Episode 48: The Life and After-Life of Homuda Wake

September 1, 2021 Joshua Badgley

19th century depiction of Homuda Wake, aka Ōjin Tennō

This episode sees the end of the reign of Homuda Wake, and a little glimpse into the future as well. When talking about history, there is always something of a pull between trying to tell the story of the particularly time period you are looking at but also looking across the years at the influence those events had. Since almost all of history is basically one giant spoiler alert for everything up to the present, it is easy to see things as inevitable, much in the same way that we see our now as an almost ever-present Now and assume that things will always be as they are at this moment. There are so many things that don’t get any attention unless they are connected to something else.

And this episode we do a little of both. We’ll try to look at things in the context of the late 4th and early 5th centuries, but we will also take a peek into the future, particularly in regards to Homuda Wake and his connection with an important god of war whose cult will play an important role in future.

In this blogpost, we’ll dig in a little past the narrative covered in the podcast. We’ll provide some of the individuals involved, but also some of the details that just didn’t make it into the podcast itself this time around. So let’s get started.

Who’s who?

Ajikki (阿直岐)

The Baekje subject who was sent over to Yamato with the tribute of two horses in 404. He helped care for them and teach the Wa what they should do. We are also told that he could read and write and he actually became the tutor to the Crown Prince, Uji no Waki Iratsuko. He is said to be the ancestor the Atogi (Ajikki) scribes.

Wang’in/Wani (王仁)

Baekje scholar sent to Yamato in the year 405. It is thought that he may have been an ethnic Han scholar, descended from those scribes and scholars who supported the Han Commanderies in the 4th century, or possibly even from somewhere across the Yellow Sea. As soon as he arrived in the archipelago he took over Uji no Waki Iratsuko’s education.

Takuso (卓素)

Mentioned in the Kojiki as a smith from Kara who was sent over by the Baekje. The Kara region seems to have long been known for smiths and iron, at least in the archipelago, and was probably where much of Yamato’s early iron products came from. This may explain, somewhat, the similarity of arms and armour between the two regions.

Susukori (須須許理), aka Nipo (仁番)

Mentioned in the Kojiki as a brewer sent over by the Baekje king along with or shortly after Takuso. He apparently made quite the brew for the sovereign and his court, which had Homuda Wake stumbling home. In the podcast we talk about a particular proverb, or kotowaza, that comes from this episode:

堅石避醉人也　ー＞　堅石（かたしわ）も醉人（えいびと）を避（さ）く
Katashiwa mo Eibito wo Saku -> Even a solid stone avoids a drunkard.

Maketsu (眞毛津)

Seamstress (縫衣工女) sent over by the King of Baekje in 404 to the Yamato court. She is claimed as the ancestor of the seamstresses of Kume.

Saiso (西素)

A weaver of Kure (呉服 - see below) whom the Kojiki tells us came over with the smith Takuso, sent by the King of Baekje. The Nihon Shoki gives a more detailed account of how weaving came from Kure, however.

Achi no Omi (阿知使主) , Tsuga no Omi (都加使主), and the Weavers of Kure

A father and son who came over with members of the “17 Districts” (十七県). We aren’t exactly sure where they came from, but it is said that they started the Aya clan of Yamato (倭漢), where “Aya” uses the character for the Han dyansty (漢). They would eventually head back to the continent and bring back four weavers of Kure with them.

A map of northern China around 406, during the 16 Kingdoms period. YOu can see a few of the kingdoms that were competing and vying for power at this time. Map by SY, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Regarding the 17 districts, I wonder if this is referencing some of the many divisions in the north of what is today the modern country of China. Though this period is called the “16 Kingdoms” period, those kingdoms were constantly shifting. Even the specific count seems to depend on what gets counted, with the name “16 Kingdoms Period” coming in around the mid-6th century. While I’m not sure of the accuracy of the specific boundaries, I think the map here, taken from Wikipedia, does a decent job of showing the confusion around the time that Achi and Tsuga would have been traveling.

Also, I’d note that the “Omi” here (使主) is interesting to me. Usually the kabane of “Omi”, which usually indicates either a minister or minister-level clan, uses the kanji for “minister”: 臣. In this case, though, they use two kanji, the first of which is often found to indicate “messengers” or “envoys”, and the second is “lord” or “master”. A more intuitive reading might be “tsukahi-nushi”, but universally it seems that “Omi” is the given reading. Dictionaries note that this is a kabane that is regularly found with foreigners. It is not uncommon to find titles that are similar in Japanese, but that use different kanji to differentiate their exact meaning.

To get to Kure, Achi and Tsuga are given two guides. Their names are Kure Ha (久礼波) and Kure Shi (久礼志). The meaning would seem to be clear, and yet their names are not spelled with the character for “Kure” (呉) used for the country.

Finally, we are actually given names for the four weavers that Achi and Tsuda are said to have brought back. They are:

Ye Hime (兄媛) - Elder Lady
Oto Hime (弟媛) - Younger Lady
Kure Hatori (呉織) - Weaver of Kure (aka Wu)
Ana Hatori (穴織) - Weaver of Holes

As you might notice, these names are not exactly informative. Two of them are little more than mentions of birth order—there is even another Ye Hime mentioned elsewhere in Homuda Wake’s own reign—and “Weaver of Kure” sounds purely descriptive. “Ana Hatori” is the only one that doesn’t immediately come to mind as an obvious place name, and yet who knows. There are places such as “Ara” on the peninsula—an “Ana” wouldn’t seem too far off. On a truly far stretch I could possibly draw a connection between the story of Amaterasu and the Heavenly Rock Cave, but that is a bit too far at this point, I think. Notably, there is nothing close to the name “Saiso”, given in the Kojiki.

King Jeonji of Baekje (腆支 / 直支)

Prince (and eventually King) of Baekje. He reigned from 405 to either 415 (the date given in the Nihon Shoki) or 420 (the date given in the Baekje records in the Samguk Sagi). His name is most popularly known as Jeonji (腆支), but is also recognized as Jikji (直支), though Aston posits that this later name is taken from the name of Ajikki, and is a mistake. The Samguk Sagi seems to also claim that “Jikji” is another name, but given its dating it is always possible that for some of these entries they were consulting the Japanese chronicles—though if that were the case I would expect more consistency between them on certain issues, to be honest.

Speaking of, the death of King Jeonji is odd for its disagreement between the sources. In large part, we can match up the sexagesimal dates between the Samguk Sagi records and the Nihon Shoki, at least when the same record exists. Occasionally they might be a year off, which could be explained by when they leave one court and eventually arrive at another. But in this case there are at least 5 years difference between the sources. So which one is correct?

On the one hand, we might assume that the Samguk Sagi is correct since it is the peninsular source. However, it was also written much later, compiled from earlier histories which, as far as I am aware, are no longer extant. The Nihon Shoki was written closer to the events—though still centuries out, and the compilers also appear to have had access to annals specifically from Baekje.

Personally, I suspect that the Nihon Shoki may be right, in this instance, or at least closer to the truth, and they may be in good company. Dr. Jonathan Best, in A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, notes that there is a record for Emperor An of the Eastern Jin (晉安帝), who, in 416, sent an envoy to bestow various titles on the King of Baekje. This shows up in the Nan Shi (南史) and the Song Shu (宋書 - compiled 492-493), where they refer to this king as “餘映” (Yú Ying in Pinyin or Yeo Yeong in modern Korean). Later, in 420, Yeo Yeong is given a new title by the Eastern Jin court, and in 424 that same King, King Yeo Yeong, is said to have sent an envoy to the court of Liu Song.

Now if the Nihon Shoki is correct, it is possible that the king known to the Eastern Jin as Yeo Yeong was Guisin, and perhaps 420 was the year that he attained his majority and even started ruling by himself, which could explain why the Eastern Jin bestowed him with a new title, celebrating his changed status. If, however, this was King Jeonji, as the Samguk Sagi claims, then that envoy arriving in 424 must have somehow been sent at least 4 years earlier, or else we get another contradiction.

My suspicion is that later Baekje records cleaned things up, so that Guisin’s reign began upon him attaining the age of majority, possibly overlooking or sweeping away a potentially embarrassing incident involving Mong Manchi, for whatever reason—either because he just wasn’t considered that important or because the story is less than flattering for the Baekje royal house.

Prince Hunhae of Baekje (訓解)

As the brother of King Asin, Hunhae was the uncle to Jeonji, and upon Asin’s death, Hunhae took the throne of Baekje, reportedly holding it until Jeonji returned, at least according to the Samguk Sagi. However, he was killed by Asin’s youngest brother, Jeomnye, who then usurped the throne. One has to wonder whether or not Hunhae actually had intended to hold the throne for Jeonji, or if he was just another claimant to the throne, despite the noble intentions ascribed to him.

Prince Jeomnye [Jeoprye?] of Bakeje (蝶禮)

Youngest brother of King Asin who killed Prince Hunhae and usurped the throne. Because of this, Prince Jeonji held off his return, holing up on an island with 100 Wa troops. Eventually the people overthrew him and welcomed Jeonji back. Or at least that is what the official records tell us.

King Guisin of Bakeje (久爾辛)

Son and heir to King Jeonji of Baekje. He was apparently too young to rule when he came to the throne, and Mong Manchi seems to have acted as a regent, at least according to the Nihon Shoki. The Baekje Annals of the Samguk Sagi ignore this altogether, which may partly account for why his reign starts many years later in peninsular chronicles.

Mong Manchi (木満致)

Mong Manchi is the son of the general Mong Nageunja (木羅斤資f) (or possibly Mongna Geunja? Given the names, the former is probably correct, though Aston had it in the latter form) and a Silla woman. He seems to have been a lord or even king in Nimna (任那) one of the states of Kara (加羅). When King Jeonji of Baekje died, the Nihon Shoki claims that he took over the administration of that state. The Japanese record claims that Mong Manchi had an affair—or at least improper relations—with the Queen Mother, and so he was recalled by Yamato. The section of the Baekje chronicle claims that he was recalled because of his violence. Of course, there remains a question: what power did Yamato have to recall him in the first place?

Continental Clans

There are three clans, or uji, that come up this reign, and I want to talk briefly about them. All three of these may even be found as surnames, today, and the kanji used for each comes from a particular dynasty, with various claims of connection. The strange thing is that the name associated—the way the name is pronounced—has no apparent connection to the dynasty or kanji in question, but it is thought that it may have something to do with a weaving technique or type of fabric or similar that may have been brought over and associated with each one, much like we associate porcelain with “China”. These may have originally been groups—probably with immigrant roots—who were dedicated to making the products in question. The names are:

Hata (秦) - This name references the Qin dynasty of the 3rd century BCE. Some sources would associate people of this name with the early attempts at finding the Island of the Immortals. Others claim that they traveled over to Jinhan during the Qin and later emigrated to the archipelago from there, possibly with the people of Yutsuki. Hata may reference weaving and looms.
Aya (漢) - This is less common, today, it seems. The name references the Han dynasty, and some stories connect them with Achi no Omi and his son, whom they claim descended from the Han ruling family before it fell. Aya likely refers to figured cloth.
Kure (呉) - This references the Wu kingdom, one of the Three Kingdoms that arose after the fall of the Han. I am less confident on what the word “kure” could have been referring to, but it seems obvious that much of what is called “Kure” in the chronicles would have to have been some other place.

Hachiman

The god Hachiman will be quite important in later centuries. For our purposes it is mainly the fact that he is associated closely with Homuda Wake that is of interest, though that is likely due to stories that came out around the 9th century.

If you are looking to read up on the early stories about Hachiman, his divinations, etc., Dr. Ross Bender did a lot of work in this area. You may want to check out his work on Hachiman and how it plays into the Dōkyō Incident.

Homuda Wake’s Kofun

Aerial photo of Kondayama kofun. Copyright © National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. — **Aerial photo of Kondayama kofun. Copyright ©** **National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.**

As with other early kofun, we are not positive that this one belongs to Homuda Wake, but it certainly is grand. It is the second largest kofun in size, but it is estimated that it has more actual material than any other kofun in Japan. There are several kofun around it, as well, crowding it, and earthquakes and erosion have done their fair share as well. By all accounts it does seem to be around the 5th century, and had an impressive number of Haniwa—though human figures would still be a little later on.

