1970 in Chinese grave sites: we would know nothing of the First Emperor’s Terracotta Army, nothing of the legal statues of the Qin, or the unexpurgated Daode Jing, nothing of the military textbooks of Sun Bin. Apologists might just as readily praise the Japanese for remaining so in touch with their roots, and so respectful of their traditions, that they do not authorize the ransacking of old tombs. But at the moment, Japan’s imperial graves remain closed to archaeology, and that drastically reduces the chances of ever uncovering a Japanese manuscript that predates the 700s.
I find it particularly frustrating because, for me, the most interesting element of early Japanese history lies in its early connections with Korean states such as Kara and Baekje. Korean exiles provided entire branches and houses of what would become the Japanese nobility, regarded as close enough relatives that their native ranks would transfer across to Japan. Contacts with Japan are frequently mentioned in the Korean Baekje Annals, until 428 CE, when all mention of the country is dropped for the next two centuries—an omission that has yet to be satisfactorily explained. But more recent history, particularly the early twentieth century, has so politicized the discussion of Korean–Japanese contacts that academics are put off by its toxicity.
In 2008, a handpicked group of scholars was allowed to enter the giant Gosashi grave mound, rumoured to be the resting place of the legendary empress Jingū, for a grand total of 150 minutes. The investigators were not allowed to touch anything, and were swiftly shooed out again. A stiffly worded fax to National Geographic reminded the scientific community that in Japan, such sites were not part of a forgotten ancient culture, but directly linked to the incumbent head of state. It read, “Imperial Household religious ceremonies continue to take place at tombs and mausolea. As they are objects of remembrance and veneration for the public and imperial family, preserving their peace and dignity is of paramount importance.”
The current emperor, known abroad as Akihito, more properly as Emperor Heisei by the policy I use in this book (see “Notes on Names”), has muddied the waters a bit by acknowledging some of his Korean ancestors, but only several dozen generations down the family tree, allowing for the possibility that his other forefathers were still super-powered beings who descended from space. Meanwhile, the Koreans can be defensively nationalist about their relationship with Japan. Kara (or Kaya, or Gaya, or Imna…) was a Dark Age state in the southern Korean peninsula that probably provided ancient Japan with many of its introductions to mainland culture. The word kara endured in Japanese as a term for the mainland (as in the word karate, which originally meant “Chinese hand”), but the state was referred to in Japanese as Mimana. However, since that name only turns up amid ancient Japanese claims of having conquered it, one uses that proper noun in the presence of Korean historians at one’s peril. Early in the twenty-first century, a Korean academy tried to establish some sort of common ground on cross-straits archaeology from the contentious fourth century CE, but their Japanese counterparts refused to cooperate on a joint statement. Japan’s ancient history remains, at least in part, a matter of religious belief that brooks no tampering.
Although this is not intended as an academic book, I have done my best to reflect trends in modern scholarship, which include history as viewed through changes to the climate and environment. There have been impressive developments in the last generation in such concepts as the “invention of tradition,” the eco-history of Japan, and some remarkably original uses of what we now call “big data.” My favorite remains the group of boffins who extrapolated medieval climate conditions by tabulating the varying dates of annual cherry-blossom parties. Scholars have also learned much in recent years by investigating previously marginalized groups such as women and the underclass, as well as groups on the Japanese periphery. I note here, for example, that the oldest human remains anywhere in the Japanese archipelago, from circa 30,000 BCE, were found in the Ryūkyū Islands, while the culture of the Ainu in Hokkaidō may offer us the merest glimpse of the way of life of Japan’s indigenous inhabitants.
Point of Departure:
Cipangu
China, 1280 CE—Marco Polo saw it with his own eyes. The river Yangtze was thick with ships great and small: ocean-going traders, robust war junks, and huge numbers of shakily repurposed river boats. All were being readied for the latest great enterprise of the new emperor, the Mongol Khubilai Khan: a massive armada that would cross the sea to annihilate the defiant island kingdom of Cipangu.
Nobody in the West had ever heard of this Cipangu before. Marco Polo’s account was the first to even mention it in a European language. When he did, he drew on years of propaganda designed to fire up the conscripts of Khubilai’s navy, as well as lies and spin concocted by reluctant Korean allies.
In his intimidating correspondence with the rulers of Cipangu, Khubilai had belittled the nation as a jumped-up barbaric kingdom, uncomprehending of courtly etiquette and ignorant of the trouble it would be in if it did not submit to him. However, in his exhortations to his armies, he made sure that everybody knew how incredibly rich Cipangu was.
“They have,” enthused Marco Polo on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, “gold in abundance, because it is found there in measureless quantities.”
Khubilai Khan had already made one attempt to invade the island kingdom after a decade of increasingly antagonistic diplomatic exchanges. Not only the people of Cipangu, but also their Korean counterparts, had literally spent years lying about the distance to the islands and the likelihood of strong resistance. Embassies had been fobbed off with numerous wily excuses, and often failed to work out whom they were supposed to be addressing. The natives infamously claimed to have an emperor of equal standing to the ruler of China, but the man who sat on their throne in 1274 was only a figurehead. His father, the former emperor, had abdicated, allowing him to meddle in politics from behind the scenes. His mother supposedly had no power of her own, but was a member of the powerful Fujiwara family, obliging the new emperor to listen to the wishes of his grandfather and uncles. His wife, meanwhile, was a scion of the Minamoto family, another powerful clan with vested interests.
And yet none of this really mattered, because foreign policy and many local issues were in the hands of the emperor’s barbarian-suppressing supreme general, the shōgun, in the town of Kamakura. But the shōgun was himself a puppet of yet another group, the Hōjō clan that had secretly run the islands for many decades. His own job was delegated to a regent, the shikken, who at the time was a callow youth of twenty-three, leaning on a shadowy council of advisers. Your guess is as good as mine, and certainly as good as Khubilai’s, as to who was really in charge.
Such obfuscations were not unique to Cipangu. The Mongols were getting a similar runaround far to the south in what is now Vietnam, where any request for a direct answer would be passed around a series of grandly titled bigwigs, any one of whom might waste another couple of months by sending back a request for clarification. The land that Marco Polo knew as Cipangu was impossible to understand, beyond a distant horizon, itself at the very edge of the known Asian world, and apparently controlled by a nebulous, invisible hegemony of power brokers and alliances. This would not be the last time it was described in such terms.
Still, at least Khubilai could mention all that imaginary gold. His troops were drunk on stories of it. The armies that had pushed Mongol rule all over Asia were ready to advance on these unknown islands, hoping thereby to shut down so-called pirate bases. What happened next is one of the greatest war stories of human history.
Khubilai’s first armada, in 1274, swiftly snatched the islands of Tsushima and Iki in the 200-kilometer (124 miles) strait. The huge fleet packed into the wide sweep of Hakata Bay, which had been for centuries the gateway to the islands for any foreign shipping.
The natives were waiting for them.
The country had not seen a meaningful battle for two generations, and the members of its warrior class, the samurai, were spoiling
