in the Yeong-san river basin in what was once the state of Baekje, implying strong cultural connections between the builders of both.
Although Japan was already occupied from end to end, the narrative in the Yayoi period takes on a new tone. The story of what would become Japan is not now told by the Jōmon peoples, and possibly not even by their most impressive inheritors, the Yamatai. Instead, it becomes a story told by people whose arrival from the mainland is indicated by in the form of a large mound burial in the first century BCE in Kyūshū, the island closest to Korea, and a gold seal from around the same time found in the Fukuoka region.
Chinese chronicles report “disturbances in Wa” around the middle of the second century CE as these new arrivals, armed with iron that cut down both enemies and forests, began to push ever further up the coast. The corpses in their Japanese graves are notably taller than the locals, perhaps explaining why dispatches back to the mainland referred to a land of “dwarves” in the first place. There is a palpable break in the line of Japanese kings around the late fourth century, possibly related directly to unrest on the mainland that saw the collapse of the Kara state, with up to a million refugees arriving in Japan. These migrants, however, appeared to be arriving with their wealth intact, and were soon interfering with and influencing the politics and power struggles of local kingdoms. Some of the indigenous Jōmon people fled north to escape the newcomers, while others seemed to welcome them, even as they were swamped by their numbers. The archaeological record reveals a double impact—first of a huge influx of these new bloodlines, forming 73 percent of the population in some areas—and then of the inevitable increase of the newcomers’ numbers as they bred both among themselves and with the locals.
Where Chinese chronicles once described everyone on the islands as “barbarians,” now there is a new narrative of civilization in the hands of these fresh arrivals, pushing back against the barbarians of the periphery. For centuries thereafter, there would be a frontier in the north—a place where young men might carve out a career on the marchland; where “barbarians” on the edges were divided into the good ones who had assimilated and the bad ones who pushed back. The long march northward would only come to an end in the nineteenth century, when the Japanese staked their claim on the last stretch of wilderness in the far northern island of Hokkaidō. There, the local Ainu people bore an unsurprising resemblance to the original inhabitants of Japan in many of the accounts from the ancient past, now eking out an existence on the very edge of the land that was once theirs.
By the early third century, the keyhole tombs had made it as far as the Kansai plain—the heartland of Queen Himiko’s legendary kingdom. Notably, they contain very few shell bracelets; the old ruling class had been supplanted. Mainland technology and genes soon wormed their way into the local elites. Deforestation rapidly escalated as these newcomers pursued new housing, new land cleared for crops, and new social projects such as dams and dikes.
It is likely that the confused historical record obscures a dual struggle for influence, as the old kingdoms jostled for power and the newcomer elites fought for recognition not only in the community of local kingdoms, but also back on the mainland, where they intervened in Korean politics.
Owing to the muddled condition of Japanese annals, the real dates are impossible to determine. Chroniclers, like readers, are apt to be confused by repetitive accounts of wars across the straits and kings begetting heirs, and are frustrated even further when a quick count soon establishes that these sovereigns appear to have superhuman lifespans, coming to the throne in adulthood and still somehow managing to rule for over a century. Your guess is as good as mine as to how historical a figure the dragon-slayer Yamato Takeru was—probably not all that much, although his son Chūai is another generation closer to the time when the annals were set down. It was the biographers of Chūai’s widow, Jingū, however, who really muddied the waters. The Kojiki reports her setting sail for Silla on the Korean peninsula with an invasion fleet, which speeds across the strait, borne on the backs of helpful fishes and a generous tailwind. The ruler of Silla, seeing this unlikely entourage approaching, does not even bother to fight, but swears allegiance to Jingū, pledging himself as a mere stable-boy to the sovereign of “Heaven,” and vowing that “each and every year, for as long as heaven and earth remain” he will send ship after ship in a constant rotation of tribute, specifically in horses.
The whole story is foggy with poetic license, and so wracked with portents and sorcery, along with strange turnabouts of fate, that one might just as easily interpret it as an account of a Korean invasion of Japan, but it does seem to bear a much closer resemblance to Japanese attitudes substantially later than the chapters in the Kojiki. Move the stories of tribute and alliance later—to, say, 369 CE—and they suddenly bear a much closer resemblance to cross-straits actions reported in Korean annals, as well as in the attitudes and proclamations of the man who was supposedly Jingū’s long-lived grandson, Emperor Nintoku (r. 313–99), who apparently died at age 145. Nintoku was a particularly powerful sovereign who commissioned a number of large public works, including dams to divert troublesome rivers. He also famously permitted his subjects a three-year moratorium on their duties, allowing his own palace to fall into ruins, its thatched roof leaking, while the rest of his country prospered. Such a story sits at odds with the material evidence of huge public projects, not least the 2,000 laborers who spent sixteen years building his supposed gravesite—the Daisenryō Kofun, the largest of all the “keyhole” tombs—in what is now Ōsaka.
The Daisenryō Kofun is, in fact, supposedly one of the three largest tombs in the world, matched only by the famous grave of the First Emperor of China and the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Today it is set in a central pond that is itself ringed by two additional moats. Like many other surviving kofun tombs, it cuts a lush, viridian shock of the ancient past into the modern landscape. It is not open to the public; visitors are permitted to approach no closer than a shrine on the outskirts that looks across the pond. It takes an hour to walk around it, but all you see is a thickly wooded hill across the moat. The best view you will have of this and similar kofun will be from the air as your plane approaches Kansai or Itami airport. You see the endless metropolis stretching toward the hill and then a sudden stark, unexpected flash of green, unbuilt upon, so thickly overgrown with trees that no human can pass. The road curves around it; the locals ignore it. It is as if a piece of Japan had been walled off and abandoned 1,500 years ago, left to the wild.
The Yamato state was powerful enough to establish cross-straits relations with the Korean state of Baekje by 369 CE, in which year there is a record in Baekje’s imperial chronicles of an imperial gift bestowed upon the “ruler of Wa.” It was an unwieldy ceremonial seven-branched sword. Korean chronicles also report multiple raids by the people of Wa; either pirate attacks or sanctioned military incursions, or both. Japan’s own chronicle, the Nihongi, is similarly focused on Korea during the period, noting that the state of Silla was expected to provide tribute to Japan, and that its failure to do so led to punitive raids around 365.
The Gwanggaeto Stone, a monument unearthed in 1883 in what is now northeast China, refers to several events in the fourth century that suggest increased Japanese involvement on the Korean peninsula. It claims that around 391 CE, the “Wae robbers” came across the sea, “destroyed” the kingdoms of Baekje and Silla, and had to be met with armed resistance from the kingdom of Goguryeo.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the provenance of the Gwanggaeto Stone is caught up in the politics of the time in which it was discovered, a mere two years after the face of Empress Jingū, or at least an artist’s best guess at it, had appeared on the newly issued one-yen banknote. The stone was found by a Japanese military officer, who was accused by later Korean scholars of doctoring the stone with a chisel to imply a significantly greater “Wae” presence on the mainland than was originally intended. It certainly seems odd that the stone would talk about the Japanese having “destroyed” both Baekje and Silla when both kingdoms were plainly not destroyed at all; and strange indeed that the same sentence has two missing characters, suspiciously etched away by unknown forces, which presumably once mentioned the state of Kara. It seems far more likely that the
