Ledyard - Galloping Along With the Horseriders

The Society for Japanese Studies

Galloping along with the Horseriders: Looking for the Founders of JapanAuthor(s): Gari LedyardSource: Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 217-254Published by: The Society for Japanese StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/132125Accessed: 03/11/2010 13:00

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GARI LEDYARD

Galloping Along With the Horseriders: Looking for the Founders of Japan

Until the end of World War II, the Emperor and the Imperial Institution in Japan occupied such an exalted legal and spiritual position that any questioning of the orthodox account of their origin was tantamount to disloyalty and treason. The orthodox account was that of the ancient books Kojiki (compiled 712) and Nihon shoki (720), as interpreted and defined by the Kokugaku scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, of whom the most prestigious was Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). The first scholars to depart in any way from this version of history were the rationalist and western-influenced historians of late Meiji times, of whom Naka Michiyo (1851-1908) was representative. Naka questioned the traditional chronology, and was able to demonstrate, by reference to Chinese and Korean history, that for the period of the 3rd and 4th centuries it was off by 120 years, or two sexagenary cycles. Earlier than that the traditional chronology, in his view, was not reliable.' Naka's efforts inspired a generation of scholars, and the late Meiji and Taish6 years saw a genuine revolution in the study of early Japanese history. The two

This paper was first presented at Columbia University's Seminar on Japan in October, 1973, then in slightly revised form at the Japan Seminar at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Japan-Korea Colloquium at the University of California in Berkeley, both in March, 1974. I wish to thank the members of all these groups for their encouragement and constructive criticism.

1. Naka not only demonstrated that the traditional founding date of 660 B.C. was beyond possibility; he also showed, by analysis of Chinese prognostic theories current during the period the early Japanese historical sources took form, how the year 660 B.C. had been arrived at in the first place. The ground- breaking articles were "Joko nendai k6," Y5yo5 shadan 38 (1878); Nihon joko nendai k6," Bun 1/8-9 (1888), and "Thsei nengi k6," Shigaku zasshi 8/8-12 (1897).

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218 Journal of Japanese Studies

main achievements were the work of Tsuda Sokichi (1873-1961), whose exhaustive and radical reinterpretation of the classical sources threw new light almost everywhere,2 and the beginning of serious archaeological work, which in short order dug up and periodized the Old Tomb Period (4th-7th centuries), the iron-bronze Yayoi Culture (2nd cent. B.C.-3rd cent. A.D.), and the neolithic JC3mon Culture that had preceded it.3 All of these developments encouraged scholars to believe that a new and fuller understanding of the early period of the Japanese state was close at hand.

But this historiographical revolution did not survive the swing to the right that transformed Japanese life in the 1930's. The accom- panying emphasis on emperor-worship led to dogmatism in the officially compiled history books. Archaeology increasingly lost gov- ernment encouragement and support and in many cases came to be forbidden. Many of Japan's leading archaeologists found themselves unearthing the past not in their own country but in Korea or Man- churia. In May, 1942, Tsuda Sokichi, after a long hearing and trial process, was convicted and sentenced to jail for "insulting the dignity of the Imperial family." His books had already been banned for over two years.4 Early Japanese history had once again become a litany of ancient gods and rulers in a "single line for a myriad generations" (bansei ikkei).

With the end of World War II, liberating breezes blew through the field of early history as through Japanese intellectual life in general. Most historians were happy to discard the official beliefs that had never commanded much confidence anyway. By 1948, few in Japan insisted on the historicity of "Emperor Jimmu,"5 and even

2. The two principal works on which Tsuda's fame rests (though only a small part of his total scholarly output) are Jindaishi no atarashii kenkya (1913) and Kojiki oyobi Nihon shoki no shin kenkya (1919).

3. See Edward Kidder, Japan Before Buddhism, revised ed. (New York: Praeger, 1966).

4. On the legal persecution of Tsuda: Ienaga Sabur6, Tsuda Sokichi no shis5teki kenkya (Iwanami, 1972); see especially pp. 355-433.

5. The implications of using the English word "emperor" for the Japanese term tenn5 are tricky even in a context of modern history. In writing on ancient history (where the characters for tenn5 are read sumera mikoto), the word "emperor" should be totally and permanently banned. The title sumera mikoto seems to go back no further than the 7th century; application of it for earlier periods is anachronistic and misleading. The best equivalent for the earlier title, 5 kimi, is probably "king," although even this confers more status on the early rulers than some of them actually had. It was an essential aim of the early 8th century Japanese historians to glorify the position of the emperor and to extend the glory back in time to the "Age of the Gods," thereby

Ledyard: Horseriders 219

fewer pushed the beginnings of the imperial line back before the beginning of the Christian era, much less to the 7th century B.C. Still, the intellectual liberation had not gone so far that people were able to avoid a certain shock when they heard that a Japanese historian had postulated an invasion of Japan in the early 4th century by a race of "horseriding people" (kiba minzoku), and that the leader of this invasion, after overcoming the pre-existing regime, had founded the imperial line that had always been thought to be a wholly indigenous dynasty. In the free and liberal atmosphere that then prevailed and indeed still prevails in Japanese historical studies, many found the idea stimulating and interesting but few took it seriously. Most established historians found much to criticize in the theory; others accepted it only with so many modifications as to change its basic character. But the author of the theory, Egami Namio, continued to spread his ideas energetically, and the "horserider theory" is today a lively topic not only among historians but also in the popular media. Still, most historians are not ready to accept the idea of a decisive foreign role in early Japanese history.6

If Japanese historians are cool to the horseriders, foreign experts in the field seem scarcely to have heard of them. George Sansom's three-volume A History of Japan makes no mention of the theory,

to clothe the imperial throne in a timeless legitimacy. Since the modern scholar's first task is to discover and correct the distortions introduced by the authors of his sources, we should not hesitate even for a minute to discard the ludicrous use of the word "emperor" to apply to the early rulers. Likewise the use of the Chinese-style posthumous names for the early rulers ("Jimmu," "Sujin," "Ojin," etc.), though sanctioned by the tradition and practice of centuries, ought to be abandoned. These names were not devised until about the second half of the 8th century, hundreds of years after most of the earlier kings had lived, and their continued application only lends authority to the false image that the Nara scholars had of their past. To say "Emperor Ojin" conjures up the improbable 130 year-old paragon who was fathered by heaven and borne after a 12-month pregnancy by the severe and bellicose "Empress Jingil"; to call the man "King Homuda" not only does more respect to the sources, but encourages us to see him freshly. The revolution in Japanese historiography will not be complete until we throw off the blinders placed aside our eyes by the Nara ideologues. Getting rid of their symbols is a good first step.

6. Inoue Mitsusada, who could be called a "consensus historian," has tried in his general works to present impartially a wide range of theories, and may be said to represent the middle ground of modern Japanese historiography insofar as the pre-Nara period is concerned. His hesitancy to accept Egami's ideas is thus shared by many. See Inoue's Nihon kokka no kigen (Iwanami, 1960; 14th printing, 1970), pp. 183-198, and Shinwa kara rekishi e, Vol. 1 of Nihon no Rekishi (ChMo Koronsha, 1965), pp. 285-292.


and John Hall's Japan from Prehistory to Modern Times dismisses the concept of a "distinct ethnic conquest" in a few sentences.7 Paul Varley concedes that the idea of a horserider conquest is "intriguing" and "may be true," but does not seriously consider it as a structural explanation of Japan's founding and growth.8 The only western writer to react positively to the horserider theory seems to be J. H. Kamstra, but his Encounter or Syncretism, though in some ways stimulating and provocative, is so poorly written and so burdened with unsup- ported statements that it hardly constitutes a reliable exposition of Egami's ideas, and in any case it does not examine them critically.9

7. John Hall, Japan from Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Delta paperback, 1971), p. 22.

8. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, A Short History (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 7.

9. J. H. Kamstra, Encounter or Syncretism, The Initial Growth of Japanese Buddhism (Leiden: Brill, 1967), pp. 35-40.

More recently Roy Andrew Miller, in the course of his review in this journal of Kodai Nihongo no nazo, by Egami Namio and Ono Susumu, has dismissed Egami's horserider hypothesis as a series of "speculations" and "interconnected guesses." These, he says, have been "generated almost entirely without evidence, and proposed solely to account for later facts, but lacking even the most elementary archaeological and linguistic evidence; and only archaeological and linguistic data could possibly shift his kiba minzoku from the level of an unsubstantiated speculation to that of a scientific hypothesis. No one can prove that Egami's invasions did not take place, but then, no one has to; Egami has to prove that they did take place, and that he cannot do, without employing evidence from archaeology and historical linguistics, and that he does not do" (JIS 1/1 (Autumn, 1974) :193-194). In a footnote Miller goes on to put Egami's ideas in a class with the apparently serious proposals of Erich von Daniken that human civilization was launched on Earth by visitors from outer space. Egami has his faults, but this is going too far.

It is one thing to disprove Egami, quite another thing to disprove the horserider hypothesis itself. Egami can be criticized on many points, as I shall show in this paper. It is further true that he offers no linguistic evidence worthy of the name for his hypothesis, although it is not clear what kind of linguistic evidence would satisfy Roy Andrew Miller. (For instance, could linguistic evidence alone prove that England was conquered in the 11th century by French-speaking people? Or that these French speakers were not Frenchmen but Vikings who had also conquered part of France? Assuming we had no relevant historical records, what linguistic evidence could we now use to prove that the Manchus conquered China in the 17th century?) As for archaeology, Egami's formulations indeed leave much to be desired, especially insofar as they concern the chronology of his invasions, but by no means can one say that he ignores archaeology. In fact, on pp. 291-324 of his Kiba minzoku kokka (see next note) he adduces a considerable range of archaeological materials.

There is no question that the horserider hypothesis can use more evidence


It would appear, then, that there has been no effective examination of the horserider theory by western specialists on Japan. This is to be regretted, since it is the product of a first-rate imagination, and if it is wrong in many details it is still rich in insights for a clearer understanding of Japan's beginnings. Moreover, it helps to throw light on some previously dark corners of Korean history. My own background is in the latter field, and it was my puzzlement over some of the problems in the early relationship between the peoples of Japan and Korea that led me to Egami's work. In summarizing his ideas here I have relied on his most recent book on the subject, Kiba minzoku kokka (1967), now in its 24th printing.10

Egami's general point of departure is in the periodization scheme for the Tomb Period of Japanese History. This period, which follows the bronze and metal age called the Yayoi period and is characterized by gigantic tumuli in most of the important centers of central and western Japan, is generally considered to have begun around the end of the 3rd or the beginning of the 4th century and lasted into the 7th. The most commonly accepted division is Period I, 300-400; Period II, 400-470; Period III, 470-600. There are many variations, particularly on the date of the end of the Tomb Period, but no one takes it beyond the Taika Reforms of 645. Almost everyone accepts a three-part division.'1 Egami thinks, however, that a two-fold division is sufficient; his "Early Tomb Period" covers the 4th century and corresponds to Period I of most other archaeologists, but his "Late Tomb Period" covers Periods II and III and lasts from the 5th into

from all scholarly fields than has so far been accumulated. This paper and others that are planned are part of an attempt to clarify the horserider invasion concept and explore the evidence for it.

