This episode starts our look at the events that were said to have occurred during the reign of Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennō. Before we get into the text, though, we will be looking at some of the other evidence, so that we have a foundation for what we are reading about.

A Quick Note About Maps…

So maps can be extremely helpful to us. They often let us relate to the geography and what is going on at a macro level. I love looking at topographical maps of historic places to get a feel for some of what people saw back in the day. However, we have to be careful, because maps can also be a distraction and even an outright lie. Even geographical features may change over time, sometimes in ways that seem inconceivable.

This is even moreso with political boundaries. Even with legal structures detailing exactly where a boundary is supposed to go, is that agreed upon by all of the parties involved? There are plenty of disputed territories, with overlapping claims. This gets even more murky when we are seeing maps of territories that are supposedly being controlled by polities without a clear code of just what constitutes their territorial borders. In many cases it was likely more people and communities that made up early polities, not land, and the tenuous bonds that sometimes formed meant alliances could change and shift. Furthermore, political and ethnic boundaries often overlap in seemingly odd and inconsistent ways.

When someone makes a map without clear guidelines for where the boundaries are, they must rely on their own judgment. That judgment is often tinged with their own biases—in the case of our current studies, maps are often heavily influenced by ideas of national pride. Maps can easily be a type of propaganda, whether intentional or otherwise. Therefore we need to be careful. This is even more true when we are dealing with sources that are not exactly crystal clear.

Below, I’ve pulled four different maps that people have made of the Korean peninsula around the time we are talking about:

Taking a look at the maps you may notice how some have “Nimna” (任那) covering the entire southwest corner of the peninsula. Others give that to Baekje. The location of “Kara” (加羅) likewise is shifted around. Some maps even get rid of one and add both. Then there is the island of Jeju, or Tamna (耽羅), which may or may not even be included.

Of course, none of these “borders” really exist. There may be certain communities, but particularly at this time, loyalties appear to be fluid, given that, in the end, there was little capacity to really control what was going on at the far peripheries. For any polity we may be able to identify a strong presence in a given area, but the that will fade the farther you go from that central area.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that our written sources place everything in the context of the later kingdoms. For much of the territory, we have few written records—typically only when they come in contact with a larger polity and even then it isn’t like we are given clear directions on how to get there, because that wasn’t important.

The takeaway that I would recommend is to assume that there is a lot going on that we are not aware of, and that isn’t getting written down. There are a lot of smaller polities doing their thing, invisible to other forms of history.

Ethnic “Wa” and Peninsular Japonic Speakers

Issues with maps similarly affect other studies, including linguistics. While there is a general agreement that the Wa in the archipelago arrived via the Korean peninsula, it gets much trickier if we look at any traces of their existence on the peninsula. They must have been their—or at least their ancestors—for them to have come over, but what happened to them? Korean is not a Japonic language, despite some older theories and some superficial similarities, and at some point it is clear that the Korean language came to dominate the entire peninsula, likely through the rise of Kingdoms like Baekje, Silla, and Goguryeo. Unfortunately, what we do have from the early period when Japonic may have been spoken is written down in classical Sinitic characters—kanji, or hanzi—and grammar. Without something like the Man’yoshu— a collection of poetry written in the Japanese vernacular, but using various kanji for their sounds— how do you know how a word is pronounced?

Aston and others often take the easy way out, and just use modern Korean, assuming that would be the closest. However, there is evidence that this isn’t the case. For instance, some of the Korean records talk about how the rulers would deliberately change the names of certain places into their own language, indicating that those old placenames held some vestiges, at least, of an earlier language.

Rather than a Korean pronunciation, it has been suggested that we look at Old or Middle Chinese. Assuming many of the earlier scribes are described as ethnic Han, and the local scribes would be learning the Chinese of their day, and so it seems likely that they would be reading it that way as well. When choosing what characters to use to represent a given word, they were probably using that pronunciation. That’s how we get things like “Nimna” v. the modern Korean “Imna” and “Kara” v. “Gaya”. Over time, Japanese and Korean readings Kanji/Hanja (Sinitic characters) started to drift apart, and we cannot always trust that modern On’yomi or Eum-dok readings were the same in the early period when these names were first being written down.

Viewed critically, there are words—primarily placenames—that scholars like Alexander Vovin have identified as seemingly quite Japonic in nature. On the flip side, scholars have also pointed to some placenames in Japan and suggested a Koreanic origin for them—that said, the Japanese chronicles do not deny that people from the Korean peninsula—likely some of them being Koreanic speakers—were settled in parts of the Japanese archipelago. Some were even made members of the Yamato court and eventually would be listed as the ancestors of prominent Japanese families.

