Episode 75: The Mirror, Sword, and ...Seal?

November 1, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Conjectural images of the sword, mirror, and jewel, and an image of the Han era seal for King Na of Wa. Were the Sacred treasures in the 6th century something like these or completely different?

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This episode we talk about the ascension of Ohodo, aka Keitai Tennō. That’s 「継体」, not 「携帯」. So why him, of all people?

Location, Location, Location

Before we get into the Who’s Who of this episode, let’s look at the locations we are talking about. Specifically, some of the locations regarding Ohodo, aka Keitai Tennō. First, there is Takashima (1), near Lake Biwa. This is where Wohodo’s dad is said to have lived, and where Ohodo was born, but when Ohodo’s father passed away, he and his mother went back to her hometown of Takamuku (2), in Mikuni. These are traditional locations, and not necessarily exact.

Once Ohodo ascended to the throne, his first palace is said to have been Kusuba (3), and then later he moved to Tsutsuki (4), and then Otokuni (5). First off, what is with all of this moving? Maybe the Nihon Shoki will give us some clues, but I’m not holding my breath. Second, why are they all outside the Nara Basin? They aren’t even in the Kawachi region. I guess one could argue that this indicates that Yamato’s influence had grown such that there were more places that could serve for the court, but that doesn’t quite sit right with me. Eventually, 20 years later, the did settle in Tamao (6), in Iware, just south of Mt. Miwa and the early seat of Yamato and just a bit northeast of the later Asuka courts and then the later Fujiwara Capital. Even his supposed kofun is located west of Kusuba, and on the other side of the Yodo River that flows from Biwa to the Seto Inland Sea at Naniwa.

Dramatis Personae

Ōtomo no Kanamura

Before we get into the sovereign, let’s briefly touch on Kanamura, likely son or descendant of Muruya. He appears to have been in charge of the court during Wakasazaki’s reign and now, here he is, choosing the next sovereign to sit on the throne. We unfortunately only know a little about him, but his actions speak volumes, in my opinion, and it will be something we see often enough. The service nobles of Yamato often realize they cannot make a direct claim to the throne, but yet it is through the throne that they earn their place. Thus, if you cannot sit on the throne, being the guy who puts people there is probably the next best thing—and possibly even a better thing, in a way, at least in later centuries. So just keep that in mind.

Tashiraga Ōiratsume

A sister to the late Ohatsuse Wakasazaki, the previous sovereign, and eventually the queen to the new sovereign, which will give her children a direct link to the previous dynasty through her, along with the connections brought to the table by her husband.

Ohodo

Prince Ohodo (or Wohodo) is, we are told, the newly chosen heir to the throne. But why? Well, it appears that his parentage connects him to both Homuda Wake and to Ikume Iribiko—a rather distinguished pedigree, assuming it is true. What follows is his presumed lineage.

Prince Ushi, aka Prince Hikonushi-bito and Hifuri Hime, aka Furu Hime

The parents to Ohodo. “Hikonushi” may come from “Hiko no Ushi”, and we’ve seen similar things elsewhere in the Chronicles, so it seems reasonable. “Hifuri” and “Furu” may have a bit more convoluted relationship, but nonetheless there are details that suggest they are the same person in different accounts.

We are told that Furu Hime’s lineage goes back to Ikume Iribiko, but I haven’t found it laid out in the same way as the paternal lineage. That said, it is an interesting claim, and one wonders if at some point the mother’s claim wasn’t as important—or possibly even moreso—than the father’s. After all, there is constantly a concern that the sovereign’s mother must have a royal lineage in order for their offspring to take the throne. The fact that it goes back to an even older dynasty makes me wonder.

Prince Oi

We aren’t given the wife of Prince Oi, only that he is the father of Prince Ushi, aka Hikonushi-bito.

Prince Ōhodo (or Oho-hodo)

We are told he was the father of Prince Oi, and again we are not given his wife. However, we are told that he was the brother of Oshizaka no Ō Naka tsu Hime, aka Osaka no Naka tsu Hime, wife of Oasatsuma Wakugo no Sukune, aka Ingyō Tennō. More on that, later. For now it is striking that Ōhodo’s name is so similar to Ohodo, seemingly indicating Hodo Sr. and Hodo Jr., though with several generations separating the two.