As for linking Egami's horseriders with von Dainiken's spacemen, I would merely observe that while there is no reason for sober minds to believe that all human civilization results from the initiatives of visitors from outer space (much better explanations are available), there are abundant cases on record of earthlings invading and subduing other earthlings and then establishing their own new state. Moreover, in a period such as the 4th century, when peoples in China, Manchuria and Korea are suffering exactly this experience, similar invasions for Japan are not at all implausible, and a proposal to explain early Japanese history in this way ought not be dismissed with a spurious analogy to visitors from outer space.

10. Egami Namio, Kiba minzoku kokka: Nihon kodaishi e no apurdchi, Chuko shinso No. 147 (Chuo K6ronsha, 1967; 24th printing, 1973). For an English version of the argument, see his "The Formation of the People and the Origin of the State in Japan," Memoirs of the Tdya Bunko 23 (1964):35-70. All page references in the following discussion are to the Japanese work.

11. Kidder, op. cit., pp. 145-160.


the 7th century. According to Egami, the basic character of the Yayoi and Early Tomb Periods is "incantatory, sacrificial, southeast Asian, in a word agricultural," while the Late Tomb Period is "realist, warlike, baronial, north Asian, in a word horserider" (p. 166). The general outline of his theory is stated in eight points. 1 ) Early and Late Tomb periods are fundamentally different. 2) The change from one to the other was not evolutionary but dramatic and sudden. 3) Agricultural societies are generally conservative and do not aggres- sively borrow foreign culture or reform their own; Japan is not likely to have been able to invade a stronger southern Korea in the 4th century and bring the horserider culture back; rather the horseriders conquered both southern Korea and Japan. 4) Japan's adoption of horserider culture was not partial but total; Japanese and continental horserider culture are "completely in common." 5) The horses did not come by themselves to start Tomb Period II, they brought people with them. 6) Tomb Period 1I was of a baronial and aristo- cratic character, and the horserider culture was spread over Japan by force. 7) The regional distribution of tombs in Tomb Period 1I shows a recognition of strategic localities, supporting the idea of rule by warriors. 8) Ordinarily, horseriding peoples do not stop their conquests when they reach the sea, but get in boats and continue them (pp. 169-170).

Who were the people who got into boats? Egami thinks they were the people led by the Korean Chinwang or his descendants or in- heritors. The Chinwang was a ruler described in the Wei chih accounts of the Han peoples in the southern part of Korea.'2 As depicted in the Wei chih, he would have been active in the first half of the 3rd century, and thus contemporary with Queen Pimiha in the Japanese islands.'3 Though located in Mahan (in the western part of the southern half of the peninsula), he exercised some sort of hegemony

12. San kuo chih (Wei chih) 30/1005b,d. 13. This lady is usually known by the modern Japanese pronunciation of

the characters used by the Wei reporters to transcribe her name, i.e., Himiko. Some use a more archaic-sounding "Pimiko." Insofar as the final syllable is concerned, it certainly had a laryngal initial, such as x- or h-; see Roy A. Miller, The Japanese Language (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), p. 22. The vowel of this character, as pronounced in Wei times, must certainly have been an -a- or very close to it, as is indicated in dozens of transcriptions from a variety of foreign contacts. I hope to make a detailed exposition of this at a later date. In the meantime, the reader may consult Nagata Natsuki, "Gishi Wajinden yakuon no onka ni tsuite," Kobe Gaidai ronsd 13/3 (September, 1962). There is a brief summary of Nagata's findings in Mishina Shoei's Yamatai koku kenkya soran (Osaka, 1970), pp. 482-483.


over a number of small "states" in the areas of Chinhan (east) and Pyonhan (south). Egami considers him a representative of horserider culture who was already ruling a dynasty of conquest in southern Korea. Towards the end of the 3rd century, this ruling group or its successors would have begun the move to Japan (pp. 193-195).

Egami puts great stress on the name and title of the tenth in the line of rulers listed in the old Japanese sources. This was Mimaki Iri-biko ("Emperor Sujin"). The first element in this name is widely interpreted to contain the root of the name of the famous southern Korean locality of Mimana, the -na of that name meaning "tribe" or "clan," the -ki of the personal name being a suffix meaning "'town" or "fortification.'4 Furthermore, the Kojiki gives Mimaki the epithet Hatsukuni shirasu sumera mikoto, "the emperor who first ruled the land."'5 The Nihon shoki gives a similar epithet to Iware hiko, or "Emperor Jimmu," the putative founder of the line.'6 Egami believes that Mimaki, a descendant or inheritor of the position of Chinwang, decided to move to Japan because his position in southern Korea was threatened by the growing power of Chinhan and Mahan and because the weakened Chinese colony of Lo-lang in the north was about to fall and bring about other changes that threatened the trading position of the people over whom he exercised hegemony in southern Korea. He thus moved his people to Kyushu (pp. 195-199). He and his immediate successors established their political center there; it was his descendant Homuda Wake ("Emperor Ojin") who carried the conquest eastward to the Kinai area and established the lasting political center of Yamato (pp. 184-190).

Egami's general conception of a "horserider" invasion of Japan and the identification of the Tomb Period rulers as a race of conquerors has much to commend it, as I hope to be able to demonstrate. But overall, I find the execution of his theory extremely disappointing and not worthy of its conceptual promise. The trouble begins from

14. The full name of this person is Mimaki Iri-biko Iniwe no Sumera mikoto. The last epithet meaning "emperor" is of course a very late addition; the meaning of Iniwe is not known; Iri-biko is rendered "Entering Prince" but the meaning of this is not clear.

15. Kojiki, Norito, ed. Kurano Kenji and Takeda Yukichi, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 1 (Iwanami, 1958, 15th printing, 1971), p. 168. Cf. Kojiki, Donald L. Philippi, tr. (Princeton and Tokyo: Princeton University Press and University of Tokyo Press, 1969), p. 208.

16. Nihon shoki, ed. Sakamoto Tar6 et al., Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 67 (Iwanami, 1967; 5th printing, 1971), 1:213 (Jimmu 1). Cf. W. G. Aston, tr., Nihongi, Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1896; reprint, Allen & Unwin, 1956), 1:133.


the very first point, the designation of his protagonists as "horseriders." What does this term mean? The overwhelming impression left by Egami is that it refers to horseriding nomads of the Eurasian type. Some people even render his term kiba as "Nomad."'17 Fully half of Kiba minzoku kokka is devoted to a description of the historical nomadic confederations that have periodically arisen in central Asia to batter and sometimes engulf the classical centers of civilization. He gives long and generally excellent accounts of the Scythians, the Hsiung-nu, the Turks (T'u-chtieh), the Hsien-pei and the T'o-pa Wei, and, in somewhat less detail, the Mongols. These people were nomadic races who fearsomely used their horse-given mobility and power to herd together all the other animals and people in their path, and to organize them into a society of providers and servants to their needs. In giving so much prominence to these societies, Egami certainly emphasizes the nomadic factors in his concept "horseriders." But this is most misleading; in fact, these are not the people he thinks invaded Japan. The invaders were rather a "predominantly agricultural and secondarily nomadic" people, or perhaps a "semi-agricultural and semi-venatic" people; as examples he lists the Puyo, Koguryo, Malgal and Parhae, who played such key roles in the formation of later Korean states, and the Jurced and Manchus, who created Manchurian and ultimately Chinese dynasties of great power and extent. "Among these," Egami says, "the Puyo and Koguryo had a special relationship with Japan's unifying Tenson people" (p. 25). He defines the so-called "Sino-Barbarian" culture (Kokan bunka) as a mixture of Chinese and Hsiung-nu culture, "a new horserider culture which, in the east, was adopted by the Hsien-pei and the Koguryo and brought through the Korean peninsula to Japan; it was the culture of the Late Tomb Period" (p. 67). Finally, the people who brought the horserider culture to Japan and gave the country its first unification, "rather than the nomadic horseriders from central or northern Asia, were much closer to the semi-agricultural and semi- nomadic, or semi-venatic and semi-nomadic, peoples of northeastern Asia" (p. 323).

One can only ask, if these northeast Asian peoples were so important to the horserider conquest of Japan, why did Egami not devote half of his book to them, instead of to the fully nomadic peoples of Central Asia, who he says did not figure in the conquest at all? If he is not ready to say that the Puyo or Koguryo carried the horserider conquest to Japan-and one can hardly fail to note his

17. E.g. J. H. Kamstra, op. cit., p. 35.


caution and lack of specifics everytime the discussion gets too close to Korea-why does he not at least discuss the nature of their "special relationship" to the Chinwang, alias Mimaki, alias "Sujin," who actually did, according to him, conquer Japan? How did horserider culture in fact get to the Chinwang, or, if he brought it to southern Korea himself, where did he come from, and when? How is it that the Chinwang can preside over a society which, to read the Wei chih's account, is just about as "incantatory, sacrificial and agricultural" as that of the Wa Queen Pimiha in Japan, yet suddenly becomes "realistic, baronial, warlike and horserider" when it leaves Korea and crosses the Tsushima straits? How is it, further, that Mimaki, once he gets to Japan to preside over Kyushu in the Early Tomb Period, suddenly becomes "incantatory and sacrificial" again, until his warrior descendant Homuda Wake ("Ojin") gets from Kyushu to Yamato and abruptly bursts into the Late Tomb Period as a "realist, warlike and baronial" ruler?

By being so hazy and unclear, Egami gives every advantage to his many critics, who have vigorously attacked his theory.-8 In refusing to be more precise about the Puyo and Koguryo, whom he himself virtually makes the key to his theory, he neglects the responsibility of fully examining the "Korean connection" in the origin of the Japanese state. In emphasizing so much the nomadic connotations of his term "horserider," he distracts the reader from his cogent but overly brief attention to the Sino-Barbarian and "semi-nomadic, semi-venatic" meaning of the term and thereby encourages a mis- understanding of the character of his invaders. Finally, in not adhering consistently to his own conceptual formulations concerning the differ- ences between the societies of the conquerors and the conquered, he contradicts his own periodization of the Tomb Period and invites the wrath of the archaeologists.19

If this were the only way to formulate the horserider theory, it indeed would have to be rejected. But we must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath, for many of Egami's observations and insights into the nature of Japan's rulers beginning with the times of Mimaki and Homuda are brilliant and valid. Any failure to recog-

18. Inoue Mitsusada, Shinwa kara rekishi e, pp. 287-290. For an English summary of Japanese criticism of Egami, see "Understanding Japan: Origins of the Japanese People," Bulletin of the International Society for Educational Information 22 (Tokyo, 1968), pp. 40-41. This number of the Bulletin was edited by Mizuno Yff and reflects his views.

19. Kobayashi Yukio, Kofun jidai no kenkya (Aoki Shoten, 1961), pp. 261-286. Kobayashi is an archaeologist from Kyoto University.


nize "horserider" elements in early Japanese society will delay an adequate understanding of the Tomb Period in general and of the Yamato state's relationship with the countries of southern Korea. These international aspects of the problem are by no means unim- portant; on the contrary, virtually every Japanese historian working on this period uses Japan's supposed relationship to the Korean states to prove that Yamato was a unified and powerful regime.

