it is Ninigi’s descendant, Jinmu, who is recorded in the annals as the first emperor of Japan.
Jinmu, it was said, was born on the southwestern isle of Kyūshū, and began a long march eastward along the coast of the Inland Sea in search of a place that would be more suitable for ruling the whole archipelago. With the aid of a three-legged crow sent down by Amaterasu to guide him, he finds a wondrous paradise—a verdant plain backed by marvelous hills, rich in fruits and games, and with ample room for expansion. This is Yamato, the “Gateway to the Mountains” and the heartland of the emperors.
The stories of Jinmu, as recorded in the Nihongi, are themselves echoes of Stone Age folktales, complete with tribal chants celebrating the crushing of enemy skulls with rocks and the subhuman status of the hero’s “Shrimp Barbarian” foes. Jinmu himself springs into song to inspire his men, but it is not clear if he is composing new war chants or is simply the first to be recorded performing verses that date even further back into ancient times.
In a sense, only the religious elements of prehistoric Japan endure in some form today. Many grave mounds still exist, often in incongruous locations—little green hillocks of woodland shoved in the middle of a shopping district or housing estate. Certain beliefs also appear to have survived in some form down through the centuries, in the form of Japan’s indigenous religion of Shintō, “the Way of the Gods.”
We should be careful not to see prehistorical parallels when they are not necessarily there—many elements of modern Shintō, including the very idea that it is an organized “religion,” are relatively recent innovations. Still alive in modern Shintō is the sense that human beings are closely connected to the sacred: daily life is steeped in portents and intimations of the divine; shrines persist in the middle of bustling shopping districts; one rarely has to wander far from the roadside before bumping into a rock tied with sacred rope or some similar such indicator of reverence for nature spirits. Shintō is often confused, even by the Japanese themselves, with folk traditions specific to particular locales, associated with local landmarks or the marking of the seasons of the agricultural year. Other superstitions and events lift—inadvertently or otherwise—elements of Buddhist belief.
Shintō—at least the uses to which it was put by the editors of the Kojiki and Nihongi—is more than a mythology. Its beliefs remained a central underpinning of the Japanese nation until 1945, and are still implicit in many rituals performed by Japan’s ceremonial head of state, the emperor. New emperors still offer a sheaf of rice to Amaterasu, and incumbent emperors annually offer harvest donations to the gods in general.
Many of Shintō’s nature gods were reinterpreted with the advent of Buddhism in the medieval period, reimagined as Japanese incarnations of Buddhist saints. There has certainly been a degree of ad-mixture at a folk level, and many Shintō shrines offer protective amulets or wooden prayer boards (ema) in return for “donations” by visitors who were once called pilgrims but who are increasingly regarded and treated as mere tourists. Visit a Shintō shrine today and you will see visitors washing their hands at an entrance spring, clapping their hands together to startle away evil spirits, and offering prayers for a variety of ancient and modern concerns: lost objects, safe childbirth, cures for disease and infertility, success in education or a career. They might even offer a donation for the chance to draw a prophetic message or omen written on a ticket or a slip of wood.
At certain crucial moments in Japanese history, Shintō has been invoked as an element of Japanese culture that is inarguably home-grown. Whenever foreign influences loom, be they Buddhist scriptures or Christian preachers, or even the onset of the modern world itself, Shintō is a fallback position. It arose in Japan; its stories relate to Japanese folk beliefs and geography. It is manifest in weathered ropes binding rocks; wooden wands decorated with paper leaves; ancient trees and sacred gardens; and in the great mountains that loom in the hinterland. A poem from the time of the composition of the Kojiki and Nihongi offered praise to an unidentified sovereign, expressing a wish for eternal peace with an unscientific, deeply devout Shintō sensibility of the natural world growing in stature with age:
May your reign
Last for a thousand upon eight thousand years
Until mere pebbles
Grow into mighty rocks
Thick with moss.
A thousand years later, it was adopted as the lyrics to the Japanese national anthem, which takes its name from the opening line: Kimigayo. Every day, Japanese schoolchildren, sportsmen, and politicians rise to their feet and sing lyrics invested with an ancient, atavistic power. Emperor Jinmu’s three-legged crow still flutters on the flag of the Japanese Football Association—an extra limb presumably being a great advantage in soccer.
CHAPTER 2
THROUGH THE KEYHOLE:
THE PEOPLE OF WA
Not even Japan’s two most ancient chronicles can agree what happened to the fourteenth emperor, Chūai. The simplest account, in the Nihongi, is that he was overseeing a war against a rebellious tribe, the Bear People in Kyūshū, when he was struck by an arrow and died. The Kojiki, however, has a far more supernatural tale to tell.
Near the edge of his island domain, it said, Chūai was partway through his campaign against the Bear People, resting in one of his subsidiary palaces, plucking idly at a musical instrument, when one of his wives—known to posterity as Jingū—began speaking with a voice that was not her own. She spoke of a land to the west, rich in gold and silver, and told him that it belonged to him.
Chūai was plainly irritated by her comments, and stopped playing. He had stood on the cliffs and faced the west, he told her, and there was nothing there. But instead of taking the hint and staying silent, Jingū uttered a deathly curse.
“You will no longer rule All Under Heaven,” she spat. “Now, turn in your final direction.”
His chief minister blanched visibly, and stammered that the emperor should continue to play his instrument. Angrily, Chūai went back to his music, but only plucked at the strings occasionally. The notes grew further apart…then discordant…then suddenly ceased.
Courtiers took up lamps and approached him only to find that he was dead.
The chief minister asked for divine inspiration, but the answers he received the following day from his oracles matched Jingū’s odd words. The next emperor, he was told, was still in Jingū’s womb—this was the will of the Sun Goddess, and of three other previously unheard-of deities.
It is not all that clear from the Kojiki where these words came from. Possibly they came from Jingū herself, who continued to utter strange phrases, calling on her people to assemble a fleet and to calm the waters by scattering chopsticks and toy boats on the sea. She led her fleet away and returned some time later, proclaiming that she had subdued the lands across the sea. Some stories said that the King of Silla had joyfully proclaimed her as his ruler. Others claimed that she had dragged him to the seashore and hacked off his kneecaps to make him fall before her, spearing him in the sand and burying his corpse in an unmarked grave.
She returned to her homeland to give birth.
Then, and only then, she put Chūai’s body on a funeral barge and sailed back up the Inland Sea to the Yamato heartland. News of Chūai’s demise had been suppressed until that moment.
Her stepsons plotted to overthrow her. One climbed a tree to scout the distance, but his perch was uprooted by a giant boar, which ate him.