The informal name of the kofun seems to be “Konda Yama”, using the first two characters of Homuda Wake’s name: 誉田山.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is episode 48: The Life and After-Life of Homuda Wake
This episode is probably the last episode for Homuda Wake—we’ve covered some of the points about his reign, from the events written down on the Gwangaetto Stele in the 5th century, to the hostages from Baekje and Silla living at his court, all of which seem to indicate that the Wa were a power of some sort in the region—if not quite as powerful as their own Chronicles make them out to be. We are also told that this is when writing, in the form of Sinographic characters, first came to the islands, along with horses and classic continental literature. We’ve also talked about a few of the other characters from this period, including Takechi no Sukune and Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko, who dealt with things on the continent as well as those back at home. This episode we’ll continue with a few other things between the archipelago and the continent, and discuss briefly what this means. We’ll also discuss matters on the archipelago, such as the division of Kibi, Homuda Wake’s choice of Crown Prince, and more. And then, of course, we’ll talk about what happened after Homuda Wake’s reign—and we’ll touch briefly on how he is connected to one of the most famous kami in the archipelago: Hachiman, the God of War. We’ll talk about all that and finish up with a brief description of the kofun said to be his—one of the largest kofun in all of Japan.
Now, as a reminder, based on all of the stories and some of the events that can be corroborated with the peninsular records, we can make the assumption that this was all went down sometime in the late 4th and early 5th century, which is also a period of change in the archaeological record. Swords and suits of armor start to replace the bronze mirrors that had previously been common in large tombs, which would also seem to indicate that soldiers and martial pursuits were well valued, which certainly seems in step with the various conflicts both on the peninsula and within the archipelago.
And thus through trade and conflict, continental culture was flowing across the straits to the archipelago, where it was mingling with the people and traditions already present. Given the close ties between the islands and the peninsula throughout the previous centuries, it may be difficult to say just when any particular thing came over, but during this reign, as we’ve seen, travel and immigration in both directions was particularly noted.
Most of the immigration appears to be through Yamato’s close ally on the peninsula, the Kingdom of Baekje. Of course, some of those who came to Yamato were only temporary residents. These are the envoys and high status individuals like Prince Jeonji, King Asin’s own Crown Prince. Others seem to have come over on a more permanent or at least semi-permanent basis—primarily scholars and artisans. For instance, we already talked about how Ajikki was sent over with the Baekje king’s gift of horses to teach the Wa how to care for them and eventually raise horses of their own. And then there was Wang’in, who was brought over specifically to help teach the continental classics and how to read and write.
The Kojiki notes a smith, named Takuso, who also came over during this reign, and then there was the man known as Nipo, aka Susukori. He was a brewer, which put him in good stead with the court, who appreciated a good drink. Now we know that Yamato had alcohol, so this wasn’t exactly new technology, and we aren’t even told if he introduced anything particularly new to the archipelago. But he was, apparently, quite talented. He brewed a stiff drink for the Sovereign and his court, and it seems that everyone drank their fill, singing songs and just having a grand old time—in other words, not that much different from certain types of Japanese celebrations, today. Homuda Wake even made up songs of praise for Susukori, he was so pleased. Later that evening, the sovereign, Homuda Wake, staggered down the road, where he came upon a large rock. We are told that he struck the rock with his walking stick and sent it flying away.
From this seemingly innocuous incident we are told there was a kotowaza, or proverb, that you might even hear today:
Katashiwa mo Eibito wo Saku.
In English we might say: “Even a solid stone avoids a drunkard.”
Of course, it isn’t as if this proverb led to any kind of temperance movement. People continued to enjoy their adult beverages, nonetheless.
The other major craft that is mentioned as coming over during this reign was that of fabric arts. We previously mentioned the seamstress Maketsu coming over—a seamstress, likely bringing over continental fashions and how to make them. And then, elsewhere, they mention weavers—those who make the actual fabric from which the clothes are put together—coming over as well. The Kojiki mentions a weaver named Saiso, who is said to be from Kure, while the Nihon Shoki gives us more details.
In fact, it is in the Nihon Shoki where we hear the story of Achi no Omi and Tsuga no Omi, a father and son team. Achi no Omi himself is said to have immigrated from the continent around 409, bringing with him his son, Tsuga. They came to Yamato with a retinue of people from what the Chronicles call the 17 districts. While there doesn’t seem to be anything that firmly identifies just *which* 17 districts we are talking about, Achi no Omi is said to be the ancestor of the Yamato no Aya, where the name “Aya” utilizes the character for the Han dynasty. Later genealogies would claim that he was a direct descendant of the Han royal family, which might make sense if we were using the uncorrected dating of the chronicles, but seems less plausible for the 5th century. Nonetheless, there is a clear connection between him and the continental mainland, suggesting he may, indeed, have been an ethnic Han immigrant. The Yamato court would later ask Achi no Omi and his son to travel back to the land they had come from and to ask for weavers to be sent to Yamato.
Indeed, they headed out on their mission, but when they reached the peninsula, they couldn’t find a way to their apparent homeland. We are told they were headed to the court of Kure, more commonly known as Wu, one of the three Kingdoms that arose after the fall of the Han in the 3rd century. Which might have been accurate if we took the Nihon Shoki’s dates at face value, but even the Wu had been displaced by the time of our current sovereign, given our corrected dates, so if this happened then it was likely that they were traveling to either Eastern Jin, whose court was, at that point, operating out of the area of modern Nanjing, or else to one of the other, northern states that had arisen—perhaps one of the Yan or Wei kingdoms. This is known, after all, as the era of the Sixteen Kingdoms—though even that number may be off depending on how you count. Suffice it to say there are a lot of possibilities here for where they ended up.
Regardless, to get from the peninsula to the mainland, it seems that these envoys would need more than just the assistance of Baekje, and the Nihon Shoki claims that it was only through the help of Goguryeo, who provided them guides, that they were able to make the journey to “Kure”, whichever polity that was—which is somewhat interesting given that Baekje had established relations with the Eastern Jin by at least 372. It is possible that, given the turmoil on the peninsula several decades later, during the reign of Gwangaetto the Great, any unilateral path to the Eastern Jin court had been blocked, making Goguryeo the ultimate interlocutors for relations with the continent. Or perhaps, as mentioned, they were going somewhere else altogether. Either way, they were successful in their mission, and Achi and Tsuga returned with four weavers who brought with them the traditions of the mainland. Of course, we don’t have any clear evidence for this in any of the court records from the mainland, though, again, that may be understandable if they were dealing with one of the outer states and not a formal envoy to the imperial capital.
All of these stories demonstrate the kind of contact that the archipelago had with the mainland, and the individuals who were coming over, often starting new families who would, one assumes, become responsible of the production of continental goods in the archipelago. Information may even be hidden in the names, here. The names “Aya” and “Kure” for instance, though spelled with the sinographic characters for the Han and Wu dynasties, use a native Japanese gloss in their reading that doesn’t clearly identify with anything on the continent, but which may instead refer to the type of woven fabrics that were associated with each dynasty.
It is also interesting to me how the court was relying on a lot of continental assistance in the form of allies or immigrants to undertake these missions for them. Achi and Tsuga are said to have come over to the archipelago less than a decade before they were back up and heading back to the mainland. Horses and writing were sent to Yamato by the King of Baekje. Even the muscle that was being used on the peninsula was apparently a Baekje general.
But of course, it isn’t just what Baekje could do for Yamato—it was also about what Yamato could do for Baekje. Enter the story of Prince Jeonji.
Just a quick recap from previous episodes, Prince Jeonji was a hostage at the Yamato court, sent in 397 by his father, King Asin of Baekje, who came to the throne after the death—some sources suggest overthrow and murder—of Asin’s own uncle, King Jinsa. Prince Jeonji may have been sent to keep him safe, given that Goguryeo had previously defeated Baekje and taken several members of its court back with them, or he may have been sent to appease an angry Yamato. Either way, young Prince Jeonji grew up in Yamato until the unwelcome tidings of his father’s death reached the court 12 years later, in 405 CE, a date that seems to correspond between the Nihon Shoki and the Baekje annals of the Samguk Sagi with a clean break of 120 years, or two sexagesimal cycles of 60 years each.
Immediately, Homuda Wake suggested that Prince Jeonji return and take the throne, which I’m sure was entirely altruistic and had absolutely nothing at all to do with making sure that Yamato had a known quantity and a friendly ruler in place in Baekje. Homuda Wake even gave him command of 100 Wa soldiers to help.
Of course, this may have been more than just some courtesy. The Tonggam and the Samguk Sagi appear to agree that when King Asin died, his brother, Prince Hunhae, took over as regent until Prince Jeonji could return, and he was likely the one who sent for Jeonji in the first place. However, before Prince Jeonji could arrive King Asin’s youngest brother, Cheomnye, took the throne. The Samguk Sagi seems to make this out as an usurpation, but I would note that from what we’ve seen of the period and penn-insular succession rules in general, neither primogeniture nor patrilineal descent appears to have been necessary to claim legitimacy. In fact, in many cases it seems to have only been a requirement that one be the eldest—probably male—member of the family, and even *that* hasn’t been a hard and fast rule. Forms of agnatic succession—where the throne passes to a brother, rather than the sovereign’s own children—are definitely in evidence. This is all well and good, of course, until you get a couple generations in and suddenly have a plethora of potential royal candidates.
Anyway, it may have been this usurpation by Cheonmye that caused Homuda Wake to provide some Wa soldiers to help out. And yet, they were hardly used. Prince Jeonji made his way to the peninsula, but upon hearing that his uncle had usurped the throne, he withdrew with the troops to an island. There he waited until the people themselves, fed up with Cheonmye’s rule, overthrew him and placed Prince Jeonji on the throne as the true successor.
Now did the people really just overthrow Cheonmye, or did the Wa forces see a bit of action? We aren’t entirely sure, though it seems that the Baekje people have a suspicious habit of nobly rising up against a king as soon as it is convenient to prevent any whiff of the Wa having a hand in regime change. For my part, I see the heavy hand of Yamato in continental politics once again.
Of course, none of this should be too surprising, given the close association between the Wa and the peninsula. And here is where we get into territory that will likely cause some people a bit of a headache. Because there is plenty of reason to believe that a lot more came over from the continent than just new technologies. With artisans coming over and bringing others, as did Achi no Omi, they likely did what immigrants around the world have done and brought their own ideas, beliefs, and spiritual practices. We’ve already seen how material evidence of Yayoi spiritual life echoes, in some ways, the spiritual life that we see on the peninsula, and so it would seem no great stretch if the residents of the archipelago continued to incorporate some of the beliefs of the people immigrating into Japan. And so it is with little surprise that we see similarities in the ancient myths and legends of the archipelago with those of the continent. Even some of the kami that would come to be central to later beliefs, have connections with the continent. Susanowo is actually said, in some stories, to have first come down from heaven to the peninsula, where he then made his way over. And some of the aspects of the story of even Amaterasu Ohokami herself, and her weaving hall, seems to have a connection with the various weaver deity cults that we see elsewhere on the mainland. This is not to suggest that these are exactly foreign—the stories as we know them were still developing. For example, the kofun burials of this time were largely pit burials, dug into the top of the main mound of the kofun. It wouldn’t be until some time later that they would being a practice of building a corridor into the mound, which itself would seem to inspire some of the imagery around the whole world of the dead—the dark world of Yomi. And by that time, local and foreign legends and stories were merged, and foreign aspects were localized to the archipelago.
And there is nothing to suggest that the transfer was simply one way. It is hard to know what went from the peninsula to the archipelago and what went from the archipelago to the peninsula. Importantly, though, is that many of these things were transnational, meaning they crossed the various borders, often blending foreign and native concepts together. This is why I spend so much time talking about the mainland as well as the islands, because none of it developed in an isolated bubble. This often causes problems when people would like to have a clean narrative, especially for nationalists who want to see Japan and the Japanese Imperial Household as more isolated, unique, and unadulterated than it ever actually was. In contrast, we have plenty of examples of high ranking court nobles, whose offspring would marry into the royal line, with claims of continental descent. There is even an example of a Baekje princess who was sent to Yamato to become one of the sovereign’s wives.
Looking in the other direction, material culture, such as pottery and even burial practices from the archipelago show up in the peninsula from at least the Yayoi period onward. In the late 5th century we even see round keyhole shaped tomb mounds, oddly similar to those in the archipelago, showing up in the Yongsan River Basin in the southwestern peninsular region. This was a highly dynamic time for the region, during which many of the things that we may take for granted as being fundamental to Japanese history and identity were still being forged in the fires of international trade and immigration.
Back to the story of King Jeonji, there is one more event that I want to touch on here before we take a look at the rest of what was happening in the archipelago, and that is the death of King Jeonji. It seems that he was not fated to outlive Homuda Wake, and the Nihon Shoki claims that he died in 414, only nine years after his father and his return to Baekje. Upon his death his son, Kuisin, was named king, but he was still a child. And so a regent came to power: Mong Manchi. Now Mong Manchi was the son of Mong Nageunja, whom you may remember as the Baekje general who had helped in the late 4th century Baekje-Wa Alliance and who later had gone to Silla to stop Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko—though sometimes it is questionable whether he served Baekje, Yamato, or was his own independent warlord of some sort who allied with both.
Anyway, the excerpt of the Baekje Annals in the Nihon Shoki claims that Mong Manchi had taken over Baekje forcibly. According to the Nihon Shoki, with apologies to Aston, the Baekje record states: "Mong-man-chi was the son of Mong-na Keuncha, born to him of a Silla woman when he invaded that country. The great services of his father gave him absolute authority in Nimna. He came into our country [that is, Baekje] and went back and forward to the honourable country, accepting the control of the Celestial Court. He seized the administration of our country, and his power was supreme in that day. The court, hearing of his violence, recalled him." The Japanese Chroniclers of course assume that the “honorable country”, or “Kui-guo”, is Japan, as is the “Celestial Court”. Their own entry embellishes this story further, claiming that Mong Manchi was a subject of Yamato and that his actual crime wasn’t forcibly placing himself on the throne but rather having improper relations with the widowed Queen Mother.
Now this isn’t clear evidence of any actual Yamato interference and influence, at least not to my mind. After all, we aren’t sure that the “honorable country” actually referred to Japan, and the idea that Homuda Wake was presiding over something that Baekje would call the Celestial Court also appears to be equally suspect to my eyes. However the idea that that the throne of Baekje was briefly usurped by someone, possibly the King of Nimna itself may not be too farfetched.
And perhaps that is where we would leave it if it weren’t for one *tiny* detail. You see the Samguk Sagi and the Dongguk Tonggam appear to refute this whole story. They claim that King Jeonji didn’t die in 414, as the Japanese chronicle would appear to suggest, but rather that he died in 420, and his son, Kuisin, then took the throne, without any evidence of the kind of trouble suggested by the Baekje record in the Nihon Shoki. So what, exactly, is going on here? Did the Chroniclers just insert that entire episode in there because they thought it sounded good?
And with that, I think we’ll turn aside from the continent for a bit and focus on what else was happening on the archipelago. Much of the events recorded in the Chronicles are fairly standard compared with what we’ve heard about from earlier reigns. For example, even while Yamato was flexing its muscle on the continent, there were still independent entities on the archipelago. Mention is made early in Homuda Wake’s reign of the eastern Emishi attending with tribute, and they were put to work building the Mumazaka road, similar to the way that continental envoys were put to work building ponds, bringing into question, in my mind, just what sort of “envoys” these all really were. Then there is discussion of Homuda Wake meeting with the Kuzu, who are, in the Hitachi Fudoki, equated with the Tsuchigumo. In this case, though, they appear to be the kuzu of the mountains areas of the Kii peninsula, which suggests to me that while Yamato held sway over the plains and river deltas, where rice farming could be particularly successful, there may have still been plenty of independent groups living in the mountains, possibly with their own culture and values, which focused more on the mountain lifestyle than that of the plain-bound farming culture that largely sustained kofun-era Yamato. Of course, these are peripheral cultures, and therefore largely invisible in the text except when they directly interact with the people and court of Yamato.
In this instance we are given some insight into their ways—particularly into their rituals. For Kuzu offered songs and sake to the sovereign. In particular we are told that after they sang they “struck their mouths like drums” and laughed. The Kuzu are described as a plain and honest people who gather wild berries and boil frogs as a delicacy. They lived amongst the steep cliffs and ravines of the Yoshino river area, and produced such things as chestnuts, mushrooms, and trout. All of this speaks to me of people with very different lifeways from those common in the large settlements of Yamato.
But it wasn’t just the people living in the Japanese hollers and tucked away in the mountain crevasses who were outside of the larger Yamato polity, but there were plenty of other rice-growing areas as well. Of course, in either case, the Chroniclers extend the cloak of national unity over everything, but in this case I think we get a very interesting story, and it is tied in to Homuda Wake’s last queen.
I say his last queen because, based on what we’ve seen of royal succession to date, there appear to have been several. Takaki no Iribime, for example, is said to have been a descendant of Ikume Iribiko. She gave birth to one of the princes and eventual claimants to the throne. Then there was Naka tsu Hime—the Middle Princess, whom most genealogies name as the primary wife and queen, though little is actually said about her. She was a sister to Takaki no Iribime, we know that much, and their father was, oddly enough, Homuda no Mawaka no Miko, a royal prince with a name eerily similar to that of the sovereign, Homuda Wake. Naka tsu Hime would give birth to another eligible Prince.
But it is the last lady, who gave birth to the youngest of Homuda Wake’s eligible sons, who is the subject of our current story. She is Miyanushi Yagawa no Ye Hime, or the Elder Princess of Yagawa.
Now of the three possible claimants to the throne, Takaki no Iribime’s son, Ohoyamamori no Mikoto—who may be the same as Nukata no Oho Naka tsu Hiko—was the eldest son. Naka tsu Hime then gave birth to Ohosazaki no Mikoto. He was also eligible to become Crown Prince, and is the middle of three children who seem to have been in the running. The third eligible prince was known as Uji no Waka Iratsuko (or Uji no Waki Iratsuko), and he was the son of Miyanushi Yagawa Ye Hime, who was the daughter of Wani no Oho-omi, the great minister of the powerful Wani clan.
Ye Hime herself is mentioned several times throughout the reign, while Naka tsu Hime and her sisters are really only mentioned in the various lists of names and genealogies. Regarding Ye Hime, on the other hand, we get the full Hallmark treatment, from her courtship in Chika tsu Afumi to her later travels to Kibi.
Now the courtship of Ye Hime is given primarily in the Kojiki, where we are told of how they met and got married with the typical feasting that seems common in these kinds of stories. Ye Hime’s father has her serve Homuda Wake a large wine cup, which seems to have been about as close to a betrothal as you could get.
It is interesting that the Kojiki places all of this in Chika-tsu-Oumi, and in the song, that he sang at the feast, Homuda Wake seems to make the claim that he is from Tsunoga—aka Tsuruga Bay. That was where he had exchanged names with the Kami, and the area where Ame no Hiboko had been worshipped, which again begs the question about potential links between Homuda Wake and the peninsula.
The Nihon Shoki, however, gives Ye Hime a slightly different place of origin. For in that case we are told that one day, while they were both looking out over the land from a high tower, Ye Hime had a longing to go home and see her parents. And so Homuda Wake, who loved her so much that he would do nearly anything, summoned up 80 fishermen and had them take Ye Hime to Kibi. He even composes a song as she leaves where he calls her, quite blatantly, his spouse of Kibi.
And this seems a rather intriguing disagreement between the sources. The Kojiki has them meeting in what was presumably her home of Chika tsu Oumi—which is to say around Lake Biwa. Meanwhile, the Nihon Shoki claims that she is from Kibi. Of course, it could be that some other Ye Hime is meant in one of these accounts.
Either way, the Nihon Shoki claims that Homuda Wake then followed Ye-Hime to Kibi, dwelling in the palace of Ashimori, in Hata. This is traditionally identified as being along the Ashimori river northwest of modern Okayama city. This is an area with large, keyhole shaped tomb mounds that rival those in Yamato, and it may have actually been the home to an independent kingdom, particularly in the early 5th century.
This is why it is interesting what else we are told: That, while dwelling at Ashimori, Homuda Wake took a particular liking to a gentleman named Mitomo Wake, who, along with his entire family, waited on the sovereign, hand and foot. Eventually, Homuda Wake decided to divvy up the land of Kibi. Five of the various lands went to the five sons of Mitomo Wake, while the district of Hatoribe is said to have been given to his wife, Ye Hime, as her own. Mitomo Wake himself was designated as the Kuni no Miyatsuko, and his sons as Agatanushi, and the divisions—which may reflect later political boundaries—would largely remain in use, either formally or informally, until the present day.
Once again, we need to look beyond what the Chronicle is telling us. For instance, we know that there are huge, round keyhole shaped kofun in that region. The largest is known as Tsukuriyama Kofun, and it was built sometime in the late 5th century. By the way, “Tsukuriyama” is actually the name of several kofun, largely because its name merely means “man-made mountain”. In this case, though, we are talking about the fourth largest kofun in all of Japan, larger than most of the so-called imperial tombs. Many believe that it belonged to a king of ancient Kibi, and based on the size of the kofun, one who likely rivaled Yamato in terms of the power and labor that they were able to mobilize. And not only that, but the Kibi region has some of the densest concentrations of kofun outside of the Kinai region of central Honshu, built between the 4th and 7th centuries. There are over 140 of the large keyhole tombs, with at least twenty of them in the region of Tsukuriyama and the modern city of Okayama.
And yet I can’t help but note that they were following in the tradition set by Yamato in building a giant, round-keyhole tomb.
From the earliest stories, Yamato is said to have conquered and subjugated Kibi. But then again, they were also said to have conquered and subjugated the Korean peninsula, and in that case we have both textual and archaeological evidence to the contrary. Here we only have archaeological evidence, but I wonder: would Yamato have really allowed a subject to build such a large and grandiose resting place if they could prevent it? I figure at the very least it shows that the local elites had a fair amount of autonomy. Still, there are so many things that we are missing, and I wish we had records from outside of the main narrative, but alas, we will have to console ourselves with what the archaeology tells us.
Perhaps this story about Homuda Wake was actually about another king altogether—a king of ancient Kibi. Or perhaps there is some evidence here of an ancient marriage link to Kibi through his wife, Ye Hime, and perhaps even with her son, Uji no Waki Iratsuko.
Speaking of whom…
Now we know that Homuda Wake himself was quite enamored of his youngest son, and he had decided to make him the Crown Prince, which would seem fitting if he was actually the product of two powerful royal families. That said, he had at least two other sons who were apparently eligible for the throne, and if they didn’t support Uji no Waki Iratsuko’s claim it could be problematic after Homuda Wake’s death. And so, in one of those epic bouts of parenting that the royal lineage up to this point is so known for, he questioned his two elder sons, Oho Yamamori and Oho Sazaki, to ask, in a roundabout way, their thoughts. Of course, you can’t be direct with this kind of question, right? You know, just come right out and say, “Hey boys, I’m thinking of making your youngest brother the next ruler. You cool with that?” Nope, instead he sets up this whole elaborate thing. First he pulls them over to him and he comments about how they both have children of their own already—so they were already fully grown adults, themselves, by this time. He then asks which of their own children is more deserving of their love, the youngest or the eldest. Basically playing a game of “who does dad love the best” with the two that you’ve already decided are out of the running. Really?
Now, neither of the two other sons seem to have had any idea what he was getting at, but Oho Yamamori thought that this might be the moment to put in a bid for the throne himself. After all, he was the oldest, and he was the most experienced, right? Anyway, Oho Yamamori expounded upon the virtues of the older brother and how they were the most loved.
As Oho Yamamori went on about this, I imagine Homuda Wake’s visage took on a dark cast. You know that feeling when the audience has soured on what someone is saying, but they just keep going, anyway? Yeah, awkward…
So while Oho Yamamori was busy bombing on pitching their pater, Oho Sazaki saw what was happening and realized this wasn’t what their father wanted to hear. So when it got to his turn, he took a different tack, and he basically told his father what he thought he wanted to hear.
First off, he talked about how older children have already grown up and discovered their way in life. They were adults and had experience and could fend for themselves. The younger children, however, were still children. They didn’t have as much experience and therefore they needed the most love and support.
Clearly this was the answer that Homuda Wake was looking for. In the end, neither Oho Yamamori nor Oho Sazaki, despite their seniority, would be named the Crown Prince—that honor would go to their youngest brother, Uji no Waki Iratsuko. However, perhaps in response to the brown-nosing, he did appoint Oho Sazaki as assistant to the Crown Prince, and asked him to help administer affairs of state. Meanwhile he gave Oho Yamamori, well, he made him Oho Yamamori, which is to say the warden of the mountains and forested areas. This is probably where his name, or more properly title, actually comes from. His actual name may have been Nukata no Oho Naka tsu Hiko, but this is largely a guess on our part, based on the lists of Homuda Wake’s many offspring.
Of course, I’m sure that there were absolutely no hard feelings, and when Homuda Wake passes away, everything will be fine, right? Well, for that you’ll need to wait for the next episode.
First though, there is one more thing I’d like to touch on, though it isn’t exactly mentioned in the chronicles, and that is the story of Homuda Wake after his death. No, I don’t mean to suggest that he rose from the grave like some undead revenant, though that would have been a cool. Rather, I mean how the idea of Homuda Wake continued and evolved after his death.
So, yes, Homuda Wake did eventually pass away, and we are told he is buried in one of the large, round keyhole style mounds in the Mozu-Furuichi tomb mound group. But his spirit lived on in an interesting and, perhaps, appropriate way.
You see, centuries after his death Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, would be worshipped as one of the most famous deities of the archipelago, for he came be associated with the famous god-slash-Boddhisatva, Hachiman.
Now most people are familiar with Hachiman due to his later connection to the Minamoto family. His shrine in Kamakura, once the headquarters of the early shogunate, founded by Minamoto Yoritomo, is still extremely impressive, and an easy daytrip from Tokyo. But Hachiman was important before the Minamoto ever existed. And to examine the origins of Hachiman we are going to have to travel away from Kamakura and all the way to the western island of Kyushu.
It was here, on the island of Kyushu, that the cult of Hachiman was born, likely sometime in the 5th or 6th century, and the processes that come together in the founding of the Hachiman cult are highly demonstrative of the changes that are happening in the archipelago in general during the time of Homuda Wake, and so it is not entirely without merit that the two are linked, in my opinion.
It is difficult, of course, to know when an idea or story first comes into being, and much of what we have is based on the later information in works like the Shoku Nihongi, the successor to our current chronicles, and the founding tales of Usa shrine, that were passed down through the ages and eventually written down. Scholars suggest that originally this new tradition centered around a deity of a place called Yahata or Yabata, the native Japanese, or kun’yomi, reading of the characters in the name “Hachiman”. Yabata probably meant something like “eight fields”—a quite plausible locative, which could be just about anywhere in the archipelago. Eventually, though, worship of this deity took hold in Usa, one of the ancient settlement sites of northern Kyushu.
From the records we know that there were three families associated with Hachiman from an early time. One of these was, unsurprisingly, the Usa clan, who were probably the chieftains of the place with the same name. Usa comes up from time to time in the Chronicles, such as during Iware Biko’s march from Kyushu to Yamato, and later they were known for their Buddhist priests, whom they would occasionally send to the court. They certainly appear to have been an important place, even if the connection with Hachiman isn’t mentioned until much later.
Also involved in the early Hachiman cult were the Karajima. They appear to have been based out of the country of Toyo, but their name suggests that they descended from people who came over from the peninsula and settled there. The scholar Nakano Hatayoshi suggested that between the 3rd and 6th centuries they pushed south into the area of the Usa clan and conquered that region.
The last family were the Ohoga, whose name is just a different reading for “Ohomiwa”. Indeed, it seems they claim descent from the family charged with looking after the ancient holy site of Mt. Miwa, and they may have been sent out to the region as an extension of the Yamato court to help provide oversight of the Yamato-centered rituals. In fact, it may have been through such ritualist envoys that Yamato was able to exert some measure of control, along with sending out specialists in, of all things, burial mound construction—hence why we see the proliferation of the round keyhole style and related burial mounds in the kofun period.
And so we see here a merger of the local traditions, through the Usa clan, the Yamato traditions in the form of the Ohomiwa, and peninsular traditions of the Karajima. Three different traditions coming together.
It is this syncreticism that make Hachiman so interesting to many scholars of Japanese religion. To an outside observer, the shrines and rituals of Hachiman may closely resemble other forms of Japanese Shinto practice, but in many ways it is its own unique thing. At Usa shrine, Hachiman was venerated along with an image of Maitreiya Bodhisattva, and the worship of both was carried out together. Later, Hachiman would be designated as the protector of the Great Buddha at Toudaiji, in Nara, and the oracles of Hachiman would have significant impact on Japanese history.
The earliest records we have of Hachiman, in the 8th century, depict him as helping to secure a military victory, though this seems to have been a relatively minor part of his portfolio, at least early on. Later, as the chosen deity of the Minamoto clan, his God of War aspect would definitely be further developed. Initially, however, it was his role as a protector and his oracular divinations that caused such a splash. These divinations are at the heart of the famous Dokyo Incident in the 8th century, and came through the voices of the priests and mediums of Usa Shrine, rather than divine visions of the sovereign or reading the cracks on burnt deer scapulae or turtle shells. This was different from the type of divination generally seen with other kami, and it has been suggested that it was the result of a combination of practices from the peninsula and on the archipelago. It also likely didn’t hurt that there was no one single family that could lay claim to Hachiman and his cult. He was, in a way, a free agent, meaning that he could be shaped by later courts and sovereigns into what they needed him to be.
The connection of Hachiman with Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, actually comes in rather late. It is in the 9th century that we get a text which tells us that Hachiman revealed himself to be Oujin Tennou to the sovereign known as Kimmei Tennou in the mid-6th century, after Hachiman had already been adopted by the royal house as a protector.
In all likelihood, Hachiman had nothing to do with Homuda Wake until centuries after the fact. But even then it is intriguing to think about just what Homuda Wake meant to people. By all accounts he seems to have been from a different dynasty than the 8th century ruling family, though his line was important enough for them to work into their own narrative, and his story is often tied up with the reign of his mother—where Okinaga Tarashi Hime was a conquerer and warlord, the story of Homuda Wake focuses more on assimilation of new people and ideas. This balance of martial prowess—Wu or Bu—with literary pursuits—Wen or Bun—is a common dichotomy in Asian thought and philosophy, and so it is unsurprising that the narrative might reflect that.
And yet, as Hachiman, Homuda Wake is often depicted wearing arms and armor, and as much a conquering hero as an administrative governor. Of course, these different aspects may better reflect the needs of the people at any given time, rather than any core aspect of Homuda Wake’s character.
And with that, we have just one more thing to discuss before we move on and say farewell to Homuda Wake, or at least his human incarnation—as Hachiman he will definitely be putting in an appearance in later episodes, don’t you worry. Now this wouldn’t be the kofun period if we weren’t talking about the giant kingly tombs that these sovereigns are said to be buried in, and in Homuda Wake’s case it is a grand tomb, to be sure.
Measuring 425 meters in length, the Ega-no-mofushi no Oka Kofun, also known as the Konda Gobyou Yama or just Konda Yama Kofun, is the largest of the Furuichi kofun group, which lies in modern Ohosaka, south of the Yamato River, and just west of the mountain pass leading to the Nara basin. Not only is it the longest in its group, but it is the second longest in all of Japan, and the largest by volume of any of the kofun in the archipelago. As for the largest kofun, at least by length, that distinction falls to Daisen kofun, which lies just a little ways to the west in the Mozu kofun group, and which is said to be the burial site of Homuda Wake’s son, the sovereign known as Nintoku Tennou. Together they are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Mozu-Furuichi Kofun group, which attained official status in 2019. This is the height of kofun construction in the archipelago, at least for sheer monumental size.
In addition to its size—and the impressive array of haniwa figures that adorned it--Kondayama Kofun is, predictably, also the site of a shrine to Hachiman—Konda Hachimangu. By the way, I should probably note, since you can’t tell through the microphone, that the “Konda” here is just another reading of the name “Homuda”. The shrine itself claims that it was originally built in the front of Homuda Wake’s mausoleum in about the 6th century, and then later moved to the present location (south of the mound) in the 11th century. I have reason to question this, but that is the claim that the shrine appears to make.
And that’s all that I really have for you this episode. I appreciate everyone who has stuck with it—there has been so much this reign, it has taken us roughly six episodes to get through it all. Next episode, though, we get to move on and we’ll see just who becomes the next sovereign. Is it young Uji-Waki-Iratsuko, who was the designated Crown Prince and Successor? Or perhaps Oho Yamamori, who was passed over by their father. Or perhaps Oho Sazaki will step up. You’ll just have to wait and find out next episode.
So, until next time, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate through our KoFi site, kofi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the link over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Questions or comments? Feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.
That’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Ō, Yasumaro, & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
Lee, D. (2014). Keyhole-shaped Tombs and Unspoken Frontiers: Exploring the Borderlands of Early Korean-Japanese Relations in the 5th-6th Centuries. UCLA. ProQuest ID: Lee_ucla_0031D_12746. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m52j7s88. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qm7h4t7
SCHEID, B. (2014). Shōmu Tennō and the Deity from Kyushu: Hachiman's Initial Rise to Prominence. Japan Review, (27), 31-51. Retrieved August 10, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23849569
Kawagoe, Aileen (2009). “Did keyhole-shaped tombs originate in the Korean peninsula?”. Heritage of Japan. https://heritageofjapan.wordpress.com/following-the-trail-of-tumuli/types-of-tumuli-and-haniwa-cylinders/did-keyhole-shaped-tombs-originate-in-the-korean-peninsula/. Retrieved 8/24/2021.
Bentley, John. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: a New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. ISBN-90-04-152253
Best, J. (2006). A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi. Cambridge (Massachusetts); London: Harvard University Asia Center. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1tg5q8p
Shultz, E. (2004). An Introduction to the "Samguk Sagi". Korean Studies, 28, 1-13. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23720180
Ishino, H., & 石野博信. (1992). Rites and Rituals of the Kofun Period. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 19 (2/3), 191-216. Retrieved August 16, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30234190
Chamberlain, B. H. (1981). The Kojiki: Records of ancient matters. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN4-8053-0794-3
Bender, R. (1979). The Hachiman Cult and the Dōkyō Incident. Monumenta Nipponica, 34(2), 125-153. doi:10.2307/2384320
Bender, R. (1978). Metamorphosis of a Deity. The Image of Hachiman in Yumi Yawata. Monumenta Nipponica, 33 (2), 165-178. doi:10.2307/2384124
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
Hall, John W. (1966). Government and Local Power in Japan 500 to 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691030197