The Korean relationship is highlighted by the fact that a Korean monumental inscription of 414 A.D. refers to "Wa" soldiers "coming across the sea" in 391 to overcome the Korean states in the southern part of the peninsula, and to several "Wa" campaigns in Korea during the 390's and 400's.20 The inscription is found on a gigantic stone stele erected on the north bank of the Yalu River in honor of the Koguryo king Kwanggaet'o, following his death in 413. (The king was also styled Hot'aewang, whence the Japanese name "Kotai6 monument," which is usual in modern Japanese historiography.) With the Japanese discovery of this stone in 1884-a fascinating story which deserves its own telling but cannot have it here21-historians for the first time had seemingly unshakable testimony to the presence of Japanese power on the peninsula in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. It has since become virtually a dogma of Japanese historiography that control of Korean territory implies the unification of Japan, or, in other words, that the best evidence that the Yamato regime ruled all Japan is that it ruled part of Korea.22 But this interpretation of the data of the Kwanggaet'o stele is open to argument on many

20. Some Korean scholars, unable to admit any suggestion of a Japanese "invasion" and occupation of Korea in ancient times, try to punctuate this passage in such a way as to make it appear that Koguryo is making a retaliatory raid on Japan. See Pak Sihy6ng, Kwanggaet'owang nuingbi (Pyongyang: Sahoe Kwahagw6n Ch'ulp'ansa, 1966), p. 163. This interpretation, which would be hilarious if it were not pathetic, and which at the very least shows an infirm knowledge of Chinese, seems to have been first suggested by Ch6ng Inbo in his collected essays, Tamwdn kukhak san'go (Seoul: Mun'gyosa, 1955), p. 120. (My thanks to K. P. Yang of the Library of Congress for these references.)

21. For accounts of the discovery, rubbings and sometimes dubious re- search history of this famous inscription, see Saeki Arikiyo, Kdkaitod hi (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1974); also Yi Chinhuii, "Kokaito6 ryohibun no nazo -choki chonichi kankei kenkyi! shi j6 no mondaiten," Shis5 575 (1972):721- 747.

22. For an excellent discussion, showing the development since Meiji times of the idea that "Control of Southern Korea Implies the Unification of Japan," see Nakatsuka Akira, "Kindai Nihon shigakushi ni okeru Chosen mondai-toku ni 'Kakaito6 ryahi' wo megutte," Shisd 561 (1971):346-363. This should be required reading for every historian of early Japan.


grounds. In particular, if a horserider conquest of Japan can be demonstrated for the 4th century before the time of the events of the Kwanggaet'o stele, then the interpretation of the stele will necessarily change radically. In fact, hardly any of the "definitive theories" or teisetsu of early Japanese history will remain valid if a horserider theory is convincingly demonstrated. This is one reason, perhaps, why most Japanese historians are so resistant to the theory.

The Fourth Century V6lkerwanderung

One of the flaws of Egami's argument is his incredible lack of attention to the concrete background on the continent of his invaders. One cannot connect Japanese history to the continent without paying attention to continental history. This is also a failing of Egami's critics. One of them, Mizuno Yui, approves of the basic idea of a horserider invasion, but moves it back to the 1st century, seemingly unconcerned that a continental irruption of the type that would have produced such an invasion is totally out of synchronization with what was happening on the continent at that time.23 If a horserider invasion makes sense for Japanese history, it must also make sense on the continent. If it does not make sense on the continent, then it will not be valid for Japan.

The 4th century was a period of great dislocation and suffering all over Eastern Asia, especially on the northern China plain, which was flooded with barbarians of every description. Chinese historiography suggestively dubs this the age of "The Five Barbarians and the Sixteen States." One could certainly quibble with the numbers: if anyone at that time had bothered to count the barbarian incursions, then invasions, and then conquests, and then the interminable wars between the ephemeral regimes thus created, there is no telling what number he would have come up with. Certainly the surviving historical sources give every indication that they are telling us only a part of the total horror. It was genuinely an age of Vlikerwanderung, a "wandering of peoples" of the kind common enough in other ages and places, when it seemed to the tenants of civilization that the whole population of the steppes had burst upon them like the waters of a broken dam and set all the world awash. In China, the rulers left their northern heartland and fled to refuge in the south, leaving

23. Mizuno Y[, Nihon kodai no kokka keisei, Gendai shinsho No. 128 (Kodansha, 1967), pp. 189-200. Also, "Understanding Japan" (see above, note 18), pp. 60-69.


most of their compatriots behind to make their way. with the hordes as best they could. From their haven south of the Yangtse they successively kept the caitiffs at bay, although no Chinese regime saw the northern plain again for over two hundred years. From their southern safety, and in their northern homes once the world was put back together again, they were able, however fragmentarily and in some cases tendentiously, to describe the period of the "Northern and Southern Dynasties," during which Chinese civilization had with- stood and survived the barbarian assault. Because they lasted, drove out the foe and had the last word, we know the 4th century by their name rather than by a barbarian one.24

The same VOlkerwanderung, in its eastern wave, was visited upon the peoples of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese islands (we may not yet say "Korea" or "Japan"). But here the result was somewhat different. These societies had no place of refuge in which to preserve their institutions intact, and there was no "return" to their former lands, for they had either stayed in place and survived or had been swept into oblivion. The actual results of the assault are much less clearly known than is the case with the Chinese wave: in the first place the societies in Korea and Japan were either not literate .or only minimally so; in the second place they were so severely battered that they probably lacked the energy or the will to sit down and write or otherwise record their ordeal. Later, when it was all over, and the invaders had merged with the invaded and they had together created new societies, the hazy memories of the old people were combined with the traditions of the invaders and the earliest stratum of the surviving Korean and Japanese records was created. The dual character of these early sources poses a special problem for modern in- vestigators. Neither in Korea nor in Japan is there any memory of being invaded by anybody in this early period, a fact which suggests that the invaders, or their culture, dominated the historiographical process.

This loss of memory about such a cataclysmic event is not so unusual as it might appear. The case of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England in the 5th and 6th centuries suggests an interesting parallel: their legends and traditions contain nothing about their trip across the sea to conquer Roman Britain, and not more than a few words have survived from the partly literate Celtic scribes who were either

24. Michael Rogers, The Chronicle of Fu Chien: A Case of Exemplar History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) shows how several different Chinese overlays have been superimposed on the history of one of these barbarian regimes, Former Ch'in.


massacred, sold into slavery or forced to flee. Yet we all know that Britain was invaded by Anglo-Saxons from the mainland side of the North Sea. The English historian George Trevelyan writes:

The bones of these nameless chiefs are dug up today in 'early Anglo-Saxon graveyards,' lying between the rusted schield-boss and spear-head that expelled Rome from Britain and drove the Celt into the West. Some of these great unknown ones must have had what we should now call 'genius' as 'men of action.' For the true life story of a single one of them, telling why he and his men decided to cross the sea, where they landed, and in what manner they fought and wrought and thought-for that how gladly would we give whole libraries of later record!

But the past is inexorable in its silence. There are no authentic chronicles of the Saxon conquest.... The heathen Saxon invaders had indeed a Runic alphabet; it would serve for a charm on a sword or a name on a stone, but it was not used to take down annals....

The historian has two points of light, and even those are dim. He sees an orderly Romano-Celtic world late in the Fourth Cen- tury, beginning to fall into chaos. Two hundred years later he sees a Celtic-Saxon barbarism beginning to emerge confusedly into the renewed twilight of history.... Between these points stretches a great darkness. The most important page in our national annals is a blank.25

For those who wonder how Japan could have suffered a barbarian invasion and yet have no explicit memory of it, these are words to ponder. The Korean case is perhaps easier to speculate on, because we have a much firmer idea of what preceded the invasions. From the time of the Han conquest of north Korea and the founding of the colony of Lolang in 108 B.C., Chinese civilization must have made a powerful impression of the peoples of the peninsula. This presence lasted for well over 400 years. In such a length of time, it is very hard to imagine that one of the world's then most powerful states should not have communicated its language, its arts and techniques, its beliefs to many of its conquered subjects. And yet the Korean people, either in their traditions or in their written sources, maintain virtually no memory of this period of almost half a millenium. The only information they have had is the same that we now have: Chinese sources. In a similar way the British people have no continuous and indigenous memory of the rule of Rome on their island. These in-

25. George Trevelyan, History of England, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday- Anchor paperback, 1952), 1:53.


stances of collective oblivion are testimony to the overwhelming and disintegrating power of the irrupting barbarian hordes. If this effect could have been wrought in northern Korea with respect to the colonial area of a powerful and dynamic civilization like that of the Han dynasty, its effect on the weaker and much less developed societies of southern Korea and Japan can well be imagined.

The Eastern Peoples and the East Asian Situation Before the V6lkerwanderung

During the 230's and 240's, the Wei dynasty (220-265, the northern kingdom of the Chinese Three Kingdoms) gave great attention to its northern frontier. Between 237 and 239, the Wei armies destroyed the independent Chinese warlords who had virtually monop- olized relations with the eastern peoples since the 190's, and launched a concentrated campaign to build direct relations with the so-called "Eastern Barbarians." The ethnographic reports on these people in the Wei chih section of the San Kuo chih were probably based on those in the Wei lieh, which was completed around the middle of the 3rd century (the latter now survives only in fragments). Although these accounts bristle with problems major and minor, they constitute the oldest and clearest records we have on the early situation of the eastern peoples. In many ways their quality as ethnographic reports is superior even to later Chinese accounts.26

The Thalassocracy of Wa. The Wei envoys first reached the land of the Wa (not yet "Japan") in 240. They probably did not go beyond the northwest coast of Kyushu, but they recorded directions, which must have been based on hearsay, on how to get to a place whose name they transcribed "Yamatii,"27 the capital of Pimiha, Queen of the Wa. I will not here go into the problem of interpreting these directions, which have been a subject of intense debate for generations. Here I will simply state my conclusion, that this YamatW was

26. San kuo chih, 30/1003b-1006b. Mishina Sh6ei, op. cit., offers a well- edited variorum text of the account of the Wa.

27. This ,Chinese name for the Wa capital is usually pronounced in Japanese "Yamatai." But there is no doubt that the Chinese pronunciation of the 3rd century gave the character now read tai a reading like d&ag or something close. The Chinese vowel -a- later became a standard transcriptional equivalent for the otsurui or "Grade B" -o-, usually written -6-, of Old Japanese. See Miller, The Japanese Language, pp. 17-18. There are dozens of examples and there is no need to continue mispronouncing this name as "Yamatai." Part of the "Yamatai Problem" is that people refuse to pronounce it Yamatb.