Waka Nuke (or Noke) Futamata and Momoshiko Mawaka Naka tsu Hime, aka Momoshiki Irobe

Futamata married Momoshiko (or Momoshiki) and gave birth to Prince Ōhodo and Princess Oshizaka. He appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shiki as a son of Homuda Wake, aka Ōjin Tennō. The Jōgūki lineage also says something similar, but instead of labeling Homutsu Wake as sovereign, or Ōkimi, it simply calls him another “Prince”. That certainly leaves us wondering if there was a mistake, or if all of the “Princes” here were perhaps of equivalent rank. Were they actually just another lineage of rulers elsewhere in the archipelago? Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go on.

Ohodo’s lineage and the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror

Picture of the back of the Suda Hachiman bronze mirror, with the inscription visible along its rim. Click for a larger view.

There appear to be some clues to Ohodo’s lineage scattered in the inscription on the Suda Hachiman mirror, but the text is so vague that it can be read multiple ways. Some see it as celebrating a marriage between Oshizaka no Ō Naka tsu Hime and the sovereign, Ingyō Tennō. Others see a connection with either Ōhodo or Ohodo. The use of the sexegenary cycle for the year gives us some possibilities, but nothing solid, and 443 or 503 seem equally valid interpretations.

It may not give us concrete evidence, but just the same it does seem to give some legitimacy to these various names that we are encountering, whether or not they are actually involved in the lineage of our latest sovereign, Ohodo, I’m not sure I could say.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 75: The Mirror, Sword, and …Seal?
We are going to be talking about the person who followed Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou, known to us as Keitai Tennou—and no, that isn’t the Cell Phone sovereign, different kanji, despite the fact that it keeps coming to my mind. We’ll talk about what the Chronicles say about how he came to the throne, and what his lineage may have looked like. We’ll look at some of what we know around this period, and what some others have had to say. As usual, it is a bit difficult to say for certain what happened, but perhaps we can know a little bit.
Last episode we covered up to this point in the early 6th century, with the ongoing formation of the Yamato State. As we noted, although the Chronicles claim an unbroken lineage, there appear to have been at least two main dynasties, so far. The first was the Iribiko dynasty, starting with Mimaki Iribiko, who is credited as the founder of Yamato. Then there is the dynasty that tentatively begins with Okinaga Tarashi Hime and her son, Homtsu Wake—although possibly it actually starts with his son, Ohosazaki, for reasons we’ll talk about later. That second dynasty, which included the clearly historic figure of Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Wakatakiru no Ohokimi, or Yuryaku Tennou, ended around 506 with the death of Ohatsuse Wakasazaki—an aptly named bookend for the last descendant of Ohosazaki no Mikoto—the young Sazaki as the last heir to the Great Sazaki.
That dynasty seems plagued with succession disputes. Despite the order that the Chronicles attempt to apply to it, the remaining stories make many people suspect that after each sovereign’s death, there was a period of confusion and chaos. Different groups in Yamato and surrounding areas would often pick up arms and vie for power and control. Influential forces would rally around potential candidates—those with some claim to the throne. The Chronicles often makes the claim that they were direct descendants of a previous sovereign—sometimes even siblings to the sovereign who had just passed. It was clearly not a matter of strict patrilineal succession, however, and there are even more than a few women who may have thrown their hat into the ring, with Ihitoyo being one of the most convincing candidates so far.
During all of this, we see the rise of the various economic households. Most clearly are the Be—a continental innovation, where various individuals were gathered into a created household for economic purposes. Some of these are groups of similar professions. The Umakai-be, or the horsekeepers, and the Tamazukuri-Be, the Jewel-makers, are examples of these kinds of groups. Members were apparently scattered across various lands, but a single family remained nominally responsible for coordinating them. That family, sitting at the top of such a structure, would have had access to resources that that were produced by the other members, taking a bit off the top, as it were.
Other such families were dedicated to simply producing economic wealth, typically in the form of some number of koku of rice, for the upkeep of some person or institution. For instance, the upkeep of the monumental tombs that we see, or some particular family member.
We also see the service nobility—families who support the court and the sovereign and the business of the court, and through that maintain an elite status. Early on we see Takeuchi no Sukune and his descendants, who make up the Heguri, who are often the Ohomi, or Great Minister. Similarly there are the Mononobe, who appear to be a constructed -Be style family focusing on the arts of war—Mono-no-fu being another term for warriors—but who claim their own divine lineage through another Heavenly grandchild. Then there are the Ohotomo. They claim descent through Michi no Omi, or at least according to the Chronicles—Michi no Omi theoretically rode with the legendary Iware Biko, aka Jimmu Tennou, when he supposedly invaded Yamato. Later you see Ohotomo no Takemotsu serving in the time of Okinaga Tarashi Hime, aka Jinguu Tennou, and Ohotomo no Muruya, in the time of Wakatake no Ohokimi, aka Yuuryaku Tennou. This is probably the first reliable account of the Ohotomo family in the Chronicles as a powerful member of the court, but we will see their continued presence.
