the architecture of ancient Japan—sturdy constructions of cypress wood above a ground of white pebbles and around a sacred central pole, with extended finials that give each roof a crossed, horned profile. It is possible that many of the buildings of the ancient Japanese capital looked like these before developments in technology and materials dragged them away from the original plans.
The Kofun period, however, takes its name from a different kind of architecture, the massive “ancient graves” (kofun) that dot the Japanese landscape. The simple, square burial mounds of the Yayoi period give way during the third century CE to huge tumuli featuring a distinctive combination of a rounded top connected to a trapezoid mound. From above, this makes them appear to be shaped like keyholes, and indeed they are often referred to as “keyhole tombs.” Their oldest examples date from the Nara area, but in the ensuing centuries they proliferated elsewhere, implying a dominant aristocracy that took its manpower and customs further and wider.
The contents of the kofun would surely have much to tell us about this period in Japanese history, but their sacred status as the resting places of ancient Japanese “emperors” keeps them largely off limits to archaeological exploration.