located in the vicinity of the historical Yamato in the Kinai area.28 At this time the Yayoi culture, founded on agriculture and a primitive technology in bronze and iron, which had started to spread from Kyushu around the beginning of the 2nd century B.C., had reached eastward to the Kinai and beyond. Queen Pimiha and her regime represented the dominant political group among several that were competing with each other at that time, and from her position in the Kinai she occupied not only the most fertile plain yet found in Japan, but also the vanguard position in the eastward spread of the Yayoi way of life. She controlled a chain of small "states" (or better, perhaps, kuni, if we can domesticate that Japanese word for English use) that stretched from the Kinai region westward through Honshu, through the northwestern corner of Kyushu and then northward across the sea to the islands of Iki and Tsushima. She did not control politically the region of Koya Han on the southern coast of Korea (the modern Kimhae), but at least part of the population in that place was ethnically Wa and had close trading relations with the Wa people in the main islands. In this connection it is important to note that the Wei chih's description of the Han peoples in southern Korea mentions Wa who are "adjacent to" and "live among" the Han people.29 In the Wa account proper, with the focus on the islands themselves, the report mentions "the country of Koya Han on their northern shore."30 It seems clear that at that time the Wa, and Yayoi culture in general, extended from the southern coast of Korea through Kyushu and eastward to the Kinai region, although by no means were all people in that area under the Queen's regime. It was essentially an area connected by water, not by land, and one of the most common scenes must have been people going back and forth in their boats (as in some of the wall paintings in Kyushu tombs).31 It was a maritime state, and to describe it I have adopted a term of that meaning, "thalassocracy," originally applied by classical Greek writers to the early Minoan civilization on the island of Crete.32 Rather than a

28. A paper, "The Thalassocracy of Wa," which explores this problem in detail, is now in preparation.

29. San kuo chih, 30/lOOSb (Mahan), 30/1005d (Py6njin). 30. Ibid., 30/1005d (Wa). 31. Nihon no rekishi, Supplement (Bekkan), 5 vols. (ChuM Koronsha,

1967), 1:67; Inoue, Shinwa kara rekishi e, p. 192 (a boat in relief on a dotaku); Kidder, op. cit., pp. 163-164.

32. The memory of the "rule of the sea" of the legendary King Minos appears in Herodotus, III, 122, and Thucydides, I, 4.1, and in many classical writers after them: see Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyopldie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft (New ed., Stuttgart: Metzler, 1932) 15:1907-1911.


land-based society which spread to the nearest water, the Wa, imagi- natively at least, were a sea-centered people who spread in all directions to land. It is important to grasp the thalassocratic nature of this Wa polity if we are to understand the invasions of Japan that followed in the 4th century.

The Peoples of the Peninsula, Manchuria and Liao-tung

According to the Wei chih accounts, the occupants of the south- ernmost part of the peninsula were the Three Han-Mahan, Chinhan and Pyonjin-mixed in with some Wa.83 They were an agricultural people. The major economic center, and it must therefore have had its political significance too, was Koya Han, which produced iron. It was part of a trade network that included the Wa, the other Han peoples, the Yemaek people to the north, and the Chinese colonies south of the Yalu. In its third century heyday it must have been a bustling place, and its history is still reflected in its modern name Kimhae-"Metal Sea."

North of the Chinhan on the eastern coast were the Yemaek, who had earlier occupied the land that had become Lo-lang, and the Okcho. These people were related closely to the Koguryo and Puyo.

In northern Korea were the colonies of Lo-lang and Tai-fang, under direct Chinese (Wei) administration. Tai-fang had been created by the erstwhile Chinese warlords early in the 3rd century in order to keep the southern peoples more closely in check. Lo-lang's capital was in the vicinity of modern Pyongyang; Tai-fang's center was in southern Hwanghae Province.

Further north, along both banks of the upper Yalu and stretching northward into southern Manchuria, were the Koguryo, longtime enemies of the Chinese. They were a hardy and tough people who lived primarily on hunting and war. Such agricultural products as they enjoyed were produced by subject peoples forced to cultivate what few flat and fertile areas Koguryo controlled.

Further north were the Puyo, who lived in the valleys and plains of the Sungari River. They were farmers and stockraisers, their horses in particular being famous among the Chinese. The upper class was clearly a warrior caste that did its own fighting; all other work was done by the lower orders and slaves, which were obtained in warfare with other peoples. Politically the Puyo were allied with the Chinese against Koguryo.

33. Some texts, by way of analogy with Mahan and Chinhan, have Py6nhan instead of Pyonjin, and refer to the three as the Three Han.


In the valley of the Liao River were two Chinese centers: Liao- tung to the east, Liao-hsi to the west. The major function of these bases was to keep watch on the Koguryo and the Hsien-pei, the latter always a threat to China's northeastern frontier. The Hsien-pei were primarily a nomadic people akin to those of the steppe but separated from them by the Hsing-an Mountains, which pretty much forced them to orient themselves toward the Liao area rather than to the steppe.

The Fourth Century Vilkerwanderung in its Korea-Japan Phase

Exactly when the great Fourth Century Vdlkerwanderung began and how it started are questions that will probably never be an- swered.34 As far as the Chinese frontier was concerned, the situation fell out of control early in the 4th century. The Hsiung-nu established their state of Han in 304, and sacked the Chin dynasty capital at Lo-yang in 311. The Chin court abandoned north China and fled south to its new capital at Chien-k'ang in 317 ("Eastern Chin").

But in the east things seem to have begun somewhat sooner. Chinese notices of the eastern peoples stop early in the 290's; from then on we hear of them only second-hand as they come into relation with the Hsien-pei, who quickly came to dominate the Liao River area. In 286, the Hsien-pei inflicted a major defeat on the Puyo, killing many and carrying thousands away captive. The Chinese frontier administrators, true to their Puyo alliance to the end, tried to restore the PuyO kingdom by finding another heir to the throne..5 But with Chinese influence rapidly falling away after the 290's, these efforts meant little.

From later notices it is clear that many Puyo were transferred from their northern homes to the Lower Liao areas, where they became a subject element of the Hsien-pei state, which eventually came to be called Yen (or "Former Yen" in Chinese historiography).

By 313, the Chinese had lost all control of their Lo-lang and Tai-fang colonies. These were not only cut off from direct contact with China by Yen, but were also under assault from Koguryo.36

34. I attempt somewhat more detail on this in my paper "The Horseriders Come to Paekche," forthcoming in Journal of Asian History.

35. Chin shu, 97/1336a, 108/1364c. 36. Tzu chih t'ung chien (Peking, 1957, 10-volume edition), 3:2797-2799

(313 A.D.). K. J. H. Gardiner, The Early History of Korea (Honolulu: Uni- versity of Hawaii Press, 1969), pp. 39-40, believes Chinese administration in Lo-lang lasted well into the middle of the 4th century. Chinese people in


By 331, Yen's territory is said to have included Lo-lang, but it is an unresolved problem whether this erstwhile Chinese bastion was actually run by the Hsien-pei or by the Koguryo. The sources simply give no hint (pace the Korean historians who are always claiming that Kogury6 overran Lo-lang).

For almost the whole first half of the 4th century the Chin dynasty, from its southern safety at Chien-k'ang, recognized Yen's legitimacy as part of its policy of countering the Hsiung-nu, who had gobbled up huge chunks of the North China Plain. But beginning in 348, Yen, having abandoned any pretense of alliance with the Chinese, decided to take the Central plain for itself, or at least its eastern part. By 352 this was accomplished.37 From this time on Yen became geopolitically preoccupied with Chinese affairs and began to give less attention to their Liao and Manchurian rear.

This is the point at which the Puyo, left behind in Manchuria, must have made their move. We know from Chinese sources that from 372 on the PuyO are kings of Paekche,8 which has taken over the old territory of Mahan in the Korean peninsula. The Puyo conquest of Paekche therefore must have taken place in the twenty-year period between 352 and 372. Faint echoes of the move into the peninsula can be detected in the Korean sources. The detection involves a careful and detailed re-examination of these sources, together with a drastic revision of traditional Paekche chronology.

The problem with Paekche chronology is the same as the problem with Japanese chronology: the official founding of the state is dated improbably in remote antiquity rather than in the historical times in which we know the event must have occurred. In Paekche's case, the Samguk sagi (Korea's oldest written source, compiled 1145) dates the founding of Paekche in 18 B.C., an absurd claim that is neither plausible nor supportable. It happens, however, that many of the events in the chronicles assigned to these early years refer to seemingly realistic details of a kind that could have occurred in the actual founding of the state-the moving of the capital (really the move

Lo-lang there certainly were, by the thousands, but this does not mean there was Chinese administration.

37. Tzu chih t'ung chien, 4:3131 (352). 38. Chin shu, 9/1097a,b. That the kings are now Puyo is indicated by the

first appearance of the surname Y6 as belonging to a Paekche king. Later Chinese histories, such as the Chou shu, 49/2338b, the Chiu T'ang shu, 199A/ 3616a and the Hsin T'ang shu, 220/4149a, use the unabbreviated form Puy6 for the Paekche surname. During Chin times the short form Y6 is also used for non-royal and non-Paekche Puy6 individuals, indicating that it did in fact reflect an ethnic Puy6 identity.


into the peninsula), the conquest of the Mahan, and early relations with Silla. Furthermore, these events, when moved forward into the probable period of founding, seem to be displaced in the chronicles by exactly 360 years, or six sexagenary cycles. Witness the following notice, given in the Samguk sagi as a preamble to the moving of the capital from the north to the south side of the Han River (the founder's mother has just died):

East of our country is Lo-lang, on the north are the Malgal. Everywhere the borders and bounds are under attack. Seldom is there a peaceful day. Now bad omens are seen one after another, and the mother of our country has abandoned her children. In this situation we have no security. We must move the state.39

The date of this notice, 6 B.C., corresponds in the cyclical system to the year almyo.40 lmyo, moved forward six cycles, corresponds to 355. Note also that with Lo-lang in the east and the Malgal to the north, the locus of the speech could only be in southern Manchuria. And yet this appears in the Samguk sagi as a discussion about moving the capital from one side of the Han River to another! There is a chain of such notices, one part of which we shall examine more closely below when we come to consider how the Puyo first met the Wa. But most of the argument must be suppressed here for reasons of space and time, and also because we want to not tarry too long in Korea but to get to Japan.

The Crisis in the Thalassocracy

As we have seen above, the retreat of Chinese administrators from northern Korea, the fall of the centuries-old colony of Lo-lang and its buffer Tai-fang, and the rise of the Hsien-pei and the major defeat inflicted on the Puyo all reflected a major change in the east. These were cataclysmic events that must have been felt throughout the region. The repercussions must have been especially sharp on the southern coast of Korea, among the iron-producers and the country- men of the Wa thalassocrats. On the one hand, they had been selling iron to the Chinese in Lo-lang for centuries, and the fall of Lo-lang meant the loss of an important link in their economy. And the same disruptions had not left unaffected their other customers and trading partners. Whatever relations they had had with the Mahan were

39. Samguk sagi, ed. and tr. Kim Chonggwon (Seoul: S6njin munhwasa, 1960), 23/394a (Onjo 13).

40. 52nd year of the cycle.


clouded for the future; the Mahan for their part were frantically trying to maintain their relations with the Chinese but having great difficulty doing so.4' The Han and Wa peoples in southern Korea could hardly have suppressed their concern.