Episode 47: The Man Who Might Be King

August 16, 2021 Joshua Badgley

Haniwa of a quiver full of arrows from the 5th century Muromiyayama Kofun. Photo from the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture.

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This episode we talk about Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko, covering what we know of the stories he is in as well as discussing what might be lurking behind these stories.

Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko

The names we find in the Chronicles are primarily 「葛城襲津彦」 (Katsuraki [no] Sotsuhiko) in the Nihon Shoki and 「葛城長江曾都毘古」 (Katsuraki [no] Nagae [no] Sotsuhiko) in the Kojiki. In the Old Japanese of the Kofun period it is probably something like Kaduraki [no] Sotubiko. Old Japanese had many differences from modern Japanese pronunciation, and is a study unto itself.

The other name we see is from an excerpt from the Baekje annals in the Nihon Shoki, and it is「沙至比跪」(Satibiko). There is technically the possibility that this story is about someone else, or that the Baekje Annals themselves had it wrong, in the first place. The general consensus, though, appears to be that these figures are, indeed, referencing the same person.

The idea of him being a high ranking chieftain, and possibly one of those responsible for the trade routes with the continent—after all, there were only so many ways to get from the archipelago to the peninsula—is intriguing. Perhaps he was some sort of King. However, I would also note that the excerpt from the ancient Baekje Annals, which is no longer extant, other than the fragments in the Nihon Shoki and other histories, like the Samguk Sagi, does not refer to him as the sovereign of all of Yamato, and puts him in a subservient position. That said, it is clear that the Chroniclers tinkered with the wording of the Baekje annals in places. Sometimes it was simply to update words to increase understanding, such as changing “Wa” to “Yamato”. It would have been easy enough, however, for them to “clarify” something in such a way that it changed the meaning to better suit what the Chroniclers knew to be the truth, so even here we can’t be entirely sure that we are getting a faithful transliteration. Still, it seems reasonable to assume that Satibiko—or Sotsuhiko—is, indeed, the one being referenced here.

Ame no Hiboko

You might recall the “Heavenly Sun Spear”—「天日槍」in the Nihon Shoki or「天之日矛」 in the Kojiki—from our earliest discussions of relations with the continent. He was said to be a Silla prince who eventually settled in the area of Kehi, along modern Tsuruga Bay, where he came to be worshipped as a kami. Of course “Ame no Hiboko” is a Japonic name, and unlike other names on the peninsula. He might be the same, however, as the man named Sonaka (or Tsunoga) Shichi (or “Cheulchi” in modern Korean). Some accounts have his origin in Silla, while others point to Nimna and the confederated Kara states. In some stories he even has a title that would appear to equate to about the 3rd rank of the Silla court.

The Chronicles make Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko one of Ame no Hiboko’s descendants, and provide yet another connection to the areas of Silla and Kara on the southern Korean peninsula.

Takechi no Sukune

We just talked bout him last episode (Epsiode 46), and while the Chronicles suggest he was Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko’s father, there is enough evidence to question whether or not that was actually the case.

Okinaga Tarashi Hime

Also known as Jingū Kōgō (神功皇后), she was the sovereign who is said to have “subjugated “ the Korean peninsula for Yamato. She is also connected to the Katsuraki family, through her lineage, and some of the earliest stories about Sotsuhiko happened, ostensibly, during her reign.

Homuda Wake

The sovereign for most of this period that we have been discussing, aka Ōjin Tennō (応神天皇). We’ll cover more on him next episode.

King of Kara and his Sister

The King of Kara is referenced as “Kwi-pon” in the Aston translation (己本旱岐—Kwi-pon Kanki). Aston goes on to note that the Dongguk Tonggam, a 15th century compilation of Korean history, gives the sovereign at this time as “I Si-Bpeum” (伊尸品). It is possibly a transliteration error, or it could be the difference between the king of Geumgwan Kara, the primary city-state of the Kara confederacy, or it could be that this is a different '“King” altogether. We have little to go on besides what is written here.

It is interesting that he is given a similar Silla rank to Ame no Hiboko, that of Kanki. I don’t know if this was added later or if it is indicative of Kara kings accepting court rank from Silla, similar to how other states sought out titles from the Wei and Jin courts, a practice we will go over in more detail in a later episode.

His younger sister’s name is given as 「既殿至」, which Aston translates as “Kwi-chon-chi”. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough information on the language of Kara to give you anything more, but it is likely better than reading it using modern Japanese on’yomi. This is the younger sister who then goes to the court of the “Great Wa” to complain about “Sachihiko” not following through with his orders.

Mongna Geunja

Mongna Günja (or Mongna Künja—possibly even something like Mong Nagunja: 木羅斤資) is a Baekje general who shows up during the reign of Okinaga Tarashi Hime, helping out with the Baekje-Wa alliance and later chasing down “Sachihiko” and stopping the assault on Kara. Later he would have a son (with, interestingly enough, a Silla wife) who would have his own role to play in pen-insular events.

Yutsuki / Kungwol

Specifically this individual is referenced as “Yutsuki [no] Kimi” (弓月君)—Lord Yutsuki or Lord of Yutsuki. Yutsuki here is the traditional pronunciation in modern Japanese, and the Korean would be something like Kungwol (and the characters at that time may have been something like “Kung-ngwet” based on a Middle Chinese reading of them). The Chronicles don’t specify exactly where they are from, which has given rise to various theories, many of them trying to connect Yutsuki to someplace in modern China or even out in the Xinjiang region, near the border with Kazhakstan. While that certainly is possible—the trade routes of central Eurasia have long been in operation—it seems difficult, if not impossible, to prove by just this particular entry.

Maketsu

Maketsu (眞毛津) was a seamstress sent over to Yamato from Baekje. She is hailed as the ancestor of the seamstresses of Kume. At that time it seems common to set up villages that specialized in particular goods and skills, and many of the stories of this time talk about the deliberate importation of expert crafters from the continent.

Clothing in particular we have a rather murky view of until we get more human-shaped haniwa in the 6th century, and even then it can be difficult to make out what is actually going on and what is exaggeration by the haniwa sculptures, but here we can see textual evidence of what we see later on, which is the influence of continental styles on the archipelago. Granted, prior to this they were probably in synch with at least what was going on in the southern tip of the peninsula, but I suspect that what Maketsu and people like her were bringing may have been a more Sinified aesthetic.

I should note that it mentions she was sent as “tribute”. It is unclear to me just how much choice that artisans like this had in their assignments, but my guess is that they didn’t have much. It has been a not-uncommon move across the globe for artisans to be forcibly taken and re-established elsewhere so that another group could acquire their intangible cultural properties. Of course, there are also examples where artisans were also enticed with lucrative offers of a comfortable living, and some may just have wanted to travel and explore the world, but given the way it is written and how people were enslaved, resettled, and sometimes sent to foreign courts, I suspect that there was very little choice involved here.

Iwa no Hime

We are told that Iwa no Hime (磐之媛) was the daughter of Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko. She would go on to become the queen of the sovereign Ōsazaki, aka Nintoku Tennō, and her son, Izaho Wake, would eventually follow him on the Yamato throne, becoming known as Ritchū Tennō. I wonder if this connection had something to do with the way that Sotsuhiko is treated in the narrative.

King Naemul of Silla

Naemul was the first historically attested sovereign of Silla in the 4th and very start of the 5th century. Naemul sent the future King Silseong to be a hostage at the Goguryeo court, and may have been the one to send Prince Misaheun to the Wa.

King Silseong of Silla

Silseong followed Naemul, despite the fact that Naemul had at least three sons: Nulji, Bokho, and Misaheun. In the first year of his reign, according to the Samguk Sagi, Prince Misaheun was sent to the Wa as an envoy, though this may have happened in the reign of Naemul, as attested to in the Samguk Yusa. Later he would send Prince Bokho to Goguryeo, and he married his daughter to the eldest of Naemul’s sons, Nulji. Eventually, though, he seems to have had a change of heart and attempted to have Nulji killed, but the plan would ultimately backfire.

King Nulji of Silla

After killing King Silseong in retaliation for Silseong’s attempted assassination of Nulji, one of the first things that King Nulji would do is to set about trying to get his brothers returned from the various courts at which they were being held hostage. This was eventually accomplished by the loyal courtier, Pak Jesang

Prince Bokho of Silla

Prince Bokho was sent by King Silseong as a hostage to the court of Goguryeo. He eventually escaped their custody with assistance from Pak Jesang.

Prince Misaheun of Silla

Prince Misaheun was a hostage at the Wa court. His eventual rescue is mentioned across multiple sources, with slight variations in the details, including the Nihon Shoki, the Samguk Sagi, the Samguk Yusa, and the Dongguk Tonggam. In the Nihon Shoki, Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko plays a prominent role in those events.

