Sengoku Daimyo

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Episode 117: The People of the North, Part Two

Joshua Badgley

A 19th century depiction of Abe no Hirafu in the far north, in the winter, fighting a bear. In truth, most of the dates we have put his expeditions in the summer time, but of course the snow and cold are what most people picture. To be fair, some of the entries in the Nihon Shoki do not actually give an actual date, so they could have been in the winter, but that seems unlikely. This print is from 1878, by the artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. It is in the public domain, and found via Wikimedia Commons.

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This is Part Two of our discussion on the people known as the Emishi and the Mishihase, and if you haven’t already listened to Part One, you may wish to do that, first. This episode deals mainly with what we see in the Chronicles. A large part of that is focused on Abe no Hirafu and his expeditions in Tohoku and Hokkaido.

I do wonder if any of this would even be mentioned if it weren’t for the role that Abe no Hirafu will later play in the conflicts on the continent, leading one of the most famous naval assaults in ancient Japanese history as Yamato was attempting to support their ally, Baekje. Given that, we can see how the Chroniclers may have wanted to give a little backstory on him—not that they bothered with anyone else.

There is an issue, though, in the way they tell the story, as the expeditions all sound quite similar. There is some conjecture that there were three different sources that the Chroniclers were drawing from, and rather than try and conflate them into one or use the “other books say…” format we’ve seen elsewhere, they instead decided to put each one in as a separate instance. They all seem to follow similar stories: Abe no Hirafu goes to Tohoku and meets with the Emishi—often mentioning a feast of some sort—and then he goes further north to fight with the Mishihase. Only one account actually gives us any details about the fighting.

If we assume that he actually only went north once, we can see how it may have been the case that the Emishi had actually asked Yamato for assistance. The Mishihase appear to have been pushing south—we’ve seen accounts of them as far south as Sado island—and it is quite likely that they and the Emishi in Hokkaido were in conflict with one another over various resources. It may have been such a conflict that led the Emishi to reach out to their southern neighbors for assistance.

Much of that is conjecture, however. Similarly, it is unclear just how much they actually submitted themselves to Yamato. Certainly Yamato would claim that they had earned governance over at least all of Honshu, but we’ve seen that movie before, where the Chronicles made it seem as though Yamato was “ruling” over places like Izumo and Kibi, though clearly those places had a fair degree of autonomy. I suspect that for those on the fringes, any “submission” at this point was similar—they weren’t entirely suborning themselves and they weren’t re-arranging their culture—at least not those on the far outer edge.

The Emishi closer in—who may have even been ethnically or culturally “Wa” for all intents and purposes—would have more easily been able to assimilate into the rice-growing culture of Yamato.

The Abe family—or a branch of it, anyway—would go on to have quite the influence in the Tohoku region, and at one point were, themselves, considered “Emishi”, though that reference is centuries from out current point in the story, and it is unclear to me if they had any actual ties to Abe no Hirafu or if they had simply appropriated the name. Either way, it will show up more, eventually.

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