I believe that it was out of such a situation that Mimaki, or a man like him, came. If Mimaki was indeed a man from Mimana, he could well have been encouraged by the uncertain situation to move into the less troubled eastern waters of the thalassocracy. If Mimaki was a resident of Kyushu, he could certainly have had connections and relationships with Mimana or southern Korea. The reverberations from Korea must have been felt in the Japanese islands, and must have caused corresponding political ferment there. The arrival of fellow Wa from the other side of the water, and the problems they would have had or caused in moving, could have led to disruptions in the Wa political order.

Whatever happened, it is essential to note that Mimaki and his friends were no "horseriders." They were products of an agricultural and commercial environment. The only difference between the Wa in southern Korea and those in Kyushu was that the former were possibly a bit richer and more powerful, and maybe more sophisti- cated in some ways. But it would be wide of probability to imagine that people from Mimana came and enforced their will on their brothers in Kyushu. Mimaki's rule was not based on military conquest; at least the traditions associated with him in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki give no hint of such an atmosphere.

The Japanese sources list five rulers from Mimaki to Tarashi Nakatsuhiko ("Emperor Chiiai"), and the Nihon shoki gives them a total reign of 297 years (97 B.C. to 200 A.D.). But Japanese scholarship long ago brought Mimaki down to the 3rd or 4th century, and Mizuno Yii has made a very convincing case for placing his death in 318.42 This dovetails remarkably well with the speculation above.

Most of the legends and stories concerning Mimaki and his successors are recorded under the first three reigns, although the third, that of O Tarashihiko ("Emperor Keiko"), has little more than genealogical information, most of the action in that reign being as- cribed to a prince, the legendary Yamato Takeru.

As the Japanese critics of Egami have said, the general impression left by the chronicles for Mimaki and his line is not one of warfare or

41. Chin shu, 3/1085a-c, 97/1336a. 42. Mizuno Yfl, ZOtei Nihon kodai dcho5 shiron shosetsu (Komiyama

Shoten, 1952; revised edition 1954; 3rd printing 1968), pp. 99-102. X


warriors.43 There are tales about unsubmissive savages and indications of hostility to Izumo, but there is very little real fighting. Most of the military campaigns of the period seem summed up in the legends of Yamato Takeru, "Hero of Yamato" (his real name was Wo Usu, "Little Pestle"; the name Yamato Takeru is said to have been given him by one of his vanquished foes, but the real donors must have been the chroniclers of a later Yamato tradition). But he was a strange kind of warrior. He did little fighting, was often beaten when he did, and always overcame his enemies by trickery rather than by martial skill. No horserider, this man! For the rest, the stories of the age concern religious ceremonies, animal transformations, quarrels between lovers and relatives, and the building of irrigation facilities. The Nihon shoki adds to these, significantly, the first legends of connections with Mimana and Silla, including some interesting stories of princes wandering to Japan.44 It may be that in these stories we see a glimpse of Mimaki himself. An interesting peninsular tie is suggested by the account of Yamato Takeri's death. He is said to have turned into a giant white bird as he died; and his tomb was called the White Bird Tomb.45 Congruently the account of the Pyonhan people in the Wei chih has this line: "They send off their dead with large bird feathers; their intention in this is to induce the deceased to soar into flight."46 In the Kojiki this is exactly what Yamato Takeru, somewhere over on the other side of the thalassocratic waters, did.

Mimaki's line seems to have come to an end sometime in the second half of the 4th century. The last ruler of the group, Tarashi Nakatsuhiko ("Chiiai"), according to the Kojiki, (Phillipi, p. 271), died on a cyclical date which can be equated with 362.47 His reign is followed in both the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki by a "regency" pre- sided over by Princess Okinaga Tarashi ("Empress Jingfi"). The legends and all other plausible indications connect her to the following ruling group, not to Mimaki's. Her "regency" corresponds in the traditional chronology to the years 200-269. However, the fact that

43. Inoue, Shinwa kara rekishi e, p. 290. 44. The prince from Mimana: Nihon shoki, 1:253-255 (Sujin 65) and

257-261 (Suinin 2); cf. Aston, 1:164, 166-168. The prince from Silla: Nihon shoki, 1:261 (Suinin 3); Aston, 1:168-170.

45. Kojiki, Norito, pp. 222-224; Phillipi, pp. 250-252. 46. San kuo chih, 30/1005d. 47. Mizuno, Nihon kodai 5ch5, pp. 99-102 and Table 12. Mizuno throws

out two of the five kings in Mimaki's line, noting that no death dates are given for them in the Kojiki, and for many other reasons having to do with his very interesting analysis of the structure of the emperor list fabricated by the later Japanese historians of the 7th and 8th centuries.


she is inserted into the succession at all must be because the Wei chih, which was available to the writers of the Nihon shoki, talked about the "Queen of Wa" in the time-frame of the 230's and 240's. The fabricators could not ignore these data from the Wei chih, since it was in a well-known Chinese book copies of which could come into Japan at any time. They could not suppress it as they probably had many native materials. They had to arrange things so that the Wei- chih's information was fully reconciled. To do this they gave the Princess a long regency that included a generation on either side of the Wa Queen Pimiha's known floruit in the 230's and 240's. And to do this they had to backdate the reign of Homuda Wake ("6Ojin"') by two cycles, so that it was made to begin in 269 rather than in the more likely 389 (120 years later) or thereabouts. This kind of interpolation was not too difficult, as Homuda needed a mother anyway, and his chronology was not adequately known even in rather early times. This fraud lasted until Naka Michiyo unmasked it more than eleven and half centuries later.

It was at the beginning of Okinaga Tarashi's "regency" that her famous invasion of Silla occurred. It is described in pompous language and grandiloquent rhetoric that has inspired Japanese chauvinists for centuries. Japanese historians, however, have long accepted its completely mythical character, only noticing that like most myths this one probably had some basis in history. There is indeed another invasion described in Okinaga Tarashi's chronicle under the date of 249, or, given the usual two-cycle correction, 369,48 and this has long been accepted as being based at least partly on some actual historical incident. In fact, according to the prevailing "definitive theory," it was in 369 that the Japanese conquered Mimana and began their so-called "administration" (Mimana kei'ei) of that place.49 Since 369 also falls within the period when we know that the Puyo were conquering the Mahan and founding the state of Paekche, this supposed invasion of 369 deserves a close scrutiny. To anticipate the results of that scrutiny, we can say with some confidence that there was no invasion of southern Korea from Japan in 369. Rather the invasion came from the north. And all the essential facts can be found or deduced from the Nihon shoki itself.

The Puyp Reach the Thalassocracy

It is necessary even though also a bit tedious to summarize the Nihon shoki's account of the invasion of 369, not just to get an idea

48. Nihon shok, 1:355-359; Aston, 1:248-250. 49. The standard work on this "event' is Suematsu Yasukazu's Mimana

kob5 shi (1949; Reprint, Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1956); see especially pp. 46-63.


of what was going on in the "invasion" itself but also what was going on in the compilation of the Nihon shoki. This historiographical problem is implicit in the study of any part of Japan's antiquity, but particularly in all matters concerning relations with Korea-or, to be more correct, Paekche, Koguryo, Silla and Mimana.

In 364, we are told, some Paekche envoys came to the southern Korean principality of Tokushu (in the Nihon shoki's reading; T'aksun in the modern but less reliable Korean reading), which virtually all Japanese scholars on fairly good evidence identify with the Taegu area.50 The envoys want to go to the "Japan honorable country in the Eastern Quarter," and to do this ask the guidance and good offices of the King of Tokushu. The king replies that he has heard of such a country but has never communicated with it. "There is nothing but far seas and towering billows . . . how could you get there?" he asks. The Paekche envoys are deeply disappointed, but ask the king to let them know if an envoy from "the honorable country" should ever come to Takushu. He promises to do so.51

In 366, an envoy from Okinaga Tarashi arrives in Tokushu and is told of the Paekche visitors of two years before. He then sends a representative to Paekche, where King Sogo (the Samguk sagi's Kun Ch'ogo) gives him a lavish reception and tells him he wants to submit tribute to the "honorable country." This message gets back to Okinaga Tarashi.52 In 367, Paekche sends three envoys to her court with tribute; on the way they are joined, strangely, by an envoy from Silla.

When they all get to Japan, the Paekche tribute articles are found to be cheap and crude, while those from Silla are rare and precious. Asked to explain this, the Paekche envoys wail that they have been intimidated by the Silla envoy, who has substituted his tribute for theirs and threatened to kill them later if they say anything about it. The "Empress" sends an envoy to Silla to make charges.53

In 369, she sends an army to invade Silla, but when it gets to Tokushu it finds that its troops are too few and asks for reinforcements. It is soon joined by the troops of two generals with clearly non-Japanese names. One of them, Mokura Konshi,54 is explicitly identified as a Paekche person. Together all the forces "invade and conquer" Silla. They then pacify Tokushu and six other places which

50. Ayukai Fusanoshin, Nihon shoki Ch6sen chime! k6: Zakko No. 7 (Keija, 1937; reprint, Kokusho Kankokai, 1971), pp. 303-307.

51. The events for 364 are reported retrospectively in the notice for 366; see the following note.

52. Nihon shoki, 1:353 (Jingfi 46); Aston, 1:246-247. 53. Nihon shok, 1:353-355 (Jingof 47); Aston, 1:247-248.


are all located within the bounds of the later Mimana. From here the armies turn west and conquer the "southern savages," and then "grant" these lands to Paekche. At this point they are joined by the Paekche king Sogo and his son Prince Kusu, whereupon four more localities (all located to the west of the later Mimana boundaries) "spontaneously surrender." The Japanese then leave one of their officials behind in Paekche. This representative leads King Sogo through a series of humiliating ceremonies in which the king supposedly swears to Japan a fealty that "will remain undecayed to distant ages."55

This story raises a host of questions. If Paekche wanted guidance to Japan, why did they seek it in the landlocked principality of Tokushu? The phrase "Japan honorable country" is just as clumsy in the original as it is in English, and it has long puzzled Japanese commentators. On the one hand, the name "Japan"-Nihon-is a blatant anachronism; on the other, "honorable country" is always a 2nd person, never a 3rd person usage. The text here would seem to have suffered a rather inept alteration. King Sogo's desire to submit tribute to Japan certainly looks like implausible behavior for a Puyo warrior. About the invasion of Silla there are many problems. Why would Japanese armies go all the way to Taegu to invade Silla? In all the many Korean references to Wa-Silla hostilities, a Wa attack never comes from this direction.56 How is it that Japan can summon reinforcements from Paekche at this point? No Japanese (or Paekche) conquest of Silla is known or likely for this date; in any case Silla is

54. I use the reading indicated in the Nihon shoki's sound glosses, which is certainly closer to the original than the modern Korean "Mongna Kinja." Aston's well-intended but misguided attempt to render all Korean names in Korean pronunciation has caused endless confusion and difficulty for readers unable to consult the original. These Nihon shoki readings for Korean names are in fact concrete evidence for the Korean pronunciation of that time, now obscured by a subsequently developed and quite different Korean tradition of reading Chinese characters. This general, Mokura, evidently founded or was a representative of a leading Paekche military family, for generals with similar-sounding names (but in different periods and in different transcriptions) are mentioned in Samguk sagi, 25/426b (Kaero 21), and Nan Ch'i shu, 58/1758b (Paekche).