Pak Jesang

Pak Jesang was a loyal courtier of the Silla court. He offered to personally go and bring back King Nulji’s brothers, the Princes Bokho and Misaheun. Even today he is held up as a legendary example of loyalty, giving up everything, including his family and, eventually, his life for his lord.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 47: The Man who Might be King
There are certainly a lot of names that get thrown around in the Chronicles. Most of them only appear once, usually in a list telling us who begat whom, which usually looks like a rather blatant attempt to connect some high muckety-muck with the royal family or otherwise explain the origin of some person or group that was around in the 8th century. This is especially true of the eras we’ve been discussing, I’d say, probably because of the lack of good source material to draw from, among other things. Still, you occasionally get a recurring character here or there that keeps popping up and making an appearance.
Last episode we talked about one such supporting character, Takechi no Sukune, the first Prime Minister, or Oho-omi, who supposedly held his job through at least 5 different reigns, and who was involved in some of the more impactful parts of the narrative, even if he wasn’t the main character.
Now Takechi no Sukune isn’t the only name that keeps popping up again and again in the Chronicles for this time—though certainly he seems to be one of the most influential, not to mention long-lived. Unfortunately, just like the sovereigns he served, we cannot confirm anything about his actual existence. Was he an actual person? Or was he, perhaps, an amalgamation of individuals, perhaps all serving under the name or title of “Takechi”? I suspect that he was an important figure in the transition to the new dynasty—possibly someone referenced in various stories, and maybe he did provide some kind of connection back to the previous dynasty, but all of that is speculation.
At the same time, we have evidence of at least one individual from this time who, more likely than not, did exist. In fact, he’s got a better claim to actual historicity than do either Homuda Wake, the supposed sovereign of Yamato, or his prime minister Takechi no Sukune, since he unlike either of them, this person is directly referenced in the Baekje annals by name. Furthermore, despite not having as many entries in the Japanese chronicles as either of those other two, he seems intimately tied in to the royal lineage. On top of all of that we’ve mentioned him before, though just in passing. His name is Katsuraki Sotsu Hiko.
Now, Katsuragi is a place name, as well as the name of a prominent family group, which is quite likely related. It is located in the southwest corner of the Nara Basin, opposite the old capital at Miwa in modern Sakurai. I haven’t found anything that clearly states when it became a place of significance—or even if the place was named for the family or vice versa. Regardless, the family group claims a lineage going all the way back to the time of Iware Biko, though you may have some inkling just what kind of stock I put into all of that.
More importantly for our current narrative, the Katsuraki family are found in the lineage of Homuda Wake’s mother, Okinaga Tarashi Hime. Specifically they are mentioned as part of the lineage descending down to her from that ancient Silla Prince, Ame no Hiboko. So they are both tied to the royal family and to the royal family of Silla, though of course there is no evidence for this prince in the Silla annals, just in the Japanese chronicles. Still, that tie to the continent is going to be important, because it is in dealing with the continent—and in particular dealing with Silla, where Katsuraki no So-tsu-hiko will gain most of his notoriety.
Before we get to those stories, let me quickly touch on the rest of his name, though: Sotsu Hiko. It is an interesting name, in part because it would seem to mark this character as the lord or prince—Hiko—of some place called “So”, assuming that the “tsu” here is, indeed, that possessive marker we’ve seen and discussed before. In the Baekje annals his name is rendered as Sachihiko, which may simply be a transliteration error from the Japanese to the Korean and then back again. In Old Japanese these characters likely sounded even closer: probably something like So tu Bpiko, and “Sa ti Bpiko”.
So to start with, let’s go with the story that is at the core of the belief that So-tsu-hiko was, indeed, a real boy, and that is the excerpt that the Japanese Chroniclers included from the Baekje Annals for the year 382. Now in the hodgepodge of the Chronicles this event actually shows up during the reign of Okinaga Tarashi Hime, backdated by 120 years to 262, but given the rest of the contextual evidence we can fairly confidently put this incident at about 382, which is about 9 years before the events recorded on the stele of King Gwangaetto the Great. This is in the time of King Gusu—aka Geungusu—of Baekje, who had succeeded his father, King Chogo, in 375. In Silla this was still the reign of King Naemul, who had sent his envoys to the Jin court only a year earlier.
According to the Baekje records, the Wa were angered when Silla didn’t wait upon them—by which I assume they mean that they didn’t send them the expected payment-slash-bribe that they were expecting—and so the Wa sent a force to attack Silla, under the command of So-tsu-hiko. So-tsu-hiko had his forces ready to march on Silla, but Silla had a rather unusual plan of their own. Rather than readying an army to oppose him they decided to appeal to try a different approach, sending two beautiful Silla ladies to seduce him. Apparently this ploy worked, and So-tsu-hiko called off the attack on Silla, though that left him with a conundrum: He had troops in the field, and no doubt they were expecting some action.
While we don’t know a lot about the military armies or bands or whatever they were at this time, certain things we can deduce from what we know about militaries around the world. One of those things is that, historically, you need to make sure your troops get properly rewarded, since they are putting their lives on the line. Even in conscript armies you need to keep morale up, and in this period I suspect that many of the soldiers fighting were probably doing so on a semi-voluntary basis, mainly because Yamato court didn’t quite seem to have the kind of authority to just force people off of their land to go fight and possibly die on their behalf. I doubt anyone at this time had true standing armies, though we are starting to see more weapons and armor—something that will become common burial goods, replacing the earlier bronze mirrors as high status grave goods.
Besides, it takes a lot of organization to keep soldiers fed, clothed, armed, and trained, and typically the resources to do that came from the booty acquired during the actual fighting. In later periods we would see this as land that could be given out to those warriors who had fought exceptionally well, while in this period it may have been more material goods, captured during the fighting.
Either way, these troops would need to be taken care of—to send them all the way to Silla, ready to fight, but then to balk at the last minute might have been a rather dangerous ploy for So-tsu-hiko. In all likelihood it he found it easier to simply redirect his forces, and so, instead of reprimanding Silla, the army marched into the lands of Kara, instead.
Of course, this was not exactly a subtle change in direction. The King of Kara, given in the Baekje Annals as Kwi-pon—though Aston gives his name as Si-Bpeum according to his reading of the Korean Tonggam—fled to Baekje due to So-tsu-hiko’s assaults. The King’s sister, Kwi-chon-chi, then went to the Great Wa—aka Yamato—and asked the sovereign there, Okinaga Tarashi Hime, for assistance, complaining about the assaults by So-tsu-hiko and his Wa troops. Well Tarashi Hime was quite livid to hear of this impertinence. Her orders to So-tsu-hiko had been clear, after all, and they had been all about reprimanding Silla, nothing to do with attacking Kara. And so she asked for the Baekje general, Mongna Keuncha, to go and sort things out. Mongna Keuncha, as you may recall from some episodes back, was one of the generals that had led troops as part of the Baekje-Wa alliance, and so here he is again, setting things right in Kara.
Mongna Keuncha appears to have been successful at stopping the assault on Kara, but he didn’t capture So-tsu-hiko, who remained at-large on the continent, presumably with those two Silla women to keep him company, though who knows if they had stuck with him through his defeat. Another account, for which, like a viral meme on social media, we aren’t given the actual source, claims that So-tsu-hiko went into hiding as soon as he learned that Tarashi Hime was upset with him.
That said, Sotsu Hiko had his own eyes and ears in the court. He seems to have had an in with one of the ladies at court, who still thought well of him, despite everything that had happened. After giving everything some time to blow over, he secretly sent her a message and asked her to feel out the mood in the court—specifically that of the sovereign. This court lady found a time to bend the ear of Tarashi Hime. She claimed to have had a dream about So-tsu-hiko. Well as soon as the lady in waiting mentioned his name, Tarashi Hime’s mood soured, and she loudly declaimed that should he ever show his face around Yamato again, she would have him killed.
And so no, things hadn’t blown over. Realizing that no pardon would be forthcoming, So-tsu-hiko headed off into a cave and died.
Which, of course, would seem to bring our story to a close. He was a general, he went to Silla, he was seduced into betraying his orders, attacked Kara, and then died, hiding in seclusion.
Except, of course, that isn’t at all where this ends. In fact, it is barely the beginning, and this is probably why the Chroniclers caveated that whole portion with “one source says” because I suspect even they were having some problem putting all of this together.
You see, Katsuraki So-tsu-hiko shows up—either by his full name or just as So-tsu-hiko, in stories from at least the adjusted year of 325 and then continuing for the next century and a half, scattered across three reigns. Of course, from what we can verify we can more reliably trace him in the historical record from about 325 to probably 418, and maybe even 426. For all of that, though, many of the stories about him seem to be retellings of the same incidents, just placed in different reigns, though with some of the actors changed. We’ve seen similar “repeated” stories in the Chronicles after all.
For example, in the 14th year of Homuda Wake’s reign—probably about 403 CE, right smack dab in the middle of the conflicts with Silla and Goguryeo--, we are given another story about So-tsu-hiko. In this case an envoy named Yutsuki—or possibly something like Kungweol, in modern Korean—attempted to travel from Baekje to Yamato to provide his allegiance. Word may have been sent with an envoy earlier that same year, or perhaps the year prior. The Baekje annals in the Samguk Sagi note that Baekje had sent an envoy to Wa to seek out large pearls, while the Japanese chronicles mention a seamstress named Maketsu who was sent over—possibly as part of the ongoing exchange surrounding the, shall we say, residency of Crown Prince Jeonji of Baekje at the Yamato court. To help Yutsuki make the journey, So-tsu-hiko was sent out to see them safely from Kara at the end of the Korean peninsula, over to Yamato, but after he left, the court heard nothing.
Of course, in this age before modern communication, it is little wonder that nobody heard anything back immediately. All sorts of pitfalls could waylay a journey, and who knew how long it would take on the other side before anyone heard anything back. In this case, though, it was rather excessive, as three years went by and still nobody had showed up at the Yamato court. And so they sent two generals out to find out what happened. Convinced that Silla had interfered and was holding them, the troops made there way to Silla and, low and behold, Silla was indeed keeping So-tsu-hiko and Yutsuki hostage. Under the threat of the Wa forces, or so we are led to believe, Silla admitted to kidnapping them and allowed them to return with the Wa forces.
Now some see in this story a retelling of the earlier So-tsu-hiko story, possibly mixed with something like the early stories of the Baekje ambassadors from the supposed first meeting of Baekje and Wa, who were also waylaid by Silla and, in that case, forced to bring Silla envoys along with them to the Yamato court. In both casesHere, you have So-tsu-hiko going to the continent and someone else having to go after him. In this story, though, he is treated as more of a victim, rather than a rogue general. And in all of these instances it is Silla who somehow detains him or causes him to stray from his mission.
Of course, this could just be a common theme in pen-insular relations—Silla may have regularly looked to intercept Wa and Baekje ships, and vice versa. But there are a few of these kinds of accounts scattered about.
Unfortunately, there isn’t too much too corroborate this in the Korean sources. The Samguk Sagi does have the Wa attacking the peninsula around 405 CE, but according to Silla they were repelled. Then there were two attacks in 407 where they kidnapped 100 people and took them back with them. But whether any of this correlates to the other stories is impossible to say for certain.
Now as to why one story has So-tsu-Hiko as the villain, disobeying the court, and the other paints him as a victim of Silla’s treachery may have to do with the different sources that the stories were coming from, as well as what we are told afterwards. You see, Katsuraki no So-tsu-hiko had a daughter named Iwa no Hime, who would wind up marrying Ohosazaki, the successor to Homuda Wake. She would give birth to one of the future sovereigns, Izaho no Wake. This, by extension makes So-tsu-hiko the ancestor of several generations of sovereigns in the Middle Dynasty, as well as the current lineage, at least according to the Chronicles.
This is interesting for a few reasons, beyond perhaps the obvious. I mean, let’s face it, everyone was trying to tie themselves to the royal lineage, so I don’t think that his placement there is all that big of a shock—if you were a major family and you didn’t claim some tie in with the court then come on, you aren’t even trying, and there were some big names that claimed descent from So-tsu-hiko.
Beyond that, though, it wasn’t just that one of his daughters was married to the sovereign, but rather that she was considered a queen. You see, as we’ve discussed before, there are multiple women who are brought into the royal family as wives of the sovereign, but most do not become the queen, and so their offspring are not considered to be in line for the Yamato throne. To be considered eligible to be a queen, and thus for one’s offspring and descendants to be considered eligible to inherit the throne, a woman had to be of royal blood herself.
Now, of course, technically Iwa no Hime is of royal blood, as is So-tsu-hiko. The Chroniclers saw to that, making sure to connect So-tsu-hiko to Takechi no Sukune, but as we discussed in the last episode on Takechi no Sukune, there are a few things that call this lineage into question, not the least being their disparate titles.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first questionable lineage in the sources, especially for women who would become the queens and mothers of the official sovereigns. However, in this case, she is the daughter of a supposed subject, rather than being the daughter of some lord outside of the Yamato court. So, unlike with those others for whom a royal inheritance may have been manufactured, here we see no obvious political benefit to the royal line for her to be considered as a Queen, let alone for her children to be considered legitimate claimants. Dr. Cornelius J. Kiley discussed this back in 1973 in an article entitled “State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato”, published in the Journal of Asian Studies. There he discusses a few other points about the succession, but regarding So-tsu-hiko in particular he points out that the stories have him defying the orders of the Yamato sovereign, and later some of his descendants would go on to found the powerful Soga clan, which dominated court politics in the 6th and early 7th centuries. And of course the Soga’s power seems to have been partly based in their association with Buddhism and the continent, which we will see in a bit coming over from the Korean peninsula as well.
Dr. Kiley isn’t the only one to have noticed all of this, and there is some thought that the truth may be that So-tsu-hiko was not actually a vassal of the Yamato court, but rather another sovereign or independent Wa lord who was heavily involved in the activities of the peninsula. Here it is suggested that So-tsu-hiko, wherever he was based, was perhaps in alliance with Yamato, but likely had his own powerful territory or kingdom, and it may be that more than a few of the actions ascribed to figures such as Homuda Wake or the ambiguous “King of Wa” may have actually been referencing him, or some similarly independent figure. We can’t know for certain of course, but we do know that there were other powerful figures—perhaps even rival courts—across the archipelago, given the number of large, kingly tombs that we see outside of the immediate geographical base of the Yamato court.
And so it may be that So-tsu-hiko was his own kind of sovereign—a king in his own right, as it were. He may have been allied with Yamato, and it is even possible that, as an independent ruler of some part of the archipelago or the southern peninsula, he was supporting a larger confederation of Wa countries. Of course, this totally goes against the narrative of the Yamato court, where the rule of the Heavenly Descendant was just a natural consequence of their divine nature and the fact that the kami had gifted the archipelago to them. Even early stories of conquest are treated more like inspection tours, with the odd outsider or resistance from uncivilized barbarians, rebels, and bandits, but no real talk of any other sovereigns. This is especially true in dealings with the continent, where the official story continues to push a narrative of conquest and subjugation by Yamato—a narrative that is not exactly backed up by the other evidence we have available to us.
So was So-tsu-hiko an independent king in his own right, possibly even the true power behind the early Baekje-Wa alliance? Or was he just another court noble, who was then entrusted with great responsibilities on the continent? Or was it something in between? Could this be why we have some stories where he seems rebellious and antagonistic, and others where he is shown in a more positive light, the Chroniclers working from stories from different parts of the archipelago and from different dynastic eras?.
These are the things I urge you to keep in mind as we read further stories about So-tsu-hikothese stories and try to piece together what is happening. That said, let’s get into those stories, and what they tell us.
Now, of only passing interest to us, perhaps, is an account from the 41st year of the reign of Ohosazaki—a year that probably didn’t exist as Ohosazaki was, most likely, not on the throne for that many years to begin with, but they still had to make up all that time since they were condensing the entire 3rd and 4th centuries into only three reigns.
Now in the account of that year we are told that the grandson of the King of Baekje was rather disrespectful towards the Wa envoy, Ki no Tsuno no Sukune, and he was delivered up to So-tsu-hiko to be brought back to Yamato as a form of punishment.
Again, this story has some eerie parallels with another.
There was another act of disrespect from Baekje during Homuda Wake’s reign, where Ki no Tsuno was also sent to the Baekje court to handle the matter. In that case it was king Jinsa of Baekje, whereas the later story focused on a different king, but there are enough similarities to make you wonder if they aren’t just different stories of the same event. So this could be taking place any time around the end of the fourth or first quarter of the 5th century.
And where this intersects with us is that, in the later telling, So-tsu-hiko appears to have been on hand at the Baekje court, or at least in close enough proximity that he could come and take charge of the young princeling and escort him across the straits to Yamato, where he was basically kept as a hostage as penance for his insulting behavior.
Thus, once again we see So-tsu-hiko in a role of essentially escort. Whether it was the young Baekje prince being sent to Yamato as a punishment, or envoys like Yutsuki being brought to pay tribute, So-tsu-hiko was the one who was helping them from the peninsula to the archipelago, and facilitating their journey across the ocean.
Now I’ve tried to save the best for last. It is, in my opinion, the most dramatic account that So-tsu-hiko is involved with, and that is the escape of Prince Misaheun of Silla from the Yamato court.
Now back in Episode 45 we mentioned that Prince Misaheun was sent to the Wa in the year 402, by the continental reckoning, which was also during the events inscribed on the Gwangaetto Stele. Silla claims he went as a peaceful envoy, but the Wa held onto him as a hostage, refusing to let him return home. It is a tale that is found not only in the Samguk Sagi, which says he was sent by his uncle, King Silseong, but it is also found in the more fantastical accounts of the Samguk Yusa, where blame for his departure was put on King Naemul. I tend to lean towards the Samguk Yusa story on this one, given a variety of factors. The Nihon Shoki, as usual, plays fast and loose with dates, and without going into too much details, let’s just say the Japanese chroniclers put this story during Okinaga Tarashi Hime’s reign because it fit right into the stories of various raids and military exploits that they were lumping together. Regardless, Prince Misaheun becoming a hostage of the Wa was a big deal, no matter when it happened. Although, had King Silseong had his way, it likely would have become a non-issue altogether.
We’ve already talked about how King Silseong came to the throne of Silla, having spent ten years as a hostage in the Goguryeo court before succeeding his brother, King Naemul, Misaheun’s father. Upon coming to the throne, he almost immediately sent Misaheun as a hostage to the Wa—though perhaps that had already happened during the Wa invasion mentioned on the stele during his brother’s reign. Ten years after taking the throne, Silseong would send another of his nephews, Prince Bokho, to the Goguyreo court, to be a hostage there, much as Silseong himself had been. You can see in both of these examples a trend: Silseong wass getting his brother’s children, future rivals for the throne, out of the way.
And sure enough, only five years later, Silseong was starting to worry. He had taken the throne in the first place under the pretense that none of his brother’s heirs were old enough at the time, but now his eldest nephew, the eldest, Nulchi, was getting on in years. Though Nulchi was married to Silseong’s own daughter—proving that it wasn’t just the Wa who liked to keep it in the family, so to speak—about fifteen or sixteen years into his reign, Silseonghe decided that he would do something about Prince Nulchi—permanently. The stories claim that he hired a man from Goguryeo—an outsider, an one whom he probably had contacted through his network within the Goguryeo court. He hired this ancient hitman to kill Prince Nulchi, and arranged for the two of them to meet on the road.
As you might guess, things didn’t go according to plan. Apparently the hired sword had a soul, and when he saw Nulchi on the road he was struck by his appearance—the elegant air of a prince of the blood. Rather than kill the Prince, the would-be assassin told him how he had been hired by his uncle, the king, to kill him, and then he returned to Goguryeo. Nulchi was incensed, and rightly so. Taking matters into his own hands the Silla annals tell us that he found his uncle, King Silseong, and killed him and took the throne for himself. The Samguk Yusa gives slightly different details than the Samguk Sagi, claiming that it was group of soldiers that were sent after Nulchi, and that when they met him they switched sides and killed King Silseong instead, installing Nulchi on the throne.
Once he was on the throne, King Nulchi immediately decided to get the gang back together, and he started looking for a way to bring his two brothers back to Silla. Into this stepped a man of Silla known as Pak Jesang. Much like Takechi no Sukune and Katsuragi no So-tsu-hiko, Pak Jesang is one of those fascinating characters who lives in the margins of the stories of the rulers of these ancient countries. Much of what we know about him comes from this story – which, according to Samguk Sagi, along with the Dongguk Tonggam, took place around 418, while the Samguk Yusa gives the date as 426, and most of the details come from the Samguk Yusa and the Nihon Shoki, with some corroboration coming from Aston’s notes on the Tonggam.
Now Nulchi was grieving for his brothers. Neither Goguryeo nor Yamato were ready to just give up their royal hostages, and so Silla needed a wise and brave man to help them hatch a plan. They found such a man in Pak Jesang, the form of the magistrate of Sapna county, and his name was Pak Jesang. Pak gladly accepted the task from his king, and after taking his leave of the court he disguised himself and headed north, to Goguryeo, to the capital at Gungnae—modern Ji’an, where Gwangaetto the Great was buried. There he found out where Prince Bokho – the Goguryeo hostage – was staying, and found a time to talk with him in secret.
Here it may be helpful to understand that being a royal hostage wasn’t quite the same as being a prisoner. Though the prince was unable to leave, it is quite likely that he was being kept in a manner befitting his station, and he would regularly attend the King’s court. He had the opportunity to meet with the members of the court and the people around him and get to know them. He just wasn’t allowed to leave.
Unfortunately, the actual escape from Gungnae—which only sounds like a Snake Plissken flick—isn’t recorded in any great detail. What we do know is that Pak Jesang had a plan, but that plan apparently consisted of the Prince pretending to be sick for a few days, and then finally running off to meet at Koseong, on the coast, where Pak Jesang would have a getaway boat ready. Seems easy enough… except when you realize that the coast would have been well over 300 kilometers away. I hope he had a horse.
Regardless, it seems to have worked, in part because of the good friends that Prince Bokho had made, particularly amongst the guards. When they king found out he ordered his guards to chase him down, but they used headless arrows when they fired at him, and deliberately missed, since he had been such a good friend to all of them—or so the stories go.
When Prince Bokho made it back to Silla, his brother, King Nulchi, was overjoyed, but there was still one more prisoner left—Misaheun, hostage of the Wa. Pak Jesang left on that voyage so quickly he didn’t even stop to say goodbye to his wife, who ran after him, only to see his ship already departing the shore.
Now when Jesang made it to the islands of the Wa where they were holding Prince Misaheun hostage, here’s where we get the Japanese Chroniclers’ perspective on things as well. The Chronicles claim that Silla sent three envoys as part of a tribute mission, none of whom had names resembling Pak Jesang. In the Samguk Yusa we are told that Pak made it to the Wa court by claiming that he was running away from Silla, since the King there had killed his father and brothers without a legitimate reason. Apparently this was believable, and the Wa ruler provided him a place to stay.
As he was staying there, he made friends with Prince Misaheun, and the two of them began heading down to the seashore and bringing back their catch each morning to the Wa sovereign. They kept this up until one day, the fog rolled in, and Pak Jesang saw their chance. He had the Prince taken away by a Silla boatman, and then he went back to the Prince’s house to buy some time. When the Wa came looking for Misaheun to check on him, Pak Jesang told them that he was feeling tired from hunting the previous day, so he was resting. They came again at noon to ask after him, and by then they discovered that Prince Misaheun had fled.
The ruler of the Wa was wroth and ordered his men to go in pursuit, but it was to no avail—the Prince was long gone. Returning back to the court he sought out Pak Jesang and poured out his rage on him, since he had claimed to become a vassal of the Wa king. Pak Jesang, however, now defiantly claimed that he was a man of Silla, through and through, and even as they tortured him, standing him up on a red hot iron, he would not say anything but that he was a vassal of the King of Silla. Finally, realizing they would get nothing out of him, they hung Pak Jesang on Kishima—Ki island.
The story in the Nihon Shoki is similar, but definitely without the pro-Silla angle to it. There, Prince Misaheun beseeches the sovereign to let him go, claiming that the envoys told him that since he’d been away for so long, the King of Silla had confiscated his wife and family and had them enslaved. He asked to go back to Silla to find out if this was true.
The sovereign gave him leave to go, and here is where our friend, Katsuragi So-tsu-hiko, re-enters the narrative. As we already demonstrated, he was the go-to guy for people traveling from or to Yamato. Together they all reached Tsushima together—So-tsu-hiko, Prince Misaheun, and the three Silla envoys, along with whatever sailors and soldiers were sent along as well. They then stayed the night at the harbour of Sabi no Umi.
It was here that the envoys found the chance they had been waiting for. They put Prince Misaheun on a boat that they had arranged to meet them and they sent him back to Silla. In his place, they created a dummy made of straw, which they put in Misaheun’s berth on the ship, and made it seem like he was ill. So-tsu-hiko was worried about his health, however, and sent men to check on him, and help nurse him back to health, but of course, they discovered the ruse.
Angry and upset at being deceived, So-tsu-hiko had the three envoys placed in a cage and then burned them all alive. He then proceeded on with his ship and his men and attacked Silla, taking the castle of Chora, and capturing and enslaving numerous people whom he brought back to Yamato. These were the ancestors of several villages and families. He never did catch up with Misaheun, however, who made it safely back home.
There is one more telling, somewhere in between these two, which comes from the Dongguk Tonggam, and it is provided by Aston in his footnotes to the Nihon Shoki. As with the Samguk Yusa, it claims that Pak Jesang was the one who went to rescue Misaheun, but in this story he went to the trouble of actually having his own family and that of Prince Misaheun imprisoned so that when the Wa checked his story they would see it was true. Indeed, the Wa believed that both Misaheun and Pak Jesang were rebels, and so when they decided to send an army to attack Silla, they enlisted both of them as guides. The Wa generals were plotting each day on how to get in and take back the families of Prince Misaheun and Pak Jesang, but meanwhile, the Prince and Jesang were spending a little time each day in a separate boat, fishing, where they could discuss things.
One day, everything being arranged, when they went out on their excursion, Pak Jesang had Prince Misaheun taken in another boat back to Silla, while he stayed behind. He stayed out as long as he could, all by himself in the boat, until he was sure Misaheun was far away.
As soon as the Wa learned that Misaheun had escaped, they bound Pak Jesang and attempted to pursue Prince MIsaheun, but mist and darkness meant that they could not catch up. The lord of the Wa was enraged and threw Pak JChesang into prison. He interrogated him, asking him why he would help Prince Misaheun to escape, and, as in the Samguk Yusa, Pak Jesang simply stated that he was a vassal of the King of Silla. They tortured him numerous times, but he would not stray from his story. Finally, he was burned to death.
Though slightly different, we can see here three stories that are clearly about the same events. The actual names are a bit different, due to the problems of transliteration and even changes in the languages over time, though I have tried to standardize them here. Still, there are enough similarities that we can make out the general picture.
Now there is one more reference to So-tsu-hiko that I want to bring up, and that comes from the Man’yoshu. I can’t recall if we’ve talked about this, but the Man’yoshu is the oldest anthology of native Japanese poetry. While, yes, many poems exist in the chronicles, the Man’yoshu was written specifically for poetry, and it not only contains many poems that are said to be much older than the work itself, which was compiled around the same time as the Chronicles, in the 8th century, but it specifically made an effort to translate the sounds of Japanese, using Chinese characters.
Anyway, that work deserves an episode of its own, but for now I want to talk about just one poem that is found in that work, and it goes something like this:
Katsuraki no So-tsu-hiko ma-yumi araki ni mo;
Tanome ya kimi ga wa ga na norikenu
I’m not sure I can quite do this poem justice from a translation standpoint, but based on what others have said, it appears to be equating the strong, unfinished wood bow of Katsuraki no So-tsu-hiko with the act of telling someone—or possibly asking for—a woman’s name. This was a rather intimate act, as most women’s names were private, and typically only known to the family and to a prospective husband.
Because of the subject matter and the fact that it references So-tsu-hiko, some have attributed this poem to So-tsu-hiko’s daughter, Iwa no Hime. Of course, authorship is rather difficult to truly ascertain, but it does at least tell us that So-tsu-hiko was well enough known that his name appears in yet another source, even if just a fleeting reference.
We also can get a sense that he was more than just an escort. The reference to his bow being made of raw wood certainly suggests that people assumed he had a warrior’s aspect, and who knows what stories were being told that just aren’t around anymore?
Whatever else may have been floating around out there about So-tsu-hiko, this is what we have. We don’t even have a good story about his death, beyond that one which claims he killed himself because he couldn’t come back to the court of Okinaga Tarashi Hime, but we already covered how he was apparently active after her, though of course, who can really be sure of any of these things, particularly if the reigns overlapped in some fashion, as opposed to the strictly serial pattern of inheritance that the Chronicles put forth?
We do have a possible candidate for So-tsu-hiko’s final resting place, though even that is suspect. There is nothing mentioned, of course, in th e Chronicles, but there are some traditions claiming that he is buried at Muromiyayama Kofun, in Gose City. Of course this might be a bit awkward, as that is also said to be the burial place of Takechi no Sukune, and we covered it last episode. I doubt both of them are buried there, and it is just as likely that it is neither of them, but it’s interesting that both of these “recurring characters” in the Chronicles have these parallels in death as well as in life..
So that’s the story of Katsuraki no So-tsu-hiko. I hope you enjoyed it. Next episode we’ll continue, and hopefully wrap up the life of Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, and maybe even get into the cult

