Episode 30: Yamato and the Continent
These bronze spirals, which in this case come from Gimhae—what was once part of Gaya—in the 4th C, have been suggested as shield ornaments, though in truth nobody is quite sure what they were used for. They are representative, though, of the shared forms and patterns between the peninsula and the archipelago as part of what Gina Barnes calls the Pen/Insular Culture. Similar spirals are found elsewhere in Japan, including at Yoshinogari, from about the 1st-2nd centuries. From the Seoul National Museum, photo by author.
This episode we start to move on into the latter part of the 3rd century, with Mimaki Iribiko’s successor, Ikume Iribiko. This episode deals with the state of the continent and the peninsula as we get one (or possibly more) visitors from those lands. We also tackle the sticky question about “Mimana” and the claims of a Japanese colony on the peninsula, which were used to justify Japanese involvement in the peninsula in the 20th century. Most of the info is in the episode, but I’ll try to lay out a few things here.
About “Kara” v. “Gaya”
So many names of things on the peninsula have changed over the years, largely because of how things were recorded. The first system of writing that was used was Sinitic writing, just as in Japan, and so the characters used were not strictly phonetic. Korea would develop its own phonetic alphabet, Hangul, just as Japan would develop katakana and hiragana, but not until much later. The early chronicles were all written with Chinese characters, and so their pronunciation is typically something debated as linguists attempt to reconstruct the old pronunciations. In general what we know today as Gaya was probably pronounced something like “Garak”, “Gara”, or even “Kara” in its own time. In much of east Asia, voiced and unvoiced consonants can be almost interchangeable, with aspiration playing a more important role, which is almost reversed from English. This can make it hard to always see the relationships between things.
As for the relationship in Japanese—as I mention in the podcast, we have various things referring to the continent that all get a “kun’yomi” reading of “Kara”. So for instance you can find 漢・唐・観 all as “Kara”, when these characters represent, respectively, the Han Dynasty (KAN), the Tang Dynasty (TOU), and Korea (KAN). Basically anything that came from the continent through the peninsula was pronounced in the same way as “Gara” or “Garak”, which was spelled in various ways including: 加羅, 伽羅, 迦羅, 柯羅, 駕洛, 迦落.
And while we are talking about potentially confusing homophones in the text, I think that we should have a talk about “Han”. I believe I mentioned this before about the fact that we have the “Han” dynasty and then we have the “Samhan” or the three Han. It is quite confusing, but the truth is that these are different words that sound the same but use different characters. So for instance you have 漢 or 汉, which are both pronounced “Han” in modern Putonghua dialect of Chinese, and which refer to either the Han dynasty or, today, the ethnic Han people—the majority ethnicity of modern China. Then you have 韓, which is also pronounced “Han” in Chinese and Korean, and it is used to refer to Korea (the modern name of the Republic of Korea is Daehan Minguk: 大韓民國), but its original use appears to have been in referring to the three Han of the Korean Peninsula. To even further complicate matters, in Japanese both are pronounced with the same On’yomi of “KAN”.
So this has two problems. First is determining when we are talking about the ethnic Han of China, to which some might just suggest that we call them “Chinese”. However, not all of the dynasties of the area that we know as China were ethnically Han. Many of them descended from different ethnic roots. Even the Tang dynasty was not considered an ethnic Han dynasty, and neither was the more recent Qing dynasty—and we aren’t even talking about the Mongolian Yuan. On top of that, we should be careful of conflating modern states and political entities with previous states or governments, especially in an area as diverse as East Asia.
Even on the peninsula, which is only a fraction of the size of the rest of the continent, we know that there were a variety of cultures mixing and mingling, and a variety of languages that were being spoken.
References
Barnes, G. (2015). Archaeology of East Asia: The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea and Japan. Oxbow Books. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19893vd
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Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryǒ to T’amna*: Slowly riding to the South with speakersof Proto-Korean." Korean LInguistics 15:2. John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/kl.15.2.03vov
Barnes, Gina L. (2007). State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-Century Ruling Elite. Routlede. ISBN 9780415596282
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Soumaré, Massimo (2007), Japan in Five Ancient Chinese Chronicles: Wo, the Land of Yamatai, and Queen Himiko. ISBN: 978-4-902075-22-9
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Barnes, Gina L. (1988). Protohistoric Yamato: Archaeology of the First Japanese State. ISBN 0-915703-11-4
Chamberlain, B. H. (1981). The Kojiki: Records of ancient matters. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN4-8053-0794-3
Aston, W. G. (1972). Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times to A.D. 697. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN0-80480984-4
Philippi, D. L. (1968). Kojiki. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN4-13-087004-1