55. Nihon shoki, 1:255-257 (Jingl 49); Aston, 1:248-250. 56. The Samguk sagi records 29 Japanese invasions (or raids) between the

years 50 B.C. and 497 A.D. Two more unclear references pertain to 297 and 408. Those said to occur before the 4th century are of course hors de propos; nor can the sixteen dated during the 4th and 5th centuries be independently confirmed. Korean sources surviving in Korea have no record of an invasion in 369.

Ledyard: Horseriders 241,

quite unconquered and quite independent a few years later, even according to the Nihon shoki. All the places named as having been overcome are in Mimana, not in Silla. The pacification begins with Tokushu itself (strange that Tokushu should be pacified after it has served as the base for the "Silla conquest"!) and proceeds southward. How did the Wa armies get to Tokushu in the first place without passing through the areas they later conquered? In other words, what people would have let a Wa army go through their territory from south to north so that it could turn around and conquer them from north to south? How is it that "Japan," which does not have enough troops to do the job, is in a position to "grant" conquered land to Paekche? Why is it that the areas that "spontaneously surrendered" go to Paekche, not to Japan? Etc., etc., etc.

While we are here concerned specifically with the events of 369, it is necessary to insert here that this account is not atypical of the Nihon shoki's notices on Korea. Time and time again it presents us with a farrago of contradictory statements, illogical sequences, farcical diplomatic situations, non-sequiturs and just plain howlers. When a story does not look plausible or reasonable, and when such improbable stories follow one upon the other, one knows there was conscientious distortion. But what was distorted? Was there a "straight" record? Probably. The Nihon shoki, in its coverage of this period, several times quotes a book called the Kudara ki, or "Paekche Record." But it is clear that many passages that do not directly quote it or name it were still based on it-this from the fact that there are telltale idiosyncracies in Paekche phonetic transcriptions which pop up in supposedly "Japanese" sections.57

The invasion of 369 comes from such a source; that is, the source upon which the Nihon shoki compilers relied for their account of the 369 affair was a Paekche source. This would explain the otherwise queer participation of Paekche forces in essentially a "Japanese" show. On closer examination, however, it is evident that it was a Paekche show. As I reconstruct it, the "honorable country" in the east was not Japan but Silla. If Paekche had wanted guidance to Silla, Tokushu would have been the most natural place to go-it was, after all, right on the way. The Samguk sagi in fact records a Paekche embassy to Silla in 366.58 The story about the switched tribute may have originated in a tale about the Tokushu intermediaries

57. See Kinoshita Reiji, "Nihon shoki ni mieru Kudara shiryo no shiryoteki kachi ni tsuite," Chosen gakuh6 21-22 (1961):673-723.

58. Samguk sagi, 3/SSa (Naemul 11); 24/411b (Kun Ch'ogo 21).


conniving for some gain for themselves. In any case, Tokushu must have done something to arouse Paekche's ire, because two Paekche generals soon arrive and pacify Tokushu. The same Paekche armies then proceed south-and these Puyo men had been going south ever since they left Manchuria-and conquer a string of cities that stretch down the Naktong basin to the southern shore. They then turn west and wipe up the "southern savages," which they conquered for themselves and did not have "granted" to them by any Wa army. They then joined up with the Paekche king and his son who had campaigned down the west coast. What the Nihon shoki has in fact described for us is the last stage of the Puyo conquest of the Mahan-therefore the final stage in the founding of Paekche itself.59

This is corroborated in an interesting way. The Korean sources for Paekche history contain no mention of the conquest of the Mahan in the 4th century. But in King Onjo's reign, that is, in the founder's reign way back in the late years B.C., we find the chain of notices that covers these events. In 6 A.D., we are told, Mahan protests Paekche's aggressive posture. In 7, omens appear in Paekche that presage the "annexation of a neighbor." In 8, the attack against Mahan begins. In 9, the Mahan are annihilated.0 Like other events, one of which has already been discussed above, these notices in the Onjo annals should be transferred cyclically forward 360 years. When this opera- tion is performed, the Mahan conquest turns out to have been accomplished in 366, 367, 368 and 369-exactly the years when the Nihon shoki describes the southward movement of the Paekche armies.

Thus the Mahan, not the "southern savages," were annihilated by the Puyo state of Paekche in the year kisa6' of the cycle-not 9 A.D., but 369 A.D. To the extent that any Wa troops were involved, and there may very well have been some in an area that had historically had Wa people in its population, they did not affect the overall strategic result. The Nihon shoki, interpreted with the right armies going in the right directions after the right enemy, turns out to make perfect sense. The Puyo had conquered the Mahan and Mimana too, and they were now on the "northern shore" of the Thalassocracy of Wa.

59. This interpretation of this key passage was first suggested by Ch'6n Kwan'u in an article in Sin Tong'a, December, 1972. I have consulted the revised Japanese version, "Mimana mondai ni tsuite," Han 2/2 (February, 1973):53-84. Ch'6n arrives at his interpretation in the course of his re-examination of the Mimana problem; he does not discuss it in terms of any horserider theory.

60. Samguk sagi, 23/394b (Onjo 24-27). 61. The 6th year of the cycle.


The Puyo in Japan A thalassocracy is a state based on the sea; one cannot conquer

it by staying on land. When the Puyo conquered the southern shore of Korea, they must soon, if not immediately, have recognized that the people there had intimate relations with those across the straits. Among those already conquered were some Wa. The conquest of these Wa was not likely to be secure if the main Wa group remained unconquered. In the same way, Caesar, after he had conquered the Celts in northern Gaul, realized he would also have to conquer those in southern Britain in order to keep northern Gaul secure (he failed in this attempt, but the task was accomplished later by his successors). 62 So when the Puyo reached the sea, they got into boats. Perhaps they could not manage the boats themselves,63 but they were not conquerors for nothing. Like the Mongols who reached the same shore and looked across to Japan many centuries later, they simply dragooned into their service people who knew about boats. Before they were finished with their conquests, they probably had learned a great deal about them.

There is no account in either Korean or Japanese sources about any transmarine Puyo migration. As with the Saxon invaders of England, no word about the voyages made it through the fog of time to the light of history. If there is any echo in written records, it is in the legend of the "Eastward Conquest" of the Prince of Iware of Godly Yamato (Kamu Yamato Iware Hiko)-to use the purely Japanese title (he has no name) of the "Emperor Jimmu." He was supposedly descended from the god/man Ninigi no Mikoto, whom the Sun Goddess had sent from Heaven down to Mount Kujifuru, located by the ancient writers in Eastern Kyushu (present Miyazaki Prefecture)." The Prince of Iware thus set out from this place, and

62. See George Trevelyan, op. cit., 1:32. "The conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, more decidedly than his invasions of Britain, had brought the South British tribes into the orbit of Latin civilization."

63. There is no reason to assume that the Puy6 were utterly unfamiliar with boats. Their neighbors the Kogury6 carried on an extensive maritime relationship with the southern Chinese kingdom of Wu during the first half of the 3rd century. There was probably more maritime travel than land travel between the Liao-tung peninsula and China proper.

64. There are many explanations for Ninigi no mikoto having picked this most unlikely of all spots in Japan, most of them as unlikely as the spot itself. My guess is that when the invaders were later looking around for a mountain upon which to localize their descent myth, far-off Kujifuru was the only respectable peak not already coopted by the dieties of other politically important elements of the native population. The fact that the most important clan in Japan has its sacred mountain in such a remote and barren place strongly suggests that it is not an indigenous group.


his first stop was in Tsukushi, or northwest Kyushu. Now obviously this would also have been the first stop of anyone coming from the peninsula as well,05 and if one accepts a separation of the descent myth (or more precisely the later localization of it) from the historical Eastward Conquest, there is no reason why we cannot consider the Prince of Iware as an impersonation of our Puy6 warriors. At least Japanese historiography has left no other plausible place to look for signs of their movements.

The Prince of Iware tarried for varying lengths of time in Tsukushi and Kibi (Okayama region), but his goal from the beginning was the rich land in the east, that is, Yamato. The Puy6 would have had to head for Yamato too, since this was the richest plain in Japan and the place from which much of Japanese territory was ruled. As with "Paekche," the name of a locality in Korea's lower Han River valley (attested 100 years before the Puyo conquest, in the Wei Chih66), where the Puy6 first made their capital, this name becoming general- ized into a name for the whole country, so "Yamato," the name of the capital area, became the name of the state the Puyo founded in Japan. (In fact, this is one of the most important indications that the Wei chih's "YamatV" was located in the historical Yamato: the conquerors made their capital there and that name became their name. If "Yamat6" had been located in Kyushu, as some still believe, then presumably the rich rice plain in the Kinai would have been named something else, and that would have become the name of the Japanese state.)

Comparative Evidence for a Puyo Conquest

There being so little in the way of direct testimony to a Puy6 migration, one is forced to look for evidence in the comparison of various cultural traits-both spiritual and material-that are known independently from Korea and Japan. The possible comparisons are quite numerous and manifest themselves in the archaeological as well as in the mythological record.

Archaeologically, Japan's Tomb Period II (the first part of Egami's Late Tomb Period) presents abundant signs of a freshly imported warrior culture of continental type. Horses appear suddenly and forcibly before our eyes as we look at the rich array of horse

65. Egami has Mimaki Iri-biko ruling his peninsula-Kyushu regime from northwestern Kyushu. Only with his descendant Homuda does the Eastward Conquest begin. Egami, op. cit., pp. 195-198.

66. San kuo chih, 30/1005b.


trappings and the haniwa representations that come from the tombs (the Wei chih reports that there were no horses at all in Japan in the 3rd century67). Weapons, helmets, and armor fill out the picture: no man ever went walking into battle with all these accoutrements. The richness of material and design of these objects bespeaks power and wealth of a kind not evident in early archaeological periods. Crowns, swords and other objects closely resemble counterparts dug from Korean tombs.

