for the funeral barge, but as he prepared to attack, the boat disgorged a company of armed soldiers. The two forces fought to a standstill, at which point the leader of Jingū’s forces told his enemies that there was no point in fighting, for Jingū was already dead.
To show his sincerity, he took his knife and cut his bowstring.
The stepson’s forces responded in kind only to discover that the man’s act had been a ruse. Jingū was still alive; her men had hidden spare strings in their topknots, which they swiftly used to turn their bows back into deadly weapons.
Something fishy was certainly going on. Chūai had left for Kyūshū alive, but had come back dead. Jingū had returned from an unknown land, claiming to have carried Chūai’s heir in her womb for three years, still communing with the voices in her head. She had turned on her stepsons, and now proclaimed that her supernaturally conceived son was the new emperor.
“The days,” said the Nihongi, “were dark like night.” The bad omen terrified the people, but was eventually dispelled when it was discovered that two priests had been buried in the same grave. When their bodies were separated, the sun reappeared.
Down at the water’s edge, the bay was full of beached dolphins.
Some called it a feast sent from the gods, but the dolphins’ bodies were already rotting, and their blood stank.
The prince was still a child, but Jingū agreed to serve as his regent until he was of sufficient age. She ruled for sixty-nine years before dying, at which point the aged Emperor Ōjin finally succeeded his odd mother. He died when he was 110 years old.
The era from around 300 BCE to 250 CE, Japan’s “iron age,” is known to modern archaeologists as the Yayoi period, named for the Tōkyō district where its most famous remains were uncovered in 1884. Its origins, however, lie across the sea in Korea, from which several hundred thousand new migrants would cross the straits in search of a safe home. Asides in the earliest surviving chronicles of the Japanese suggest that these travelers first made their home in Kyūshū, but advanced over several generations along the Inland Sea until they found the best of possible locations, at the “Gateway to the Mountains” (Yamato) near what is now Nara.
These new arrivals hailed from a world that, if it was not openly Chinese, at least aspired to emulate Chinese civilization. They brought with them knowledge of the Chinese writing system, which was used inexpertly and inaccurately in early attempts to transcribe the words and concepts of the Japanese islands. They also brought new technology and materials—most notably metals and the potter’s wheel—as well as a culture steeped in patriarchal Confucianism. Whereas the archaeological record and ancient legends speak of chieftesses and warrior-women, in what may have even been a society where women either held the reins of power or shared it with the men in complementary roles, the newcomers swiftly marginalized the womenfolk. Denied many of their former occupations, women in powerful positions were soon found only in relation to shrines and ceremonies, a position which would be further undermined in subsequent centuries by the advent of Buddhism. In the world of the newcomers, dominated by a Confucian tradition wary of female influence, women were usually seen merely as wives, mothers, and daughters to be wed, appeased, or traded. There were occasional throwbacks, like the ax-wielding Empress Jingū, but even her power base seemed shakily founded on her husband’s importance, or perhaps her family’s desire to keep hold on power until her son was old enough to wield it. It is in her time that we last hear of female shamans that, in the words of J. Edward Kidder, are “oracular and battle-tested.”
The earliest written record of Japan’s ancient myths dates from the Kojiki, completed in 712 CE, by which time they had plenty of chances to be half-forgotten, re-interpreted and embellished. Although certain elements are liable to form a relatively accurate list of kings and queens or a gazetteer of notable events, others may have been added simply to serve the interests of later figures. Others may simply relate half-remembered accounts of ancient enmities, but are worth repeating for a glimpse of the stories the Japanese tell themselves about themselves.
Although the later Nihongi is presented as a straight chronology of a thousand years of wars and deeds, it is far more likely to offer a cluster of separate family lineages that originally happened concurrently: the king-lists of old Yamato; the sagas of the ancestors of the Kyūshū nobility; the last legends of once-proud clans, now invisible beneath new names and alliances. At some point, many may have once regarded themselves as “kings” of one part of Japan or another—Kyūshū, perhaps; the coasts of the Inland Sea; and the Yamato foot-hills. The line from the Sun Goddess did not merely descend through the emperors, but through some nineteen other clans that claimed descent from her children. It may even conceal subtle differences between different kinds of newcomers—we can place no single great cataclysm that may have led to the largest influxes of migrants, but if there were several waves, it is very likely that they came from different Korean kingdoms—particularly Baekje and Silla, depending on which one had the upper hand. There are numerable dynastic spats, usually justifying the accession of a younger heir above his brothers (or, more usually, half-brothers). We might read these incidents as indicators of the tussles behind the scenes between powerful families seeking to influence the next emperor by trying to ensure that his mother comes from their bloodline. If the right fair maiden from the right clan attracted the emperor’s eye at the right time, his eldest son might be easily ousted in favor of the infant child of a new favorite, suitably steerable to ensure further influence at court.
Certainly, in the ancient tales of sophisticated gods from Heaven locked in battle with snarling, belligerent gods of Earth, we have all the indicators of a story told by the winners in war for control of Japan. But we also have many signs of a story that has been mangled in transmission. With the benefit of digital archives and internet searches, I can tell you the details of my own ancestors stretching back just over a hundred years, but I can tell you of nothing before then save a few misty allusions and rumors. How much harder was it for the chroniclers of the eighth century, describing events up to a millennium in the past, with nothing to go on but hazy memories of lost scrolls?
For generations to come, lineages of the Japanese nobility were divided into three categories: immigrants, the descendants of emperors, and the descendants of the “gods of heaven and earth.” Perhaps the three sacred treasures of Japan are intended to reflect this tripartite-structured Japan as mirror, sword, and jewel—the later arrivals of the mainland with their fancy Chinese mirror, the earlier invaders with their sword of conquest, and the indigenous people with their sacred comma-shaped jewel, regarded as a symbol of wisdom.
Tales related to Jinmu may have been the ancient legends and tales associated with the Ōtomo clan, whose ancestral turf was close to the mainland in Kyūshū, and who were therefore liable to have been involved with the first of the conquering newcomers. But the tales of the tenth emperor, Sujin, seem to draw on the lore of the Mononobe clan, a powerful family that was largely outmaneuvered in the politicking of the early Japanese state, and which appeared to have strong connections to assimilated indigenous peoples. It’s not for nothing that Sujin is described as having a council of female shamans, setting a very different policy from the conservative Confucian-influenced newcomers. Sujin’s reign is a time of localizing and confining local kami, suggesting a poetic allusion to the incorporation and pacification of multiple neighboring clans, from whom he collects tribute in meat and textiles.
Meanwhile, the tales of the fifteenth emperor, Ōjin, seem to cleave closely to the family traditions of the Soga clan, whose strong ties to mainland Asia are reflected in long tangents about diplomacy and cultural exchange.
One day, someone may finally be able to reconfigure the Nihongi from its current single-strand thousand-year epic form into three or more interlocking sagas, each spanning the same period of two or three centuries, leading up to the historically verifiable moment in 552 CE when Emperor Kinmei (509–71) received a fateful gift