References

Ō, Yasumaro, & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
Kim, P., & Shultz, E. J. (2013). The 'Silla annals' of the 'Samguk Sagi'. Gyeonggi-do: Academy of Korean Studies Press.
太田蓉子. (2020)「葛城」を詠んだ万葉の歌. http://www.baika.ac.jp/~ichinose/o/20211125ota.pdf
Bentley, John. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: a New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. ISBN-90-04-152253
Best, J. (2006). A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi. Cambridge (Massachusetts); London: Harvard University Asia Center. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1tg5q8p
Iryŏn, ., Ha, T. H., & Mintz, G. K. (2004). Samguk yusa: Legends and history of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea. Seoul: Yonsei University Press
Chamberlain, B. H. (1981). The Kojiki: Records of ancient matters. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN4-8053-0794-3
Kiley, C. (1973). State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato. The Journal of Asian Studies, 33(1), 25-49. doi: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

Episode 43: Finally, Some Real History (and Some Horses Too)

June 16, 2021 Joshua Badgley

Crude image of what appears to be a man riding a horse inscribed on a 5th century cylindrical haniwa. From the Chikatsu Asuka Museum while on loan to the Tokyo Museum for the Fall 2014 exhibition 「西日本の埴輪－畿内・大王陵古墳の周辺」. Photo by author.

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This episode we’ll talk about the history of, well, history. Homuda wake is seen as a pivotal figure in many ways, and stands at the head of what is thought to be by some a completely new dynasty. This episode we get into some of that, but we also talk about the actual start of historical record-keeping with the coming of writing to the court, including a court record keeper. Of course, that doesn’t entirely mean that just because they started writing things down everything we have from here on out is a 100% accurate representation of the facts.

One of the things that we don’t exactly know is just when this was happening. Despite the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki being largely in agreement on most of the details, they place the advent of writing at two different points in the late 4th century. The Kojiki claims that the Baekje king at this time was our good friend Chogo, while the Nihon Shoki claims that it was Asin. King Chogo’s reign ended with his death in 375 CE and King Asin reigned from about 392-405, so there is a bit of a gap. It is quite possible that it was even a different sovereign altogether. In the case of the Kojiki, they may have simply been attributing it to the most notable sovereign, the one who first opened relations with Yamato, and who had just started a written record for Baekje through Gao Xing, while in the Nihon Shoki they don’t expressly name a sovereign so much as date this whole thing to a year that, when corrected, would line up with the dates of King Asin. One possible hint in all of this is the mention, in the Nihon Shoki, of Areda Wake as the lead envoy to request Wang’in’s presence. Areda Wake, you may recall from last episode, was one of the generals sent to the peninsula during the Yamato-Baekje campaigns in 369. Either way, they both agree that this was during Homuda Wake’s reign, whenever that actually was and we can probably assume that was some time between the 370s and 405, during which time there was plenty of contact between the archipelago and the peninsula.

The other big thing we talk about in this episode is the advent of horses.

We talk about what a big deal the horse is in the episode, and what we find in the 5th century tombs, so here is a gallery of just a few of the horse items that we find, from haniwa to actual tack.

Haniwa horse

An example of a horse from about the 6th century. Much of the tack shown is similar to earlier examples.

Iron banner holder

An iron banner holder meant to fit to the back of a saddle, from the 5th or 6th century in Japan. Compare to the similar Korean example.

Korean banner holder

A Korean horse banner holder. Note the similarities with the same version from the archipelago. There was a clear link between the islands and the continent at this early date, though later they would diverge.

Horse bits

Horse bits from the 5th through 6th centuries found in kofun on the archipelago

One more thing—we previously mentioned that Homuda Wake’s name seems to come from something that was later referred to as a “tomo”. That appears to be this item shown on this 6th century haniwa warrior. There are also examples that we have in the Shōsōin repository from the 8th century. Those are made of a stuffed leather. It is unclear to me exactly how they were used—they seem extremely bulky, and they aren’t used in any modern tradition that I am aware of. Nonetheless, one could get an idea of how a fatty growth on the arm could be seen as something similar, though I still am not sure about calling them “homuda”.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is episode 43: Finally, Some Real History (and Some Horses Too).
Alright, so I know I keep saying we are almost there. We are almost to real historical stuff. You know, stuff that was written down, so we have some idea that it actually happened and we aren’t just dealing with oral history. And I think we are finally there. Well, sort of. Okay, let me explain.
This episode we are finally talking about Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, the first sovereign traditionally considered truly historical in that it was during his reign that the court started to keep records. Or at least that’s what we are told. You see, we aren’t quite sure because those particular records no longer exist, and where they were incorporated into the Chronicles they aren’t exactly highlighted as such AND there was still plenty of oral history going on at the same time.
You know, let me start back at the beginning. Just know that we are going to talk about several things this episode. Homuda Wake is something of an interesting and pivotal figure in this period, and we’ll talk about why that is, including some talk about the 20th century scholarship about him, and how that has affected our current views of this reign. We’ll also discuss some of the big things that happened during this time—primarily the advent of record-keeping, as I already mentioned, but also the first evidence of horses coming to the archipelago.
But first, let’s recap where we are. Supposedly, we are somewhere at the end of the 4th century. Probably some time after 371—possibly later, though it could be earlier—with the previous sovereign-slash-regent Tarashi Hime’s death tied to that of Queen Himiko, the exact timing is confused, but we are still generally assuming that the dating in the Nihon Shoki is about 120 years or so off of what was actually happening.
Tarashi Hime’s death finally put her son, Homuda Wake, firmly in the driver’s seat. Whether or not he was part of a ruling pair before this, he was certainly the one handling things from here on out. And he was inheriting the throne at a highly dynamic period. While I’m not quite sure there was an archipelago spanning government—local countries were probably still operating under their own systems—the influence of Yamato and the surrounding area, as well as the keyhole tomb culture in general, seem to have gained prominence, and they had relations—friendly and otherwise—with at least two of the more powerful kingdoms on the peninsula, Baekje and Silla.
From here on out, though as I said, we supposedly start to get actual written accounts that were included into the Chronicles, the dates for many things are still quite sus. The Chronicles from this point were probably a combination of information from written sources from the peninsula and the archipelago as well as various oral histories that were handed down separately. We see a lot of poetry, written in a style of Man’yogana, that is using the Sinitic, or Kanji, characters for their sound and very deliberately reproducing the Japanese poetry styles that would become popular later on. We also see various accounts from the continent that may or may not have lined up appropriately with things happening in the archipelago.
Time wise, you have two major reigns coming up—Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, and his son, Oho Sazaki, aka Nintoku Tennou. Once again it is somewhat difficult to tell if they actually reigned separately—heck, some people even claim they may have been the same person! Either way, I suspect both reigns were considerably shorter than they are written, especially when you look at other reigns that are only a handful of years. Remember, the historians needed to “find” a couple of 60 year cycles in all of this, to make the math work out according to plan.
One more thing about this period is that there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between our continental and archipelagic sources. Continental sources talk about the fighting and conflict on the peninsula at this time, while the Japanese chronicles focus on more inward matters. And so while there may be some hints of where the two come together, it isn’t at all clear every time.