A striking parallel is found in the pottery: joining the older, hand-crafted Haji ware is the new mass-produced Sue ware (Sueki), obviously of the same origin as the contemporary Kaya pottery of Korea. The Japanese forms show a richer development and variety than the Korean, but in many cases it takes a real expert to tell the two apart.68

Another archaeological datum of major importance is the huge scale of the tombs (kofun) from which this age takes its name. It has been argued that the size of the tombs testifies to a large territorial extent and, indeed, to a unified state; without these conditions it would seem impossible to account for the huge labor force that must have been required to build them. These observations are reasonable as far as they go. But one wonders if conquerors from any part of Japan could have pulled labor off the farms on that scale and still have been able to feed themselves and their workers, much less maintain firm hold on the population. That the tomb labor force was huge is axiomatic. What is crucial, however, is that it was extra and additional. The legends in the old Japanese sources speak of large numbers of immigrants in the time of King Homuda and his immediate successors. Immigrants (also known by the euphemistic and self- serving term "kikajin"69 which is ubiquitous in Japanese historiogra-

67. San kuo chih, 30/1006a. 68. See Kidder, op. cit., p. 189. Sue ware was "produced in shops of a highly

trained guild that must have been Korean at the core." 69. This word connotes an individual, usually an immigrant, who has made

a spiritual commitment to an alien culture; who, in the literal meaning of the phrase, "has turned toward" the foreign culture "and been transformed." Such individuals indeed arrived in Japan in later times, and most persons of alien origin portrayed their ancestors in this light when they constructed their genealogies in the 8th and 9th centuries. But in the beginning immigrants came in whole communities, and most of them unquestionably as prisoners. Japanese sources present a picture of the populations of whole counties in Korea anxiously waiting to come to Japan, but given the fact that these early arrivals came in large corporate groups from recently conquered territory, and that after their arrival they were put to work building huge irrigation projects and


phy) is too glossy a word; they were probably prisoners, captives, dragged behind PuyO horses from conquests in Manchuria and Korea across the sea to do the work of the new state. Some of these arrivals were Chinese survivors from the old colonies.70 It is significant that the tombs are biggest in the early decades of Tomb Period II, and this is the time when captives from the conquest would have been the most numerous.

There are many mythological analogues between Yamato legends and those of the PuyO and Koguryo. The mythological specialists in Japan, such as Matsumura Takeo,71 are well aware of these but seem more fascinated with the comparative elements from the south seas and from southeast Asia. I do not deny the importance of these elements at all; in fact they are very significant. But they relate mainly to Japan before the Puy6 conquest, that is, to the Thalassocracy of Wa and its people.

To understand the later stratum of the Japanese people that is related to the continent, we have to give attention to the Korean and Manchurian parallels. Some common elements follow, just a few by way of samples. Yamato mythology is strong on rocks: people live in rock caves and sail in rock boats (the Prince of Iware sailed in "Heavenly Rock Boats" on his Eastward Conquest). There is the Rock Princess (Iwa no hime), mother of several Yamato kings, and there is the Shrine of the Stone God (Isonokami), located in a place anciently named Furu (< Puru),72 and Puru is a frequently seen

mammoth tombs, one can reasonably doubt that their coming to Japan was so voluntary. The facts of these immigrations have been exhaustively examined by Bruno Lewin in his Aya und Hata: Bevdlkerungsgruppen Altjapans konti- nentaler Herkunft (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz, 1962).

70. One of these was probably Wani, the man traditionally held to have brought Chinese writing to Japan, and to have founded one of the scribal corporations, the Fumi no Obito. Actually the Paekche man Achiki brought Chinese writing before Wani, and it is actually on his introduction, according to the story, that Wani came. The Nihon shoki presents a story that Achiki was given the charge of feeding the horses that had come from Paekche as "tribute," thus in effect giving credit for the important cultural milestone to the later-arriving Chinese. But one fact, reflected in both ancient sources, belies this story: Achiki (or Achi-kishi) is the founder of an hereditary corporation of scribes, the Achiki no Fubito, and must have been more than a hostler. Nihon shoki, 1:271-272 (6jin 16); Aston, 1:261-263; Kojiki, Norito, p. 248; Philippi, pp. 284-285. Cf. Lewin, op. cit., pp. 12-20.

71. Matsumura Takeo, Nihon shinwa no kenkya, 4 vols. (Baiffikan, 1954- 58).

72. Now incorporated into Tenri City in Nara Prefecture. This is the


element in Korean Puyo stories-indeed, it seems linguistically cognate with "Puy6."73 In Korean accounts of the Puy-, kings are born from under rocks.74 In this light, one recalls the tale of the fabulous birth of Homuda, who the war-waging Princess Okinaga Tarashi kept in her womb for three months beyond term by hanging rocks on her skirts. When one reflects that she was campaigning in Korea at the time, and that the rocks were so placed to delay the birth until she got back to Japan, it is clear that Homuda's physical presence in Korea is implicit in the story, and that the legend-spinners were only able to get him born in Japan by gynecological legerdemain. Such were some of the problems of incorporating the traditions of the conquerors into the indigenous legends of Wa.

To conclude on rocks, we have the important place name Iware, found in the title of the putative founder of Yamato and as the name of the residence of King Homuda and several of his successors. The name not only suggests rock lore through its first element iwa < ipa, "rock," "boulder," but also seems to be present in Paekche as well, again as a name associated with the capital area. The Korean variant is *Ipar ( e t5Z ), 7 while Ipare is the older Japanese form of Iware. When one notices the characters with which Iware is written ( f, @ ), and sees the odd and otherwise unattested phonetic value of the second character-which just happens to be also the second character of the name Puyo ( f or t ; )-one

ancestral shrine of the Mononobe clan. They were closely associated with the early ruling family and would also have been of horserider origin. See Egami, pp. 266-270, 281-284.

73. It is the name of the legendary first king of the Puy6 (Hae Puru); see Sarnguk yasa, ed. Ch'oe Nams6n (Seoul: Minjung s6gwan, 1946), pp. 39-40 (Tong Puy6) and 40-41 (Kogury6). In this later passage, Puru, variant Piru, is also the name of a river along which the Puy6 live. See also Sarnglk sagi, 13/247a-248a (Tongmy6ng Prologue and 2nd year).

74. Samguk yusa, pp. 39-40 (Tong Puyd). 75. The name "K6bal" Fa V occurs in the Siti shi, 81/2532a, the Pei

shih, 94/3033c, and the T7ung tien, 185/988a, as a name for the capital of Paekche. Giving the first character a Korean "kun" reading of i yields the reading *Ibal or *lpar. Normally it would not be permissible to interpret Chinese transcriptions by means of presumed local and contemporary native readings. But these same Chinese sources give strong emphasis to Paekche knowledge and use of Chinese characters and literature; moreover, most of the other Paekche words they give (mostly titles and surnames) are in the forms that also occur in Paekche sources in both their Korean and Japanese survivals. The likelihood is thus strong that the Chinese envoys reported back the actual characters used in Paekche, and therefore that these names are not Chinese transcriptions in the normal sense. The city they called '1Ipar was called in Korean sources "Southern Puy6." It is called simply Puy6 today.


begins to see the plausibility of a connection with that name too. The character B had, according to Karlgren,76 a voiced dental initial in Old Chinese-that is, an initial d-; this could well have served as a transcriptional equivalent for a trilled -r- of the Japanese and Korean type. I am inclined to regard the -re of Iware as a vowel-harmony variant77 of the suffix -ra meaning clan or tribe or nation, and that the name Puyo (possibly originating in a form like *Pora or *Para78) might boil down to something like "Rocklings" -a more than appropriate name for a people whose legends tell us of births from under rocks, of rock princesses and rock boats.79

While we are on the subject of place names, there is one more that deserves mention. After the Prince of Iware arrived in the Yamato area and vanquished all the unruly elements there, he decided to build his palace in a place called Kashiwara,80 or the "Plain of the Kashi Trees" to follow the traditional etymology. Now the Samguk yusa, speaking of the "Eastern Puy6," has the following passage:

Aranbul, the Minister of the Northern Puy6 King Hae Puru, dreamt that the Sky Emperor descended and said to him, "I am going to have my sons and grandsons establish a state in this place. You go somewhere else. On the coast of the East Sea there is a place called the Kas6p Plain. Its lands are fat and fertile, and would make a fit place to establish a royal capital." Aranbul urged the King to move his capital to that place, and the state was then designated "Eastern Puy6."8''

76. Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, No. 82-1. 77. In the same way the final syllables of isolating forms such as kaze

and fune contrast with those of combining forms such as kaza- and funa-. 78. These hypothetical forms seem possible for Han times, when the name

Puy6 (Ch. Fu-yu) is first attested (Shih chi, 129/0277a). They are based partly on an assessment of the phonology of Han-time Chinese, and partly on earlier names for the peoples of the Liao and Eastern Manchurian area. Some of these names are Po (*part), P'an (*p'arn), Po (*bert) and P'ai (*p'ard). These hypothetical forms are based on the principles of an unpublished system for Old Chinese elaborated by the late Peter A. Boodberg. At the time he recon- structed all those r's in 1960 or 1961 (for the Karlgren forms see Grammata Serica Nos. 275c, 195n, 491c and 320), I doubt that he was aware of any possible connections between the name of the Puy6 and the Japanese place name Iware. The same reconstruction principle applied to the first character of Iware yields *barn. All of these forms have a syllable like *par in common and are plausible transcription choices for such a name.

79. There is a possibility that the Puy6 and other South Manchurian peoples were representative of a megalithic culture that had originally come from the south.

80. Nihon shoki, 1:213; Aston, 1:131; Kojiki, p. 160; Philippi, p. 177. 81. Samguk yusa, p. 39 (Tong Puy6).


Koguryo supposedly took over the islands of the Northern Puyo, who moved east to the "Kas'p Plain" and became the Eastern Puy' but who then completely vanished from history. Their new capital may have been some place on the east coast of Korea, as the text seems to suggest, but no such place name or people are known. Perhaps they could be interpreted as the PuyO who went in the direction of Paekche; on the other hand, the surviving legend of the founding of Paekche by the Puyo gives quite a different story. Could we have here an echo of some Puy6 gone off to Japan? The name "Kasop Plain" suggests that we do. The Korean word for "plain" is pal, cognate with Japanese para > hara. The Middle Chinese pronunciation for the combination now read kasdp is ka sUap. And Ka s?fip para strongly suggests Japanese Kasi Para > Kashiwara. The parallel is too striking to ignore.

There are many other common elements in Japanese-Korean myth that must have a PuyO tie. The "backwards flaying of horses," famous through Chamberlain's charming translation of the Kojiki line,82 is seen in one Korean version of the Tan'gun myth.83 The discovery of previously unknown people by observing their things floating down the river from upstream is a motif that occurs several times in both Japanese and Koguryo stories.84 In Korea, Chumong escapes his pursuers by walking across the river on the backs of fishes and turtles that have floated up to the surface at his entreaty;85 in the Kojiki, a similar escape takes place when the pursued flees across the water on the backs of wani-a fabulous animal defined in the Wamyosho as a kind of turtle.86 There are also interesting narratological parallels between the two PuyO cultures. In Korea and especially in Koguryo chronicles, there is a great fondness for stories involving puns to explain the origin of place-names.87 These are, of course, a common element in old Japanese legends.88 It is not just that this kind of tale

82. Basil Hall Chamberlain, "Ko-Ji-Ki," (Supplement to Vol. 10 of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1882), p. 53. Cf. Kojiki, Norito, p. 80; Philippi, p. 80.

