others.
The stone goes on to record some two dozen castle names, each presumably the site of a battle, before Baekje formed a new alliance with the “Wae” in 399 in an attack on Silla, for which Goguryeo was called in to the rescue. This would seem to dovetail with Baekje’s own annals, which record that King Asin’s eldest son, Prince Jeonji (Straight-Branch), had been sent to Yamato as part of a hostage exchange. This Jeonji would return home in 405 after his father’s death with an honor guard of a hundred Japanese troops—which turned out to be more than merely ceremonial when the prince discovered that his uncle had seized the throne. Jeonji and his Japanese escort then camped on an island, waiting for matters to take their course. During this interval, in an odd moment of historical inaction, the “populace of the kingdom” then killed the usurper for him. The same story, in a garbled form, appears in the Japanese Nihongi—but 120 years too early, adding further fuel to the idea that the dates in that narrative are all over the place. In repositioning the life of Empress Jingū, the compilers of Japan’s chronicles seem to have also dragged the lives of her son and grandson far away from their original placement.
The Kojiki similarly has a lot to say about Korean matters, seemingly out of chronological order, noting, “Also, many people came across the sea from Silla. Thus the mighty one…conscripted them to build dikes in the manner of overseas and thereby made ‘Baekje Pond’.” The story matches neatly with the tales of dam-building and large public works in the realm of the emperor Nintoku, who died in 399, but similarly places them over a century too early. Also placed way too early in the Kojiki is the account of a Korean prince called Sunspear arriving in Japan with strings of jewels, mirrors, and scarves with magical powers.
The Baekje annals are a veritable Yamato love-in during King Jeonji’s reign. In 409, the Yamato court sends King Jeonji a gift of “night-shining pearls” (thought to be a poetic term for any kind of glittering gem). In 418, Jeonji sent Yamato a gift of ten rolls of white silk. And horses—always horses, a promise backed up by the archaeological record of Yamato graves.
Although imperial graves may not be opened, some were stumbled across by accident and subjected to rescue archaeology in modern times. Early tombs from this period contain peaceful items: comma-shaped stones denoting authority, forked ceremonial swords, and mirrors from distant China. Some of the latter may even have been the self-same mirrors mentioned in the Chronicle of Wei, passed on as heirlooms and eventually buried with particular aristocrats. But from around 500 CE, the contents take a turn for the warlike. We suddenly find aristocrats buried with axes and swords, armor and helmets. From the 450s onwards, the graves of Japanese aristocrats are also found containing saddles, bridles, and other items associated with horses—both horses and cattle having been introduced from the mainland.
Nor should we assume that the newcomers considered themselves to be forever free of their mainland attachments. There is evidence in chronicles from both sides of the Korea Strait that the Yamato people traded with their cousins for military manpower, scribes and ironware. Yamato’s Hanzei emperor (r. 406–11) applied to the Chinese court to be officially called the “Supreme General Who Maintains Peace in the East, Commanding with a Battle-Ax All Military Affairs in the Six Countries of Wa, Baekje, Silla, Imna [Mimana/Kara], Chin-Han, and Mok-Han.” This suggests that, for a moment at least, a Japanese ruler considered himself to be the overlord not only of Japan, but of much of southern Korea. The Chinese fobbed him off with just plain “General Who Maintains Peace in the East,” but did eventually grant a similar title to his son, the Ingyō emperor (r. 412–53), shortly before his death.
By the sixth century, the administration in Yamato was robust enough to plan ahead for disaster relief—the first reference to public granaries in the Nihongi dates to 536 CE, the year in which the European chronicler John of Ephesus wrote: “The sun became dark, and its darkness lasted for eighteen months.” Korean chronicles spoke of a decade of wars and invasions. In Japan, the aged Senka emperor issued a telling decree: “Food is the basis of the Empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving and cold?”
His words, in the Nihongi, allude to starvation conditions on the Korean mainland, and the prospect of a new refugee crisis calling for food supplies to be sent to north Kyūshū. Soon afterwards, the Japanese annals record ambassadors from the mainland offering “tribute,” and conversations among the Yamato courtiers about the prospect of seizing the opportunity to invade the mainland.
In 552, the king of Baekje caused a stir by sending some special gifts across the strait: a bronze statue of Buddha chased in gold, along with attendant banners; and a stash of sutras, the precious Chinese translations of the original Buddhist scriptures. This was not the first time that Buddhist items had reached Japan, but previous missionaries or contacts had achieved little. This king was looking for some serious cooperation in his quarrels with the neighboring kingdom of Silla, and plainly hoped that Buddhist artifacts would go down well overseas as emblems of belonging to some sort of club. Buddhism, of course, was all the rage in China now, and was seen as a symbol of contemporary sophistication.
The arrival of this embassy sparked an explosive scandal, which is likely to have had very little to do with religion and everything to do with the one-upsmanship of certain noble families at the court who were seeking rank and position and arguing over whether intervention or isolation was the best policy toward the Korean peninsula. Emperor Kinmei’s ministers immediately began bickering about omens and portents and perceived threats to the local religion, suggesting the continuing existence of ancient enmities and rivalries at court, shakily held alliances and dynastic pacts stretching back into the mythical past.
Emperor Kinmei, says the Nihongi, was enchanted by the foreign paraphernalia, pronouncing it to be “of a severe dignity which We have never seen before.” Sensing an opportunity, Soga no Iname—who was not only the emperor’s pro-intervention chief minister but also the father of two of his wives—agreed with his august opinion and noted that Buddhism was swiftly attaining prominence on the continent as the religion of choice. If Buddhism were welcomed at the court, it could lead to closer contacts with the mainland.
But Soga was not the only wily schemer who saw his chance. Representatives of two other clans, the Nakatomi and the Mononobe, sensed that the emperor was inviting dissenting opinions. Whereas the Soga clan had strong connections to the mainland, and still had relatives and contacts there, their rivals were drawn from clans “descended from the gods,” who were likely to have been connected to the indigenous people assimilated by earlier invaders. The Mononobe regarded themselves as the armorers of the court and loyal warriors who had been first to support the legendary emperor Jinmu in his conquests. This made them staunch supporters of Japan’s indigenous religion, and they were horrified at the thought of introducing a new idol to the country when there were already “180 gods of Heaven and Earth, and the gods of the Land and of Grain” to consider. “If just at this time we were to worship in their stead foreign deities,” they cautioned, “it may be feared that we should incur the wrath of our national gods.”
Still wavering, Emperor Kinmei decided to have the best of both worlds, and ordered the Soga clan to take the Buddhist statue and worship it for a while, to see what happened.
Unfortunately for the Soga clan, while their leader was busy setting up a temple and burning incense to his new idol, a plague broke out. His rivals were swift to point this out to Emperor Kinmei, who finally made an actual decision, ordering that the hapless statue should be thrown into a canal and the temple razed to the ground. Omens, however, continued to be unhelpfully vague, since the flames from the temple then spread to the great hall of the palace.
Worried now that he had incurred the wrath of Buddha, Kinmei flip-flopped again, and was ready to receive reports of mysterious chanting heard across the waves at Izumi; he also ordered the carving of two new statues from a piece of camphor wood that had supposedly washed up on the seashore.
It