So where do we get started? Well, we already know a few things about Homuda Wake. For one thing, he was miraculously carried in his mother’s womb for up to three years, if the Nihon Shoki is to be believed, and his name supposedly comes from a growth on his arm that looked like a “Homuda”, or an archer’s wrist-guard. Of course, he also went up to Kehi, at Tsunoga Bay, and exchanged names with the kami of that area. But beyond that, we know very little.
We know that the Nihon Shoki dating is off, and he probably wasn’t in his 69th year when his mother died and he came to the throne. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we can be sure of.
He does seem to have many wives and a fair number of children, at least according to the stories, though whether they are all his or not we can’t be entirely sure, and the kofun attributed to him, Konda yama Kofun, in modern Ohosaka—which may or may not be his, mind you—is definitely in the kingly category in terms of size.
Perhaps most relevant for us to keep in mind that is that Homuda Wake is is considered by many to be at a turning point, and he is placed at the head of the “Middle Dynasty” or the “Kawachi Dynasty”, a potentially new group of regents, despite the orthodox view of an unbroken lineage. Along with the influx of various technologies from the continent, this makes this a very interesting period. I’ve made mention of this before, here and there, but I would like to talk about what this all means.
The Japanese Imperial Household Agency maintains the orthodox view expressed in the Chronicles that the current emperor can trace an unbroken lineage all the way back to the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Ohokami. That doesn’t mean that every sovereign is necessarily the direct descendant of the previous one—we see brothers and cousins and nephews inheriting the throne, instead—but they are all part of that lineage with a direct tie back to the lineage of the Sun Goddess herself. This is the official line coming out in the 8th century that can be seen in all of the various Chronicles, to include the Kujiki, the Kojiki, and the Nihon Shoki. Even if there are some things that may be fantastical legends, this view holds that the lineage is basically correct, even if some of the details might be a little bit fuzzy.
This orthodox view was largely maintained up through the end of WWII in the early 20th century. There may have been those who questioned parts of the lineage, and even those who considered that many of the details were added or lifespans enhanced in order to extend the lineage back to around 663 BCE, but even though they may have questioned some of it, the orthodox view still held as true that the imperial lineage traced back to Amaterasu Ohokami, at least.
In the early 20th century, a right-wing nationalist fervor overtook Japan, and much of it centered around the concept of Kokutai, the government of the state, based on the idea of a Heavenly-descended Imperial Line. I won’t try to pass myself off as a student of these modern times, but suffice it to say that there was a clear party line on what constituted the Japanese state and the Emperor was at its head. Proponents of this view set themselves up against what they saw as Marxist and left-wing Socialists, whom they believed would destroy the character of the country. In such a heated political climate, discussion of the Imperial lineage became more than just a matter of history.
Enter one Tsuda Soukichi. In the early 1900s he wrote up his belief that much of the lives of the first fourteen sovereigns—so up through and even including Okinaga Tarashi Hime—was fictional. While some of the stories may have come from actual incidents, Tsuda claimed that the overall history was written merely to support the central raison d’etre of the Chronicles—codifying the divine lineage of the Imperial line. For the most part this was an academic discussion and seems to have stayed in academic circles, and I don’t know that he saw his own view as particularly radical, but in 1942 he was actually taken to court for his views, accused of profaning the imperial house. He was actually sentenced to 3 months in prison, but was later pardoned. All because his theories questioned what some considered the foundation of the Imperial Household.
After the war, there was a much greater freedom to investigate the origins of Japan and the Emperor, though the imperial household agency continues to control certain aspects tightly to maintain the dignity of the imperial family. Still, many theories have flourished, often building off of Professor Tsuda’s work.
For example, moving beyond the idea that the first fourteen sovereigns are purely fictional, there is some thought that the earliest sovereigns may have simply been unrelated lords of various areas in and around the Nara basin, though I tend to agree that for those first nine sovereigns there is very little evidence of their existence at all.
Another scholar, Mizuno Yu, who studied at Waseda University around the same time that Tsuda was teaching there would go ahead and divide the sovereigns into three dynasties, suggesting even further that while some of the sovereigns may have existed, they were not actually linked hereditarily. Under Mizuno’s system, the first nine sovereigns were considered completely fictional, while the emperors from Mimaki Iribiko through Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko are considered part of the ancient dynasty, sometimes called the “Miwa” court, due to the location of the court at the foot of Mt. Miwa in the southeast corner of the Nara Basin. The site of this court was attested to in the Nihon Shoki, and of course there were numerous kofun and the holy mountain of Miwa itself, but there was still some doubt about whether there had actually been any kind of a court here until 2009, when an excavation found an extremely large structure, thought to be a palace or ritual center, which dated from about the 3rd century, which would seem to confirm the Chronicle’s account, though the dating was clearly off. This dynasty is sometimes referred to as the “Iri-“ dynasty due to the prevalence of the term in various names. For example, Mimaki IRI-biko and Ikume IRI-biko.
Mizuno also included the Tarashi dynasty in this same general category, although there seems to be more support for the Mimaki and Ikume Iribiko than for the various Tarashi’s, including Oho Tarashi Hiko, Waka Tarashi Hiko, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko, and Okinaga Tarashi Hime. While Mimaki and Ikume are assumed to be actual names, the other rulers of this ancient period seem to be marked with titles, with the exception of the name “Okinaga”, and so there are much greater doubts about their actual existence.
Mizuno’s next dynasty was the Middle dynasty, sometimes called the Kawachi court and that started with our current subject, Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, and continues until the 25th sovereign, wo-Hatsuse no Waka Sazaki no Mikoto, aka Buretsu Tennou. His successor, Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennou, was not directly related to him. In fact, Wohodo’s lineage goes separately back some five generations to our current sovereign, Homuda Wake. From Wohodo to the current Emperor, Mizuno considered that the New Dynasty.
We do know that the center of building for the giant, kingly kofun transitioned around this time from the Nara Basin out to the country of Kawachi, in the area of modern Ohosaka. Large tombs were built in this area until the time of Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennou, in the early 6th century. Together they are known as the Furuichi and Mozu tumulus groups. They are the most dramatic evidence of the court having moved to this area around this time, and it includes the largest of the keyhole shaped tombs, Daisen Kofun. If that name sounds familiar it has been in the news of late as they have allowed some very basic excavations to take place recently on the outside of the tomb as part of the necessary upkeep. This tomb is actually said to belong to Homuda Wake’s successor, and is an indication of the power of the early Kawachi court.
Now here’s the thing about this and Mizuno Yu’s theory: He not only noted that the courts had moved, but he also suggested that these three dynasties weren’t actually related to each other despite what the Chronicles say. Or at least, not significantly. According to Mizuno, the Chroniclers pasted the various dynasties together into a single lineage to support the legitimacy of the current sovereigns in the 8th century, but prior to that, these dynasties may have actually descended from separate groups of local rulers, who may have had varying degrees of control, though generally ruling from the modern Kinai region, around the country of Yamato. The 6th century Wohodo’s own tenuous link to Homuda Wake may be little more than a genealogical fiction designed to support his legitimacy and connect him back to an older dynasty, and likewise the Tarashi lineage may have been little more than a bridge from the Iribikos up to Homuda Wake.

As it stands, there is still plenty of debate and conjecture over Homuda Wake. Some conflate him and his successor, Oho Sazaki, aka Nintoku Tennou, and others would suggest that the events of his mother’s regency were actually his, and that her existence is largely just a correction in the Chronicles for Queen Himiko.
If I were to suggest anything to take a way from this it is to understand that there is a lot of evidence that the story of a single, unbroken, royal lineage is likely a fiction. Rather, there were several different dynasties that supplied sovereigns at different times. We already know that the chronology is demonstrably incorrect, to the point that some would write it off altogether.
So what is it about Homuda Wake’s reign that makes all of this relevant? Why do these theories all seem to come to a head right here?
Well, that probably has to do with one of the more significant events attributed to Homuda Wake’s reign, and although they can’t agree on the exact details, both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki do agree on one thing: This was the first reign whose events were, in some form or fashion, written down. And not only were they written down, but they were written down by the court itself. I can’t stress how important this is to us. Up to this point, our assumption has been that we only had the oral histories to go on, which were then written down at a later point. Now it looks like we have one of the most important events in the history of the archipelago—writing had come to Japan.
This event is recorded in both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki in such a similar manner that it certainly seems that they were pulling from the same source for how it came to be. They do have differences, and I’ll get to that in a second, but for the most part it is the same. So the stories go, the King of Baekje sent a pair of horses, along with an envoy, who is named in both Chronicles as either Ajikki or Achikishi. The horses were stabled on the slopes of Karu, and Ajikki was given charge of their care and feeding—apparently this was a long-term posting for Ajikki.
Now the horses are certainly interesting—this is likely the beginning of a long culture of horse cultivation in the islands, built off of the peninsular traditions—but there was something more interesting to the people of the time and this is that Ajikki had another skill that the court wanted to cultivate beyond his animal husbandry skills. You see, unlike many others in Yamato at that time, Ajikki could read, and because of that, the young Crown Prince asked him to become his tutor, so that the Crown Prince could learn to read the Classics himself.
Now I doubt that writing was completely new to the people of Yamato, but it is unclear just what sort of grasp they had on the skill. After all, this wasn’t just as simple as learning an alphabet and then learning how to write words with those letters. Literary culture in east Asia at this time relied on Sinitic writing—that is to say the ancient literary Chinese. Of course, Sinitic languages are from a completely different linguistic family than Japonic or even Koreanic. Grammar and word order, in particular, are different. Sinitic actually has more in common with Tibetan than with the languages of the Korean peninsula or the Japanese archipelago. So that means that it wasn’t enough to learn individual characters, or logograms, but you had to learn an entirely new language.
Speaking of the logograms, I’d like to touch on one misconception. Many people consider Chinese to be made up of pictograms, where a picture represents a given word. The issue is that Chinese, or Sinitic, characters aren’t actually pictures. There are certainly symbols that represent particular things, like trees or people, and a direct link can be seen between those characters and earlier pictures. However, by the time of the 4th century, the characters had grown much more complex. They contained symbols with meaning, but also symbols that were used more for the sound they made, and still other symbols represented more abstract concepts. Referring to them as logograms better emphasizes their actual use. Each character, often made up of various parts, represents a single word, concept, or morpheme, and are pronounced as a single syllable.
Now there is evidence of writing in the archipelago from an early date. For example, we have inscriptions on bronze mirrors from at least the start of the Kofun period, if not earlier, and of course the seven branched sword, which had come over from Baekje in the latter half of the 4th century. We also have a few examples of what may be writing on pottery, though usually that is just a character here and there. Most of this writing, however, either came from the continent or it was more decorative or even performative—it demonstrated a certain level of culture and sophistication, but it wasn’t necessary for understanding the meaning. It may have also had a kind of magico-symbolic quality. After all, in many places the idea that you can put ideas into sound and then inscribe those thoughts onto things is really remarkable in a way that those of us in the Computer Age might not always consider. I’m reminded of the various written prayers for the Dead included with the mummies of Egypt, as well as the Tibetan prayer wheels, where the written words stand in for the mantras and prayers of those who turn them round.
But in the 4th century, Yamato was prepared to take the next step. It was more than just performative—this was also basically a request to learn more about the classics of continental literature, such as Confucius and Laozi. Homuda Wake asked Ajikki if there was any one who could teach him and his court how to read the Classics as well. Ajikki, though literate himself, demurred and recommended another Baekje scholar known variously as Wanikishi or perhaps Wang’in.
We don’t know much about Wang’in. The name certainly strikes me as Sinic, though that could just be an artifact of how the name has come down to us. Most likely, if he wasn’t an immigrant to Baekje from the continent, he may have been a descendant of the administrators who had served the Han commanderies in the Korean Peninsula. Either way, he knew the art of writing and could teach it, and so Homuda Wake sent a request to Baekje to send Wang’in over.
With his arrival at the court, Wang’in not only started to teach writing to others, but he also started to chronicle the history of the court—or so we are told. There is no extant evidence of his chronicle, and nothing that I have seen to indicate whether a particular event came from his records or from oral history, which no doubt continued as another source of lore and memory. I mean, it wasn’t like people just stopped telling stories, and even in the reign of Oama in the 8th century the court was still commissioning storytellers to recount history at court.
Since there were records being kept and written down, many consider Homuda Wake to be the first truly historical sovereign, even if we aren’t sure how much of that history is accurate. The point is that for the first time the Yamato court was starting to write out its own records and keep its own annals.
In fact, even the character of the Chronicles themselves, written in the 8th century, would still have elements that link their literary tradition to that of Baekje, and various scholars have drawn a connection between the formulation of the Baekje Annals, as passed down in the Samguk Sagi and elsewhere, and the formulation of Japan’s own chronicles.
Beyond just keeping a record of things, though, writing would also bring other benefits to the archipelago. For one thing, once literacy could be spread, it would increase communication. No longer would you have to rely on the memory of a messenger to relay information, but rules, laws, and edicts could be written down and communicated directly. Likewise, information from the provinces could easily be sent back to the capital. In this way, it was a technological advancement for the state itself, and may have helped to solidify the archipelago even further along its march to status as a unified kingdom.
On top of that, it opened the doors to a host of continental ideas and philosophy. While there is evidence of ideas that entered previously through contact with the continent, being able to read and write would open up so much more to consider. Of course, this would also bring some amount of turmoil, as the indigenous ideas and philosophy that had grown up on the archipelago came into potential conflict with ideas and philosophies from the continent—but that is all still a ways out at this point.
Of course, all of this talk about writing—which is a huge step, by the way, don’t get me wrong—and we didn’t even touch on the other big thing that happened. In fact, it almost got swept aside for all of the literary geekiness. The second big thing that happened in this exchange was that this is the first recorded instance of Japan getting horses.
I know we’ve mentioned this in past episodes. In the discussion of Yamato Takeru, for instance, they talk about how the bridges and mountain pathways through the Japan Alps were often so narrow that a horse wouldn’t be able to make it, but that was before we have evidence of horses or of horsemanship on the archipelago. Up to this point we had seen domestication of some animals, including pigs, but there was scant evidence of horses. There is perhaps evidence of some horse remains from before the Kofun period, but what I’ve seen suggests that there is still a lot of doubt over those finds. And most of the time travel has been via boat, using the sea lanes to cross from one point of the land to another. And horses weren’t exactly needed for rice cultivation—cattle are actually much more useful in that capacity.
But here we have at least two horses given by Baekje and maintained in stables of some sort. The fact that Ajikki, the envoy who brought them, was also there to see to their care and feeding suggests that there weren’t people in the archipelago who already had the knowledge and skills required for horse husbandry.
As a gift from Baekje, this seems to have been not uncommon. Baekje is also recorded as providing a gift of horses to Silla in the Samguk Sagi. Furthermore, if the nobility of Baekje really did descend from the Buyeo people then it was likely that horse culture was a big part of their ethnic identity, and so I have no reason not to believe that horses would have been a suitable and not uncommon gift to other state leaders.
By the way, there is another theory of how horses came to the islands. This theory, known as the “Horse-Rider Theory” is one we’ve touched on before. It claims that the horses came with an invasion force from the Peninsula—likely led by the Buyeo descended nobility of Baekje, who then put their own descendant, Homuda Wake, on the throne. I’ve already mentioned that this theory is accepted about as well as the second Highlander movie, at least these days, but you still see it pop up now and again, and since we already talked about Tsuda and Mizuno we may as well touch on this as well, since it was formulated around the same time and derived from some of the same scholarly lines of questioning.
You see, following on behind Tsuda Soukichi’s work describing many of the earlier sovereigns in the Chronicles as fictional, and while Mizuno Yu was still laying out his ideas for breaking the royal lineage into separate dynasties, another professor, Egami Namio, published his theory, known as “The Horse-Rider Theory” that similarly questioned the lineage as written, though it had a much more radical concept.
Now, I don’t really want to get too much into the politics in Japan post World War II, but there was something of an explosion of ideas as previously taboo areas of discussion were suddenly opened up for debate. There had also been a lot of archaeological research being carried out during the occupation of the peninsula. Egami Namio’s theory certainly combines both of these, I’d say.
Professor Egami looked at the assembly of horse equipment and armor that seems to typify burials from the 5th century onward, which has many ties with the material culture of the peninsula, and he proposed that there must have been some event to create such a rapid change. Why would these assemblages suddenly show up in kofun from this date onward? To add to that, you have several narratives of ancient sovereigns marching armed forces in from the west, from Kyushu along the Inland Sea Route. First, there is Iware Biko’s march east when he conquered the Yamato basin, and then Okinaga Tarashi Hime traveling east and defeating the forces of Princes Kakosaka and Oshikuma to put her son, Homuda Wake, on the throne. On top of that were the connections between Okinaga Tarashi Hime and Homuda Wake with Kehi and the so-called Silla prince, also known as the kami Ame no Hiboko. Professor Egami suggested that these were all stories of conquest from the Korean Peninsula, suggesting that the Buyeo nobility of Baekje were the actual founders of the Middle Dynasty. According to this theory, the lack of horses in the archipelago made them an easy target for the horse-riding warriors from the peninsula.
Archaeologists have since shown that the increase in horse assemblages in the archipelago can be explained through the natural acquisition of horses from the continent, and it doesn’t otherwise demonstrate a wholesale replacement of local material culture that would be expected with an invasion as suggested.
It should probably come as no surprise that certain Korean scholars have latched on to this idea, and though it has largely been disproven, it still comes up now and again.
Also, even though we don’t see a large invasion from the peninsula, we do see a number of artifacts and the Chronicles definitely seem to demonstrate more and more people from Baekje, Silla, and Kara arriving—willingly or not—in the archipelago. It is also quite possible that Homuda Wake’s own lineage included peninsular nobility—perhaps nobility that was erased in favor of a connection to the previous Iri- dynasty.
Now however they first came to the archipelago, the usefulness of the horse was quickly recognized and while the horse-rider invasion theory of Egami Namio may go a bit too far, there certainly was an increase in horse trappings found in Kofun era tumuli from the 5th century onwards, as well as more armor and weapons. Furthermore, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that much of what we find in the tombs matches up with continental fashion and technology, right down to the banner pole holders that would attach to the rear of the saddles. It is quite clear that it wasn’t simply horses that were brought over, but the material culture of equestrianism as well.
Of course, Japan isn’t exactly built for horses. 70% of the archipelago is made up of forested, mountainous terrain—hardly the flat plains of the steppes where Eurasian horse-riding had begun. Much of the flat land that they did have was given over to agriculture in one way or another, and you didn’t exactly want horses stomping on all of the young rice plants, did you?
And yet the horse would come to feature prominently in Japan. Even in the Age of the Gods, on the plain of Takama no Hara, you may recall that it was a colt, a young horse, that Susanowo had flayed and sent flying through the roof of Amaterasu’s weaving hall. Later, various areas would become known for their horses, and in the Kantou region the marshy islands would actually provide natural corrals where they could raise horses of exceptional quality. The use of the horse and the bow, perhaps influenced by further immigrations from the Eurasian continent, would form the basis of the early warriors who would become known as the samurai. Despite a modern view of the samurai as a warrior with a sword, the original connotation was a that of Kyuba-no-Michi: The way of the horse and bow. Even today, you can still witness the art of yabusame, or horsed archery, at various festivals around Japan.
These horses, though, were not, perhaps, the horses you might be thinking of. Many people today think of a horse and imagine something like a thoroughbred—tall and fast. In truth, the horses of Korea an Japan, at least before modern times, were more closely related to their ancestors on the Mongolian steps, and were probably closer to what we would classify as a pony, though that distinction—pony v. horse—is much more of a European classification rather than an Asian one. In Japan, they were all classified as Ma or Uma—horse.
These early breeds were probably shorter and stockier than you might otherwise imagine. The truth is, it is hard to find these ancient breeds today, and most films and even practitioners of traditional arts like Yabusame tend to use more modern breeds. But the shorter and stockier breeds had several advantages.
For one, they tended to be stronger and have greater endurance. Shorter legs would also make them better at navigating the mountain trails and similarly variable terrain. I’ve even heard it said that their gait would also provide a smoother platform, more suitable to a horseback archery, though I don’t have personal experience to confirm.
Either way, the horse would be a huge benefit to the state of Yamato. Not only would it provide a new military tool and advantage in battle, but it also allowed for faster communication. Sure, the boats they used were great for getting around via the water, but horses were much faster on land. Horses could travel 50 to 80 miles in a day. While there are certainly people who can walk 40 miles a day and even runners who have run much more—the world record is over 150 miles in a day—most people are probably in the range of about 20-30 miles in an 8 hour period. Furthermore, by taking a horse, you arrive rested, and with multiple horses you can do even more. This would have been a huge benefit in connecting up the various parts of Japan—at least across the larger islands of Honshu and Kyushu, and even Shikoku.
So there you have it. We’ll go into more details over the next few episodes, but if I were to capture the highlights of Homuda Wake’s reign, I’d say this is it. First off, he’s a pivotal figure in the dynastic succession, and although there were some 10 other sovereigns after him, the new dynasty after that would be linked not to any of his descendants, but rather all the way back to Homuda Wake himself, which does strengthen the case that they may have been a new dynasty altogether. Furthermore, this period in Japanese history would see the advent of writing as well as the horse, two technical innovations that would prove hugely important to the development of Yamato as a whole.
In the next few episodes we’ll deal with some of the other events in the Chronicles, as well as some of the events not covered there, such as the those inscribed on the famous Gwangaetto Stele, a fascinating and, as per usual, controversial source of information.
So, until next time, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate through our KoFi site, kofi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the link over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Questions or comments? Feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.
That’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Ō, Yasumaro, & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
Kim, P., Shultz, E. J., Kang, H. H. W., & Han'guk Chŏngsin Munhwa Yŏn'guwŏn. (2012). The Koguryo annals of the Samguk sagi. Seongnam-si, Korea: Academy of Korean Studies Press.
Bentley, John. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: a New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. ISBN-90-04-152253
Best, J. (2006). A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi. Cambridge (Massachusetts); London: Harvard University Asia Center. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1tg5q8p
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

Episode 41: Trouble on the Homefront

May 16, 2021 Joshua Badgley

Jingū and Takechi no Sukune, armored up for battle. Of course, in this Edo period depiction, they are anachronistically in armor that is many centuries out of date, but it still depicts them as warriors.

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This episode we take a look at what happened after Tarashi Hime returned from Korea, and the story of how she secured the throne for her infant son. This episode does have a lot of names in it, admittedly, so we’ll try to go through the who’s who for you.