And so there is a question as to why we think this wouldn’t work the other way around. After all, as Yamato expanded their power, someone was on the losing end of that arrangement. Why wouldn’t they flee to the peninsula? And then there are the people still on the peninsula, who may or may not have been directly under a given polity, who could also be ethnic “Wa” and speaking some Japonic language, possibly one that has since been forgotten.

And this brings us to the island nation of T’amna.

T’amna or Tanimura

The island of Jeju sits off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Due to its location, it is easily isolated from much of what was going on, and yet not so far out that travel was not attainable. Its position meant that it remained largely independent right up into the first few years of the 15th century, when it finally came under direct control of the Joseon court.

The Kingdom of T’amna first enters the narrative in the 5th century according to the Korean chronicles—and in the 6th century in the Japanese. It is a great example of the kind of place on the periphery where we have little to no actual documentation until much later. By the time documents are being written down locally, they appear to have adopted a Koreanic language, but some words and placenames suggest that the people were, at one point, speakers of Japonic. Old renderings of the name suggest that it was something like “Tammura”, which Vovin connects with “Tanimura”. It certainly seems plausible, and there have been some investigations into the language of Jeju island. From the time of Unified Silla, however, it was a tributary state of peninsular powers, and it appears to have adopted peninsular language, culture, and more, though with its own unique character.

Yeongsan River Basin and Keyhole Shaped Tombs

Moving on from just linguistics, we can take a look at the archaeological evidence and see that there was a lot more going on in this region than just what the written sources tell us. The Yeongsan River basin has its own unique archaeological features. For instance, they have their own burial practices, similar to the other mounded tomb cultures around them, but still their own. Early on they used jar style burials—jars were used as coffins, basically—that accreted into a single mound, sounding not dissimilar from the funkyūbo burial mound at the Yayoi site of Yoshinogari in Kyūshū, though with their own characteristics. These evolved and changed over time.

In the late 5th to early 6th centuries we find a different kind of tomb mound that suddenly appears in this region: keyhole shaped mounds. These again bear a superficial resemblance to similar mounds in Kyūshū, which were, themselves, copies of what was going on in the kinai region of the archipelago. The mounds in the Yeongsan area—initially found in Gwangju and the surrounding Jeolla region—use local construction techniques to build mounds no larger than about 50 meters. They have a horizontal entry chamber and a coffin, similar to later kofun tombs, but they use a Baekje style coffin, complete down to using nails that had to be imported from Baekje for the task. The grave goods include items from Baekje, Silla, as well as the rest of the peninsula and the archipelago, suggesting that the people of this area were well connected.

Only 14 of this style of tomb mound have been identified, and it died out quickly in the early 6th century. The fact that they had this practice—unique for the region—and yet we don’t know more about it just heightens the mystery surround them.

And that really carries us through to the theme of this episode—there is a lot we don’t know, and which the Chronicles still won’t tell us. Even if we assume everything that is mentioned in the Chronicles themselves is valid and occurred, there were so many other things going on and interactions that never get mentioned or written down. Entire states could have flared up and died off without a mention in some of these regions, especially as the Chronicles were focused, themselves, on the central polities, for the most part.

What we can generally assume is that differences were more gradations than anything concrete. There had been cross-strait interaction for centuries, with no reason to believe that things suddenly came to a stop, and it is likely that smaller polities could move and change in ways that larger, more established nations would not. National culture and politics—something that we don’t yet see so much of at this point—is a different game, as it is often a very clear “us” v. “them” mentality that encourages individuals to pick and choose sides. In this period, most people were probably more loyal to their village and their immediate neighbors rather than to some far away sovereign or national identity, allowing them to also be much more fluid in other ways as well.

References

• Lee, D. (2018). Keyhole-shaped Tombs in the Yŏngsan River Basin: A Reflection of Paekche-Yamato Relations in the Late Fifth.Early Sixth Century. Acta Koreana 21(1), 113-135. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/756453.

• Barnes, Gina L. (2015). Achaeology of East Asia: The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea and Japan

• Lee, Dennis (2014). Lecture: “The Significance of “Korean” Keyhole-shaped Tombs in the Study of Early “Korean-Japanese” Relations”. https://vimeo.com/112210901

• Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryǒ to T’amna*: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean." Korean Linguistics 15:2. John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/kl.15.2.03vov

• Bentley, John R. (2008). “The Search for the Language of Yamatai”. Japanese Language and Literature (42-1). 1-43.  Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/30198053

• Soumaré, Massimo (2007); Japan in Five Ancient Chinese Chronicles: Wo, the Land of Yamatai, and Queen Himiko. ISBN: 978-4-902075-22-9

• Kiley, C. J. (1973). State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato. The Journal of Asian Studies, 33(1), 25–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2052884

• 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