83. Sejong sillok, 154/5a-b. 84. For instance, Samguk sagi, 13/248a; Kojiki, p. 84; Philippi, p. 88. 85. Hou Han shu, 115/0896b; Samguk sagi, 13/247b, etc. 86. Kojiki, Norito, pp. 90-92; Philippi, pp. 93-94 and his additional note

on wani on pp. 406-407. 87. Samguk sagi 13/248a (Tongmy ng 2), 13/249a (Yuri 21), 13/249b

(Yuri 24), 14/259b-260a (Taemusin 4 and 5), 16/258b-259a (Sansang 13), 17/298a (Tongch'on 22), and others.

88. An example of this prose feature, very well known in the early Japanese sources: Susa-no-wo arrives at a place in Izumo and says, "Coming here, my


is present in both places, it is that in both places it serves as an important element in the narratological structure: the narrative liter- ally hangs on the place-name story.

These comparative traits are too close and too abundant to be accidental. They must have a common origin.

Yamato Power

Homuda probably unified Japan, at least as far eastward as Yamato, although I have no clear idea how much further east Puyo power pushed. This unification was not necessarily permanent. In fact I believe that after the fall of the Homuda dynasty in the late 5th century, the country fell into a certain degree of disunity before it was put together again by the founder of the next dynasty, King Wohodo ("Emperor Keitai"). I suspect that the Iwai ("Rock Well") Revolt in Kyushu in 527, for example, was not really a revolt so much as a survival of pro-Homuda, or "Rockling" elements.89

For a generation after the events of 369, Puy6 power stretched in a great arc from the Han River Basin in Korea, through Mimana and Kyushu, over to Yamato. However, the two ends of this arc began to fall apart fairly early, for they each had to respond to quite different local conditions and military challenges. The Puyo in Paekche, for instance, by the 390's came under heavy and continuous battering from their Koguryo cousins in the north, and were quite severely in trouble during the 390's and 400's. Help from their brothers in Japan may have been the only thing that saved them-in any- case, this is what I think it means on the Kwanggaet'o Stone when it says that the Wa came across the sea and fought in Korea. (One can ask, if they were Puyo, why did the writers of the stele text not call them Puyo? Why did they call them Wa? One possible response to this question is that the same objection could be made in the case of Paekche. Koguryo people knew they were Puyo (and we know from Chinese sources that they were Puyo) but on the Kwanggaet'o Stone they still call them Paekche, their adopted name.)90 After this period, the

heart is refreshed (suga-sugashi)." He builds his palace there, and "therefore that place is still called Suga." See Kojiki, Norito, pp. 88, 154; Philippi, pp. 91, 170, for this and another Kojiki naming-tale. Two examples from among dozens in the Nihon shoki are 1:425-427 (Richfi 3) and 473 (Yiiryaku 6); Aston, 1:306-7, 347.

89. Nihon shoki, 2:35-39; Aston, 2:15-17; Kojiki, Norito, p. 336; Philippi, p. 385.

90. The actual name used is Paekchan, a pejorative variation of Paekche.


Japanese end of the Puyo arc was definitely the stronger. This is why Mimana, which the Puyo conquered on their way to Japan, and which they therefore "brought" with them, came more and more to be oriented to Japan rather than to Paekche. But Yamato's hold on Mimana, in my opinion, did not survive the fall of Homuda's line at the end of the 5th century.

Succession and Duration of Homuda's Line

The chief consort family during the Homuda period was the Kazuraki family (this spelling seems to be more correct than the usually seen Katsuragi). Homuda himself did not have such a consort, but his son 0 Sazaki ("Emperor Nintoku") did; this was the famous "Rock Princess," Iwa no hime. She was the daughter of Kazuraki Sotsuhiko, a prominent figure who is closely identified with Mimana and southern Korea., Sotsuhiko (or Sachihiko as his name is quoted in the Kudara ki) is in or around Mimana on every occasion he is mentioned in the Nihon shoki.91 Many of these notices have the same disturbing signs of having been tampered with, that is, of having been based on an originally Paekche source which was distorted in order to magnify the role of Yamato-a case of which we have already examined in connection with the "invasion" of 369. Sotsuhiko's movements too often just do not make any sense. My suspicion is that the Kazurakis were originally Mimana Wa who early on allied themselves with the conquerors and made a place for themselves. They moved on to Yamato with the Puyo but retained their strong position in Mimana, which was the basis of their wealth.92

The Homuda dynasty lasted until about the end of the 5th century. It finished its life with split ruling houses, and this probably was a key factor in its demise. On the one hand, there was Ohatsuse

91. Nihon shoki, 1:349-351 (Jingil 5), 359-361 (Jingil 62), 371 (6jin 14), 373 (djin 16) and 409 (Nintoku 41); cf. Aston, 1:241-2, 252, 261, 263-4 and 293.

92. It is possible to explain the sudden disappearance of Japan from the Chinese dynastic histories after its spectacular appearance in the Sung shu (97/1655c-d) to the loss of its ties with Mimana. This in turn coincides with the fall of Kazuraki House. Just as the Sogas (who were descendants of the Kazurakis) in later times dominated the ties with the mainland, so in the 5th century the Kazurakis might have handled Japan's foreign relations. This is a promising postulate from which to re-examine the hoary problem of the identification of the five Wa kings mentioned in the Sung shu, possibly to include only kings (or likely kings, see next note) descended from Kazuraki consorts.


("Emperor YUryaku"), descendant of a non-Kazuraki union, who ended the dynasty in one half; on the other, there was the Kazuraki- related Ichinobe Oshiwa, who certainly appears to have ruled;93 his daughter or sister Iitoyo, who very likely ruled (Mizuno Yii calls her "Japan's first empress"94); and his sons Oke and Woke, who "did" rule ("Emperors" "Kenz6" and "Ninken"). The Nihon shoki compilers, operating on the "Single Line in a Myriad Generations" theory, were ill-equipped to deal with a situation in which two houses contended for legitimacy; in any case, they were not anxious to provide any models for such a situation. The way they actually arranged the successors from Ohatsuse through Wohodo raises many problems of fact and interpretation. But one fabulous story is enough to throw into doubt the whole labored narrative: King Ohatsuse, climbing up a mountain significantly called "Mount Kazuraki" with his attendants, encounters another man looking just like himself, with attendants looking just like his own attendants. Ohatsuse says:

"There is no other king in this land of Yamato. Who is this who comes in this manner?"

The style of the reply was also the same as the emperor's own words.

At this time, the emperor was greatly enraged and fixed his arrow. His many attendants also all fixed their arrows.

Then the other people also all fixed their arrows. Hereupon the emperor again inquired, saying: "In that case, say your names. We will all say our names and

then shoot our arrows." This time, the reply was: "Since I have been asked first, I will say my name first: good

fortune with one word, bad fortune with one word, the word-

93. The king, Woke ("Emperor Kenz6"), identifies himself as the son "Of him who in the Palace of Ichinobe / Governed all under Heaven." This kind of formula is seen elsewhere in the early Japanese sources as a way of identifying Yamato kings, but Woke's father, Ichinobe no Oshiwa, is not in the Nihon shoki's list of rulers. Woke also gives his father the kingly-sounding epithet "Oshiwa no Mikoto." Nihon shoki, 1:515; Aston, 1:382. See also Kojiki, Norito, p. 524; Philippi, pp. 370-371.

94. Mizuno YO, Nihon kodai dchO, pp. 72-81. Mizuno, though quite bold in pruning the false rulers from the traditional king list, still works with his own "single-line-in-a-myriad-generations" mentality. He cannot stand a hiatus, and he always insists on having one and only one king on the throne at a time. Yet his conclusions, and the whole context iin which the Nihon shoki presents the struggle between King Ohatsuse ("Emperor Yfiryaku") and Ichinobe, argue strongly for a split ending to this line of kings.


deciding deity, The Lord of One Word and the Great God of Kazuraki am I!"

At this the emperor was afraid and said: "I am struck with awe, 0 my great deity! I did not know that

you had a corporeal form." Thus saying, beginning with his own great sword and bow and

arrows, he had his many attendants take off the garments they were wearing and reverentially presented them.

Then this Lord of One Word and Great God, clapping his hands, accepted these offerings.

Thus, on the emperor's return from the mountain top to the entrance of Mount Hatsuse, this great deity escorted him back.95

This story clearly presents a situation with two rulers contending for power (note the contradiction introduced when the later compilers changed one word "king" to "emperor" but left the other one stand- ing), although most Japanese commentators give other explanations.

The political and economic influence of Homuda's line probably persisted longer in Kyushu and Mimana than in Yamato proper. The political effect of the Iwai Rebellion in Kyushu in 527 was to assert local Kyushu interests in Mimana. I feel that elements still loyal to the Homuda line were trying to hold out in Kyushu and to keep it away from the new rulers in Yamato. All of the Yamato efforts to "restore" Mimana are probably nothing but historiographical manipulations to save the face of the imperial house, perpetrated by the Nara ideologues.96 Even if Yamato had succeeded in bringing Mimana into its new miyake system, the relationship could not have lasted long; already in the second decade of the 6th century Paekche was gobbling up Mimana territory (although the writers of the Nihon shoki hid their embarrassment by calling these losses "grants" to Paekche97). What was left Silla conquered in 532 and 562.

The Identity of Wohodo ("Keitai") and His New Dynasty

Wohodo is given a genealogy that connects him to the earlier rulers. But there are differing versions, and the major sources simply identify him as a distant descendant of Homuda.98 By the late 5th

95. Kojiki, Norito, p. 316; Philippi, pp. 360-361. I have translated here the name of the deity which Philippi transliterated.

96. These notes fill the reigns of Wohodo ("Keitai") and Amekuni ("Kimmei") and appear to be edited from Paekche sources.

97. Nihon shoki, 2:27-29 (Keitai 6), 31 (Keitai 7) and 33 (Keitai 10); Aston, 2:7-9, 11, 14.

98. Nihon shoki, 2:19 (Keitai prologue); Aston, 2:1. Most surviving texts of the Kojiki lack such a statement.


century, roughly 100 years after the death of Homuda, that identification might have applied to thousands of people. The idea of a dynastic break after the so-called "Emperor Buretsu" (this man is almost surely completely fictitious and there is no question of finding a genuine Japanese name for him) and before "Keitai" is held by quite a few historians.99 In my view, Wohodo represents a dominantly non-Puyo, mainly Wa ethnic entity. As the vigor of the early warrior- founders declined, and as Yamato's profitable mainland connection faded during and after the reign of the non-Kazuraki-related Ohatsuse, the Puyo rulers got weaker and weaker, and ultimately their regime fell down and could not get up. When it fell, Wohodo and other compatriots picked it up in a kind of nativist rebellion. And they held it ever after, obliterating all memory of the conquest earlier accomplished by their erstwhile rulers. But they could not obliterate the legacy of that conquest: the creation of "Japan." When Wohodo and his men took over, they were irrevocably changed from the Wa they had been. They were now the children, and the masters, of Yamato civilization. The Japanese nation and state had now been formed.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

99. Mizuno Yu's Nihon kodai dchd is the most thoroughgoing exposition of the "three dynasty" theory (the first, "Sujin"; second, "Nintoku," though some call this the "Ojin" dynasty; and third, "Keitai"), now generally accepted in most surveys.

Ledyard - Galloping Along With the Horseriders

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