Okinaga Tarashi Hime

We should be well acquainted with our main protagonist by this point. Her father is said to have been Okinaga no Sukune, grandson of Hiko Imasu, who was a half-brother to the tenth sovereign and August Founder, Mimaki Iribiko. Both Hiko Imasu and Mimaki Iribiko (Sujin Tennō) claimed descent from Waka Yamato Neko Hiko Oho Hihi, aka (Kaika Tennō). Meanwhile, on her mother’s side she claimed descent through Kadzuraki no Takanuka Hime, a descendant of the Tajima line from Ame no Hiboko. Ame no Hiboko is said to have been a Silla prince who came over back around the time of Mimaki Iribiko, and the Kojiki specifically waits until they are telling the story of Homuda Wake, Tarashi Hime’s son, before they tell his story, which would seem to indicate that it was really more about the connections with his story then about Ame no Hiboko himself. Below, I’ve tried to give you a rough breakdown of the generations, with the paternal line on top and the maternal line down below:

LINEAGE OF Okinaga Tarashi Hime:
- Yamato Neko Hiko Oho Hihi + Oke tsu Hime
  - Hiko Imasu + Woke tsu Hime
    - Yamashiro no Oho Tsutsuki no Mawaka + Tanba no Ajisawa Bime
      - Kanime Ikazuchi + Takaki Hime
        Okinaga no Sukune
        Okinaga Tarashi Hime
        Kadzuraki no Takanuka Hime
      - Tajima Hitaka + Yuradomi
    - Tajima Hinaraki
  - Tajima Hine
- Tajima Morosuke
Ame no Hiboko + Maetsumi

Homuda Wake

Homuda Wake would eventually be the next sovereign. His birth is considered rather miraculous, as he was conceived before his father, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko, died, but he wasn’t born until after Okinaga Tarashi Hime returned from her campaign in Korea. By the count in the Nihon Shoki that would seem to be three years, which is highly unlikely. A quick Internet search turns up the pregnancy of Beulah Hunter, which went 375 days, while in 2016 a woman claimed to be pregnant for 17 months, though it seems that it could not be fully verified and some doctors had their doubts. So it is possible that Homuda Wake was abnormally long in the womb, and even that he was born after Tarashi Hime went to Silla and back, but it likely wasn’t a full thirty six months.

Quite notably, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko doesn’t seem to have ever known his son. He passed away before the kami were able to break the news to Tarashi Hime that she was pregnant. This means that he was never officially appointed as the Crown Prince and heir to the throne—in fact, all we really have is the vision of the kami that said he would be the ruler.

Takechi no Sukune

AKA Take-Uchi no Sukune, Takeshi-Uchi no Sukune, Take-no-Uchi no Sukune, and Uchi no Ason. We’ve talked about him before, of course. The “Take” in his name would seem to be the same as in Yamato Takeru—that is, “Brave”—which seems appropriate given his involvement . In the latter name, used by Kuma no Kori in his poem, Takechi no Sukune is given the title of Asomi, or Ason. This is a title that has roots in the Korean courts, and was likely imported at a later time, but its use here, as we are seeing more and more connection with the peninsula, is interesting, to say the least.

Ō Naka tsu Hime

Another wife of Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko, the 14th sovereign (aka Chūai Tennō). She was the mother of the princes Kakosaka Hiko and Oshikuma. Her father was Hikobito no Ohine (aka Hiko Hito no Ohoye), and his parents were the 12th sovereign, Oho Tarashi Hiko and Inabi no Waka Iratsume. So she had essentially married her cousin. Several things that strike me about her and this lineage. First, she seems firmly placed in the context of the Tarashi dynasty. On top of this, her name, along with that of her husband, seems to form a Hiko Hime pair. The explanation of “Naka” is given that Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko was the middle of three brothers. Is that the same story for his wife? Or was there some place called Naka? It is unclear. But it bolsters an idea that perhaps Kakosaka Hiko and Oshikuma had a more legitimate claim than the Chronicles make it out to seem.

Prince Kakosaka Hiko

AKA Kagosaka. His name looks suspiciously like a title—the Lord/Prince of Kako Hill. According to the Chronicles, he is said to have been the eldest son of the 14th sovereign, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko and Oho Naka tsu Hime.

Prince Oshikuma

The younger brother of Kakosaka Hiko. Perhaps. That’s what the Chronicles say, at least. I only wonder about this because of the name element “kuma”. Typically assumed to be “bear” there certainly are a lot of “kuma” names that show up in the Chronicles for these stories. Most notably, there was the campaign against the Kumaso—probably the Kuma and So. And then we have people in Kyushu like Kumawani and Kumawashi. Then there is Oshikuma, and on the other side there is Take Furukuma. There is even a Kuma no Kori. What it actually means I don’t know that I could say, but the prevalence of this name element certainly seems odd, and with the seeming abandonment of the Miwa area, I wonder if it indicates other groups that were coming to power, bringing new names and traditions with them. Or it could just be that the name element “kuma” became popular around this time. Who knows?

Kurami Wake and Isachi no Sukune

These are the generals who came with the soldiers from the east. We don’t have a lot of information about them, but they seem to have been major players. “Wake” indicates a title—the Chronicles claim it means that they are a royal prince that was separated (“wake”) from the royal lineage. There is also evidence that it may have just been a noble title at the time, so this could just be something like the Lord of Kurami. His partner in all of this, Isachi no Sukune, carries the title of Sukune, just like the once and future prime minister, Takechi no Sukune. Of course, we know that Sukune is a high ranking title in the court—look at Takechi no Sukune. So these are individuals of some status, lending credence to the idea that Kakosaka Hiko and Oshikuma had some powerful backers.

Take Furukuma

Tarashi Hime’s main general during the conflict. Sometimes his role is usurped in the Chronicles by Takechi no Sukune, but that may just be a case of Takechi being a more memorable figure in general. This is one problem with things like oral history, where it is easy for stories to accrue to the more famous individual, while others become forgotten. He is said to have been an ancestor of the Wani no Omi, a rather powerful family whom we’ve already seen pop up here and there throughout the stories.

Kuma no Kori

As far as we can tell, this was just a soldier in Oshikuma’s forces who composed a song that mocked Takechi no Sukune, or, as the song calls him, Uchi no Ason. Other than showing the importance of verse to the early Japanese, we also get a glimpse at a possible seperate mode of address for Takechi no Sukune. I would also note that hwere we have one more person with the name “kuma”

Izasa Wake no Ōkami

THis is the name given for the god of Kehi that wants to exchange names with the young prince Homuda Wake. In the end he is also known as Mike tsu Ōkami, because of the way he helped out with the offering for the ritual.

Tarashi Hime's Campaign:

Map of the likely route of the campaign, based on the sources, as well as the location of Kehi, also mentioned in this episode. Click to enlarge. Original map by Ash_Crow, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by author.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is Episode 41: Trouble On the Home Front
Now, before we get started, just a quick shout-out to Steve-O for donating to support the show. If you’d like to join him and just help us keep this thing going, we always appreciate any donations at kofi.com/sengokudaimyo. That’s ko(dash)fi.com/sengokudaimyo.
So, from the last episode, we’ve been talking about Okinaga Tarashi Hime, aka Jinguu, and her supposedly successful assault on the Korean peninsula. Of course, as we covered, and despite what the Chronicles would have us believe, this likely wasn’t the first time that warriors from the archipelago had gathered in boats and made the journey across the straits. In fact, if anything, Jinguu’s invasion may have been a story that encompassed numerous different assaults and generalized them into a single campaign. And it really is unlikely that the outcome of the raid was that anyone on the peninsula felt subjugated to Yamato, though there certainly may have been some payments made to hopefully prevent future raids.
“Hey Silla—those are some nice villages you have there. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to them.”
Either way, though, that is all only the beginning of Okinaga Tarashi Hime’s story in the Chronicles, and though they don’t exactly count her as a sovereign—the Nihon Shoki continues to refer to her by her title as wife of the sovereign and regent—one has to wonder at the fact that she gets to have her own book in the Chronicles. Not even Yamato Takeru can make that claim, and he was supposedly the one whose lineage would rule the archipelago.
I’ll drop a quick note here that the fact that she isn’t counted as a sovereign is not just something that we talk about today. Kitabatake Chikafusa, writing his own history in the 14th century, known as the Jinnou Shoutouki, gives Tarashi Hime her due and treats her with full honors, claiming she was actually the 15th sovereign, not just a regent. On top of that, there are many other records that accord her with titles, often anachronistic, that are otherwise only used for the other sovereigns of Japan. So even though the Nihon Shoki may not deign to give her the title, she certainly seems to have been a sovereign in all but name.
So there she was, a ruler with a powerful army and direct connections to the kami. Okinaga Tarashi Hime must have been at a high point. Her campaign against Silla had been successful, and she likely came back to the archipelago in quite a good mood. She probably would have been celebrating, if it weren’t for the fact that she had other things on her mind. For according to the Chronicles, no sooner had she gotten back to the island of Kyuushuu but she went into labor. The child she had been carrying finally was due. Before departing for the mainland she had performed a ritual involving a couple of white stones to put off the birth until she returned, and according to the stories, this must have been some medicine, because the Nihon Shoki claims she was gone for three years. Of course, this is still at a time when the Japanese weren’t exactly great at date-keeping, so it could easily be the case that three years was anything but. Still, they don’t seem to think anything of it—after all, she had done the ritual thing with the rocks, right? So all was good.
Now, though, she had successfully returned, and it was time for her to give birth. We aren’t given the details—did they have time to set up a parturition hut for her, or did it come on suddenly? All we know is that her birth was successful, and resulted in a healthy baby boy who would be known to posterity as Homuda Wake, aka—and this may be a bit of a spoiler—Oujin Tennou.
The birth of her son was likely great news for Tarashi Hime, but it also put her in a bind. After all, Homuda Wake was only a baby—just a newborn infant—and however legitimate his claim to his father’s throne, he was hardly the only one with such a claim. Tarashi Hime and her prime minister, Takechi no Sukune, both knew that their position was tenuous, even with their recent successes on the continent. It seems that Yamato wasn’t quite as unified as the Chronicles might have us believe.
Now, up to this point, the title of sovereign seems to have been passed down from one ruler to the next in a fairly orderly succession—or so we are led to believe. It may not have been the eldest child, and not even the child of the sovereign’s first wife, but it does seem to have largely just happened. But then again, was it really in the Chroniclers’ interest to try to challenge the legitimacy of the royal family? Wasn’t building an unbroken lineage back to Amaterasu Ohokami, the sun goddess herself, one of their key tasks?
And yet, despite all of that, there are hints throughout the stories that we’ve read that there were plenty of places where history may have taken a different turn—stories that may even cover up times when the lineage did break, only to be stitched back together through the efforts of some rather creative story tellers. Remember how Ninigi no Mikoto wasn’t the only Heavenly Descendant? There was also Nigi Hayahi no Mikoto, the ancestor of the Mononobe clan. Then, after Iware Biko had conquered Yamato, removing Nigi Hayahi’s descendants, his own chosen heir had to deal with a jealous older brother who wanted the throne. Then there was Prince Take Haniyasu and his wife, who apparently thought they should be in charge rather than his nephew Mimaki Iribiko. And of course, how can we forget that all of this was being compiled after Ohoama – aka Emperor Temmu - had usurped the throne of his own nephew in what would be known as the Jinshin no Ran. It wasn’t enough to just be named the heir, you had to be able to fight for it as well.
I think we can safely assume that Tarashi Hime and Takechi no Sukune realized this fact. For one thing, while she may have been Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko’s partner in the campaign against the Kumaso, she was not his only consort, and there were adult princes running around, who were probably already helping to run things—whether they were off running their own provinces or were keeping things afloat back in Yamato or wherever the seat of government was. And while she had been off on the peninsula, they would have had time to consolidate their own power base. Of these potential rivals, two in particular looked like they were going to be a problem—these were the princes Kakosaka Hiko and Oshikuma.
Now, it is little wonder that Kakosaka Hiko and Oshikuma might have some reservations about serving under their younger half-brother. After all, they doubly descended from royalty. Not only was their father the fourteenth sovereign, Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko, their mother was Oho Nakatsu Hime, the daughter of Prince Hiko Hito no Ohine, who, himself, was the son of the Twelfth sovereign, Oho Tarashi Hiko and his wife, Waka Iratsume. They had the bona fides of their lineage, so why should they bow and scrape to some kid who hadn’t even been born when their dad kicked the bucket?
Truth be told, it is unclear how strong Homuda Wake’s claim to the throne was. Sure, they all had the same father, but let’s take a look at his mother, Okinaga Tarashi Hime. Sure, she’s a badass conquering hero who leads troops into battle and speaks with the gods, but how did her background stand up to her husband’s other wife, Oho Naka tsu Hime? Of course, everyone was trying to connect themselves back to the royal family so that, as I’ve noted before, the family tree was often more the family bamboo stalk. Heck, even Takechi no Sukune has a genealogical link back to the legendary eighth sovereign, Oho Yamato Neko Hiko Kunikuru no Mikoto, who was supposedly his grandfather—man that guy must really be old. But how did these two separate lineages compare when it came to deciding who should take the throne?
Well, we are told that Okinaga Tarashi Hime’s father was a man named Prince Okinaga no Sukune—who may or may not be the same person listed in the Fudoki who assisted Oho Tarashi Hiko when he was creep-stalking Oho Iratsume over in Harima Province. Prince Okinaga no Sukune was, in turn, a great-grandson of the legendary 9th sovereign Waka Yamato Neko Hiko-ohohihi, also known as Kaika Tennouō. Perhaps more importantly, she descended through his son, the prolific Prince Hiko Imasu. But it wasn’t just Tarashi Hime’s paternal lineage that is mentioned—the scribes also recorded her maternal lineage as well. Now all of this is somewhat scattered and obscured in what became these long lists of names, but it is still there if you want to pull it out, especially in the Kojiki. There they have her maternal line traced back through her mother, Kadzuraki no Takanuka Hime, herself a descendant of family from Tajima, all the way back to a man that we talked about many episodes back: Ame no Hiboko.
Two things stand out in this lineage. First, it is Tarashi Hime’s connection to the Kadzuraki family. We’ve previously mentioned that “Kadzuraki” may be the name of the envoy to Silla that the Korean annals record as Kalyako, and later there would be another Kadzuraki no Sotsuhiko who would be sent over to the continent, so let’s not forget about that little fact. But looming much larger than that is the presence of Ame no Hiboko, who is said to have been a prince from the Korean peninsula. Specifically he is said to have been a prince of Silla, who followed his wife to Japan, where she ended up at the site of Naniwa where he ended up at Tsuruga Bay, where he was worshipped as a kami at the shrine of Kehi. And Kehi, as you may recall, was the location that Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko had moved the court before heading off to the south, and it was also the location that Tarashi Hime herself had departed from on her way to Kyushu. It seems that Homuda Wake, then, makes claims not only to the Yamato royal lineage, but also to a line of Silla kings, though the connection is not exactly air tight, as we don’t really have anyone in the Korean chronicles that we can identify as Ame no Hiboko, who comes down to us with a decidedly Japanese sounding name.
Now, again, we aren’t sure how much truth there is in any of this—in fact, we are pretty certain that much of the lineages are constructed to try to make everything neat and tidy. But if so, why tie Tarashi Hime—and, by extension, her son—to a legendary Silla Prince?
Well, I suppose that in the first case, it could have just been a way to give her legitimacy for her actions on the peninsula. After all, if she was descended from Silla royalty it would bolster her claim to be the rightful ruler when subjugating Silla. There is also another thought, though, and that is that it tells a story of Silla—or at least continental—blood in the royal line. Some have taken this to mean that Homuda Wake and his mother were entirely from the Korean Peninsula, and that this next story is basically a fanciful retelling of the conquest of Japan by a Korean prince, who stayed and later founded a new line of sovereigns. I’m still not willing to go that far, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that Tarashi Hime and her son were not solely descended from the Wa people of the archipelago, but that they did have Korean ancestors on the continent, as well. In fact, this is almost to be expected given the Wa’s use of marriage politics.
And this is probably the time to discuss one other line that many bring up on this topic, Homuda Wake’s own name. Scholars much more versed in the study of ancient Japanese and Korean have made the case that “Homuda”, or perhaps “Pomuda”, is clearly a Korean name, and not Japanese. For my part, I don’t know about that.
One claim, in the Chronicles, is that Homuda is an old name for a Japanese style of wristguard, known as a tomo. These were bulky pads that were tied around an archer’s wrist to keep the bowstring from striking into the inside of the arm. It is said that the young Homuda was born with a growth of his arm, and hence the name. On the other hand, I don’t think there is any other evidence of such a word in ancient Japanese, and the Chronicles don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to etymology.
I would note that there was a Homutsu Wake – or Pomutu Wake - as the son of Ikume Iribiko and Saho Hime. He was never Crown Prince, that we know of, but is it so far a jump from Homutsu to Homuda? As for the title “Wake”, that would seem to be just that, a title. Is it possible that Homuda is simply a locative—a place name? If so, is that place in the archipelago or somewhere on the peninsula?
Regardless of the name, there is a question if what we are seeing is more than just a fight between rival heirs to the throne, or if there is something more. Is there, woven in here, an allegory for something else: the rise of elites that were closely tied with the Korean peninsula?
Certainly the changes on the peninsula had created some uncertain times. Goguryeo’s destruction of the Han commanderies meant that there was no longer the threat of continental reprisals to help keep all of the peninsular states at peace, and Silla and Baekje were bringing the other states of their confederacies under their sway—by force if necessary. And though they were the states that would come out victorious, we shouldn’t assume that they were the only ones. Where would the victims, displaced by these conflicts, end up going?
In addition, though there is no direct evidence that I’m aware of, I have to wonder if the life of the Japanese raiders didn’t appeal to certain peninsular people as well. It is a story that plays out time and again throughout history—farmers abandoning their fields, especially in times of conflict and uncertainty, to join up with the same people that the so-called civilized cultures deem as ruthless barbarians. In Great Britain, it wasn’t uncommon for Anglo-Saxon farmers to join up with the Norse raiders, and on the borders of empire, there are stories of peasant farmers abandoning their livelihood to take up with the nomads of the steppes. And why wouldn’t they? As part of a roving band they had opportunities to acquire wealth, whereas on the farm they were little more than targets for others. Would it have been so surprising if some number of people from the peninsula threw in with these Vikings of northeast Asia?
And again, that puts this whole story in a different light. While there is no evidence that there was a sweeping conquest of the archipelago by a peninsular force, could this struggle be rooted in the idea of a new and changing elite—one made up of a blending of people from the archipelago and the peninsula? The jury is still out, but we do know that from at least this point on, there were certainly more and more people who would be coming to Yamato from the continent, with entire families claiming that their ancestors were actually ancient peninsular royalty.
But much of that is to come, so for now, let’s return to the story at hand: Homuda Wake was little more than an infant, and his mother Okinaga Tarashi Hime, knew that she was probably going to have a fight on her hand as she tried to head back to Yamato along the Seto Inland Sea route. Thinking ahead, she decided on a clever ploy.
First, she dressed one of the ships in the style of a funerary boat. Word seemed to have gotten out that the sovereign, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko, had died, and so she made it seem as though they were bringing his body back to the Yamato heartland so that it could be buried. This ship would sail the direct route, through the Seto Inland Sea, while another ship, carrying her infant son and under the command of her trusted prime minister, Takechi no Sukune, would take the long way, traveling along the Pacific coast side of Shikoku. It would add time to the journey, and expose the ship to some of the dangers posed by being on the open sea, rather than the relatively calm waters of the inland sea route, but those were nothing compared to the dangers that were likely lurking and waiting for them along the interior waterways.
And we’ve talked about this before, but it bears mentioning again, I believe—the Seto Inland Sea may be more protected from the weather and vagaries of the open ocean, but the numerous bays and islands also make it the perfect place for pirates and other nefarious actors who may want a piece of whatever was coming down that channel. The entire waterway is only 34 miles wide at its widest point, and in some places the widest passage between islands is still less than a mile. Furthermore, the many islands and shallow waters can make for some unpredictable currents, if you aren’t familiar with them. It was the fastest way from Kyushu to central Honshu, but it had its share of dangers.
Case in point: The two brothers, Oshikuma and Kakasaka Hiko, the other royal princes. They had heard about the birth of their infant half-brother, and they were determined to resist. Together they raised an army, and they came up with a ploy to intercept the royal ship. Claiming to build their father’s mausoleum in Harima province, they set up a line of boats going back and forth from Awaji Island to Akashi, in Harima Province. There is only about 4 kilometers—roughly two and a half miles—between the island and the shore, and their soldiers were patrolling back and forth.
This army wasn’t just their own men. The two brothers were joined by others from the eastern lands—likely those of Azuma, that Yamato Takeru is said to have pacified. These were Kurami Wake and Isachi no Sukune, and they were quickly made generals. Clearly it wasn’t just the two princes who had a problem with Tarashi Hime and her plans to put her own son on the throne.
Now while they were waiting—their ships spread out to ensure that they would catch Tarashi Hime as she would have to pass through their line or take a detour all the way south around Awaji Island—the two princes went out hunting. Of course, this wasn’t just any hunt—it was a divination hunt. You may remember that Tarashi Hime conducted several of these divinations before setting out for the peninsula, to establish the success of her endeavor. So, as they were planning to hunt Tarashi Hime and her son, the princes knew that if they were victorious in their hunt on land, they would be successful in their hunt on the water.
And so the two sat and waited. The elder brother, Kakosaka Hiko, climbed a tree to look out and see what he could observe. As he did so, a giant beast came crashing out of the underbrush—it was a wild boar.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of encountering a wild boar, but these aren’t like domestic pigs. The Japanese wild boar is, itself, a subspecies of the Eurasian wild boar, slightly smaller than its continental cousins they still can average about 100 kilograms, or about 220 lbs. But that’s just average. Even in the past couple decades there were boars that have been caught that were 220 and 240 kilograms. That’s over 500 lbs, and that isn’t the lazy fat of a pig, happy in its muck. That’s 500 lbs of lean muscle with two tusks 5 to 18 inches long. On top of that, they are aggressive. In Europe, the boar spear, used for hunting such animals, had a crossguard built into it to prevent the skewered animal from continuing to push up the spear to gore its attacker. Although they are not exactly hunters, they are still quite deadly, especially when you have to face them head on.
It was this ferocious vision of the forest that came out and attacked the two brothers. According to the chronicles it knocked down the very tree that Kakosaka Hiko had climbed up into to get a better view, and then gored him to death. Oshikuma, the youngest brother, escaped, but barely.
It would seem that their divination was anything but a success. With his brother dead, Oshikuma had to decide what to do next. Rather than confront Tarashi Hime’s forces as he had planned, he told one of his generals, Kurami Wake, to pull the troops back to Sumiyoshi, near modern Kobe, and they would wait there for the royal ship to arrive.
When that time came, Oshikuma looked out and he could hardly believe his luck. Where he had likely suspected an armada, fresh from their victories on the peninsula, instead he saw the ritual funerary ship, carrying the body of the deceased sovereign, his grieving wife, and only a handful of seamen to work the oars.
Oshikuma gave the words and his men got in their boats and rowed out, expecting an easy victory. But, as the wise Admiral Ackbar once said: “It’s a trap!”
No sooner were Oshikuma’s ships within range when the funerary ship was transformed. What they thought was an empty ritual vessel was quickly shown to be swarming with hardened veteran warriors. They fought back their surprised foes, who turned and ran, but Tarashi Hime’s forces pursued them. Her general at that time, since Takechi no Sukune was handling the infant Prince, was a man known to us as Naniwa-neko Take Furukuma no Mikoto, an ancestor of the Wani no Omi.
The royal forces pushed their opponents to the shore and then pursued them back all the way to Uji, in Yamashiro province. Take Furukuma, Tarashi Hime’s general, was eventually joined by Takechi no Sukune. The two forces found themselves camped out on either side of the river, each waiting for the other to make a move.
As they glared across the waters at each other, a man named Kuma no Kori in the army of Prince Oshikuma sang a song to encourage the men, in which he mocked Takechi no Sukune—or, as he is referred to in verse, Uchi no Ason.
Now the next part is a bit confused—the Kojiki attributes it all to Take Furukuma, but the Nihon Shoki gives the lion’s share of the credit to Takechi no Sukune. Either way, the basic tactic is more or less the same, regardless of who came up with it. First, the men of Tarashi Hime’s army took out their spare bowstrings and tied them into their hair like normal cords. Then he had them all put on wooden swords, made to look like the real thing. Once they did this, they called out to Oshikuma.
Takechi—or perhaps Furukuma—called out that they had received word that Tarashi Hime had died, and now all they wanted was to secure a promise that the young prince could live, and in return Oshikuma could take the throne—after all, why should anyone else fight and die over this. As a gesture of their goodwill, he had the royal army cut their bow strings and then thrown their swords into the water.
Prince Oshikuma, seeing victory at hand, accepted this and magnanimously returned the gesture. He had his men cut their own bowstrings, and throw their own swords into the river. Of course, no sooner had he done so than the ruse was revealed. Tarashi Hime’s forces pulled their spare bowstrings from their hair buns and quickly strung their bows and they started launching arrows at their now weaponless opponents. They grabbed up their real swords and started across the river.
Prince Oshikuma had no other options. Without weapons, there was only one thing he could do, so he ran. He and his men ran north, retreating all the way to Afusaka, near the shores of Lake Biwa. Takechi no Sukune and Take Furukuma continued to pursue Prince Oshikuma and routed him and his men all the way to Kurusu in Sasanami, where Prince Oshikuma’s army was finally destroyed. Defeated and facing certain death, Prince Oshikuma and his remaining general, Isachi no Sukune, decided to take their own lives rather than be captured. They sailed a ship out onto the lake, the Kojiki records the song that Prince Oshikuma sang:
Come my lads,
Rather than receive the wounds
Inflicted by Furukuma
Come, like the nipo birds
Let us dive into the waters
Of the lake of Afumi
And, so saying, they jumped into the lake together. Their bodies were swept downstream, and eventually washed ashore in Uji.
With their opposition now quite decidedly out of the picture, the generals returned, and Tarashi Hime took time in the peace immediately following the conflict to properly bury her husband, Tarashi Naka tsu Hiko. Supposedly he was buried not back in the area at the foot of Mt. Miwa, but instead outside the western mountains of the Nara basin at a place known as Nagae or Nagano, in Ega, in Kawachi Province. This has been identified as a late 5th century tomb in Fujidera, in modern Osaka, just south of the Yamato river where it comes out of the Nara Basin. Of course, much of this is suspect, but it certainly does seem like an impressive—even kingly—tomb.
Once her husband was in the mound, Tarashi Hime set up a court at the Wakazakura no Miya, or Young Cherry Blossom Palace, in Iware, on the eastern edge of the Nara Basin. And if Iware sounds familiar, you might remember that it was Iware Biko, aka Jimmu Tennou, who had supposedly marched in and conquered the Nara Basin some 800 or more years prior, at least according to the Nihon Shoki’s dating.
Here, in the Nara Basin, it seems that Homuda Wake was finally poised to take the throne at what I can only assume was the youngest age ever. Have no fear, however, for Tarashi Hime was more than ready to step in as regent and rule in his stead.
For 69 years.
Yes, once again that habit of the chronicles to go all timey-wimey, Jeremy Bearimy on us strikes again. Not only does the Nihon Shoki claim that Tarashi Hime was pregnant with Homuda Wake for three whole years before she brought him to term, but she then sits on the throne herself for 69 years as quote-unquote “regent”. Homuda Wake’s own chapter and deeds doesn’t start until she dies, 69 years into her reign. So something is going on here.
First off, it could be as simple as the idea that she was no regent, but she was the sovereign. Certainly much of the verbiage used for her is, much like with Yamato Takeru, verbiage that would be used for a sovereign. Indeed, in the Fudoki she is often treated as ruler in her own right, and like we discussed above, the later historian Kitabatake Chikafusa certainly viewed her as such—though that 14th century history was based more on his memory than on documents. Still, it supports one idea.
Another thought is that her reign is unnaturally long to account for other events dealing with the Korean peninsula, and we’ll certainly delve back into those. In this case, her rule is so long because she’s being held up as the embodiment of Queen Himiko, and the chronicles are using Himiko’s known dates as well as extrapolating back to the supposed dates of the older rulers.
There is one thought that in this time before the Japanese started writing things down the years were not based on actual seasons, but rather on harvests. Some have suggested that there were even three cycles a year, and that this was what was counted. If that were true, then 69 cycles might only really be 23 to 35 years—still past the age of majority for young Homuda Wake, but not nearly as excessively so.
And then there is the idea that there is actually a problem in the record, and that many of her exploits actually belong to her son. The problem with that is that he then goes on to reign for another 40 some-odd years. So while it is perfectly reasonable that some of his exploits—particularly some of the more martial exploits—were attributed to his mother, it doesn’t explain the supernatural longevity.
Personally, I simply don’t hold much with the chronology. Remember, Takechi no Sukune is supposedly with us through all of this. We’ll see that the earliest date that I might at all want to put any reliance on is about 366, and the last is roughly 385. Even these dates are suspect, but they seem much more reasonable, given other events that we know are going on. This gives us about 19 years to work with—a much more reasonable number than 69.
But what happened in those 19 years? Well, quite a lot, and much of it has to do with the peninsula. Before we get into all of that, though, let’s talk about the other things that happened in Japan.
First off, there were the kami. It certainly seems that the kami were jealous of the time that Tarashi Hime had spent on her campaign. In fact, when she was sailing back towards Yamato, before that whole mess with her stepsons, there was a point where her boat kept getting turned away, and she couldn’t get past Muko Bay in modern Hyogo prefecture. Now one might assume that this was because of the army that was waiting for her, but the Nihon Shoki makes the much more reasonable and sensible claim that it was the kami. Most importantly, Amaterasu Ohokami’s “rough spirit”, or “ara-mitama”, could not be allowed to approach the land of Yamato.
You may recall that the spirit of a kami could be divided up in various ways. This includes their rough, or wild spirit—the ara-mitama—as well as their gentle, or pacified spirit, known as the nigi-mitama. Of course, they had just been at war, so it is little wonder that Amaterasu’s ara-mitama might be with them, but they did not want that spirit of war brought into the heart of Yamato, so it was sent to be worshipped in Hirota by Hayama Hime, a daughter of Yamashiro-neko—a name that suspiciously sounds like they may have been an ancient ruler, or at least major noble, of Yamashiro province.
But that wasn’t all. You know how once you stop to talk to one person all of a sudden everyone else wants a piece of your time? It seems that Tarashi Hime had to deal with this as well, but with the kami. No sooner was Amaterasu Ohokami’s ara-mitama was taken care of than Waka Hirume asked to be worshipped in Nagawo, in Ikuta, just beyond modern Kobe. Then, Kotoshiro Nushi wanted to be worshipped in the land of Nakata, so Hayama Hime’s younger sister, Naga Hime, was sent out to perform the task. Finally, the three spirits that had started her out on her campaign, known as Uwa tsutsu no wo, Naka-tsutsu-no-wo, and Soko-tsutsu-no-wo, asked for their gentle spiritis, or Nigi-mitama, to be worshipped at Nunakura in Ohotsu, so they could watch the ships traveling back and forth through the Seto Inland Sea.
By the way, if any of those names seem familiar, they should. Of course we know Amaterasu, also known as Oho Hirume. Waka Hirume was her maiden, or perhaps even younger sister, who was doing the weaving when Susanowo tossed in that backwards flayed colt, at least in some of the stories. And then Kotoshiro Nushi was a son to the great god of Izumo, Ohokuni Nushi. We’ve encountered him a time or two back in the mythical period.
I mention all this because I find it significant that they are being mentioned at this juncture, because this seems to be that point where we see something else happen, at least in the archaeological record. Around the 4th century we see the abandonment of the Miwa area for some reason. The seat of power when the mounded keyhole tombs became a thing in the archipelago seems to have disappeared. Eventually, though, in that same century, there is a shift to the Kawachi area, and modern Ohosaka. Much of it was probably still under water as part of Kawachi Bay, but that was silting up and creating more and more land.
This is also an area where we see heavy influence from the peninsula, and we’ve already talked about all of the stories associated with the Korean peninsula and this area. This could simply be a reflection of increased immigration as well as increased trade, but with the mention of these kami, was there also something happening to the ancient Miwa cult? Are we starting to see other kami come in and take center stage? Of course, since this is all being written down at a much later date it is hard to pull apart all of the threads, but it does make one wonder.
Speaking of other kami, there is at least one more story that we should relate here. It is likely apocryphal, but it nonetheless adds a few more threads connecting this latest dynasty to the peninsula, because it deals with the god of Kehi.
Now at this time, the young prince, Homuda Wake, was probably no more than about 13 years old, and he went with the prime minister, Takechi no Sukune, on a tour of several provinces. At this point, I have to imagine that Takechi no Sukune must have been Homuda Wake’s father figure. The way they talk about Tarashi Hime and Takechi no Sukune, one almost thinks that they might have been married, but of course, no such allegation is ever made, though it does cause one to wonder. Takechi no Sukune wasn’t exactly a commoner—his lineage in the Chronicles goes back to before Mimaki Iribiko and to the line of sovereigns before him, or at least so they claim. And yet he is never mentioned as anything other than the prime minister and a dutiful officer of the court, still, it does make you wonder if there wasn’t something more in their relationship.
Still, his relationship with Homuda Wake, whatever may or may not have been going on with his mother was undeniably a close one. Travel such as this must have been quite the bonding experience.
Together they went through the province of Afumi and ended up at Tsuruga Bay, near Kehi. There the deity known as Izasa wake no Ohokami no Mikoto reached out to Takechi no Sukune in his dreams and told him that he wished to exchange names with the young prince. Takechi no Sukune agreed, and he said the words of blessing and promised that they would do whatever the kami had commanded. And given everything they had been through, I’m sure that Takechi no Sukune had learned to listen when the kami decided to speak to you.
Izasa wake no Ohokami seemed pleased, however. Rather than Takechi no Sukune preparing some elaborate offering it seems that the kami offered to handle that on his behalf. He simply had to go down to the beach the next day the kami would present the offerings.
The next morning, as he had been told to do, Takechi no Sukune made his way down to the beach. There it seems that a pod of dolphins had beached itself. Their snouts were broken and bloody, and they were lying all over the shore. Dolphins, which were hunted by the Japanese up through the modern day, were considered a source of food—and thus an offering for the exchange of names.
Now, what’s not quite clear to me is exactly what it meant, in this case, to exchange names. Does that mean that Homuda Wake received the name Homuda Wake at this point? If so, does that mean that was actually the original name of the kami of Kehi? If so, what was Homuda Wake’s original name? Was it Izasa Wake? This isn’t answered by the chronicles in any satisfactory way that I can make out. The kami of Kehi is given the name Mike tsu Ohokami, or the Great Kami of the August Food, since they had provided the dolphins as an offering. They are also called, rather uncreatively, Kehi no Ohokami. But nowhere does it actually demonstrate them exchanging names. It is possible that there is a problem with the way that the words are translated, and it was more a ceremony of giving each other new names—or even just getting a name of the kami. Either way it is a strange episode.
Following that encounter, Takechi no Sukune takes the young prince back home, where he is wined and dined with a great banquet by his mother. While the young prince was away, she had worried, as mothers around the world are want to do when their children are away. To take her mind off things, she caused to be brewed a particular sake, which she did as what would appear to be another ukehi—a kind of divination she was rather familiar with. It must have been successful because they did return safely, and in the end she had barrels of sake at her disposal, so what better way to get rid of them than to throw a party.
It was at that party that she invoked the name Sukuna, by which many people believe she meant Sukuna Bikona, the kami who had helped Oho Kuni Nushi. Apparently he had more than a little efficacy in the realm of sake, or at least so we gather by the way that he is invoked by Tarashi Hime in her poetry.
And I think that is enough for this episode. From here, we are going to get into more shenanigans with the peninsula. Notably, however, these are dated shenanigans. We can argue whether it was Tarashi Hime, Homuda Wake, or some unknown sovereign that took part, but the actual incidents seem to come from records older than our extant chronicles that actually describe real activities with what seem to be verifiable—if slightly offset—dates. These are largely from the Chronicles of Baekje, the country that would become one of Yamato’s closest allies, or so it would seem. There are certainly a couple of problems between what we read in the Nihon Shoki and what we read in the Kojiki, but I think we can get over those.
So, until next time, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate through our KoFi site, kofi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the link over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Questions or comments? Feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.
That’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Ō, Yasumaro, & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
Bentley, John. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: a New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. ISBN-90-04-152253
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

Who’s who?

Ajikki (阿直岐)

Wang’in/Wani (王仁)

Takuso (卓素)

Susukori (須須許理), aka Nipo (仁番)

Maketsu (眞毛津)

Saiso (西素)

Achi no Omi (阿知使主) , Tsuga no Omi (都加使主), and the Weavers of Kure

King Jeonji of Baekje (腆支 / 直支)

Prince Hunhae of Baekje (訓解)

Prince Jeomnye [Jeoprye?] of Bakeje (蝶禮)

King Guisin of Bakeje (久爾辛)

Mong Manchi (木満致)

Continental Clans

Hachiman

Homuda Wake’s Kofun

Rough Transcript

References

Katsuraki no Sotsuhiko

Ame no Hiboko

Takechi no Sukune

Okinaga Tarashi Hime

Homuda Wake

King of Kara and his Sister

Mongna Geunja

Yutsuki / Kungwol

Maketsu

Iwa no Hime

King Naemul of Silla

King Silseong of Silla

King Nulji of Silla

Prince Bokho of Silla

Prince Misaheun of Silla

Pak Jesang

Rough Transcript

References

Rough Transcript

References

Okinaga Tarashi Hime

Homuda Wake

Takechi no Sukune

Ō Naka tsu Hime

Prince Kakosaka Hiko

Prince Oshikuma

Kurami Wake and Isachi no Sukune

Take Furukuma

Kuma no Kori

Izasa Wake no Ōkami

Tarashi Hime's Campaign:

Rough Transcript

References