In the period of the second dynasty, the service nobility play a large role in running the state and even in helping to select new sovereigns. In the story recounting Wakasazaki, or Buretsu Tennou, Matori, of the Heguri family, appears to be the one in charge at the start, but Ohotomo no Kanamura, presumably the son or descendant of Ohotomo no Muruya, helps Wakasazaki overthrow and destroy Heguri no Matori, gaining his place as Ohomuraji in the process. In some ways, it seems as though the important political story of Wakaszaki’s reign at the turn of the 6th century wasn’t about him at all, but about the competition between the Heguri and the Ohotomo.
When Wakasazaki dies without an heir, it is these same service nobility who seem to be figured prominently in the next part of the story, the selection of the next sovereign.
According to the Chronicles, it was Ohotomo no Kanamura who made the pitch that they would need someone to sit on the throne. The Nihon Shoki puts this two weeks after the death of Wakasazaki, Kanamura proposed a candidate—one Yamato Hiko, a fifth generation descendant of Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko, aka Chuai Tennou. This Yamato Hiko was living in Kuhada, in the land of Tanba—modern Hyogo Prefecture.
The next part is a little, well, strange. Rather than sending a simple messenger to Yamato Hiko and asking him to come take the throne, they apparently sent what the Nihon Shoki refers to as an “honor guard”—so armed men. Now remember, up to this point, successions were a bloody affair, and when Yamato Hiko saw armed men coming for him, he took to the hills, not wanting to be purged just because he had a connection to an ancient sovereign. The men searched high and low but they could not find him.
And so, a few days later, Kanamura and the other nobles started the search anew. They focused on another prince, Prince Wohodo. The Nihon Shoki claims he was the son of another Prince, named Hiko Nushi-bito, and his wife, Furuhime. Although Hiko Nushi-bito lived in Miwo, in the district of Takashima—probably around the area of modern Takashima o nthe shores of Lake Biwa—Wohodo’s father passed away and his mother, Furuhime, took him back to her home of Takamuku. This was likely in the area of modern Fukui, in the old province of Echizen, the area of the ancient land of Koshi that was closest to the Kinai region. So that is where they sent the honor guard this time, to the land of Mikuni, to find Wohodo and ask him to take up the throne.
When the troops showed up this time, Wohodo remained calm, and sat there with his personal retainers. Still, he wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, and so he didn’t exactly consent, immediately. However, someone had snuck him a message beforehand to tell him what was going on. That was Kawachi no Umakahi no Obito no Arako, who let him know that this was a force coming to kill him, but rather to escort him back to the court. When everything was finally over, Arako would be well rewarded for his service.
Traveling with the honor guard, Wohodo made it down to the Kusuba palace, traditionally identified as being around Kuzuhaoka in Hirakata in modern Osaka. It was there that Ohotomo no Kanamura presented Wohodo with the Mirror, the sword, and the signet, or seal.
And let me take a moment and mark this occasion. We’ve seen discussions of the mirror and the sword before this point, and this seems to indicate the three items of imperial regalia of Japan: The Mirror, the Sword, and the Jewel. And this is the first time we’ve seen these used as part of the ascension ceremony, at least since they were first brought down to earth in the legend of the Heavenly Grandchild, Ninigi no Mikoto.
As you may recall, legends in the Chronicles claim that the Mirror and the Jewel were both hung on the Sakaki tree outside of the Heavenly Rock Cave as part of the ceremony to get Amaterasu to come out into the light. There is even mention of a blemish on the mirror from when it was accidentally knocked against the side of the cave. The sword implies the famous Kusanagi, or grass-cutter, found by Susanowo in the tail of Yamata no Orochi. Of course it could be that it was a different mirror and a different sword, but I think that any reader in the 8th century would have assumed these to be the same as those discussed earlier in the Chronicles. These were described back in episodes 15 and 16, as well as the descent of Ninigi no Mikoto in episode 22.
More reliably, it does seem there was a tradition in the archipelago of maintaining and even displaying elite goods, such as mirrors, jewels, and swords, from tree-like structures to announce or welcome royalty.
This is, however, the first time we’ve seen them brought out for an investiture—an enthronement ceremony—and you may have already caught on that there is one thing that is out of place. In the Nihon Shoki we are told that they used the mirror, the sword, and the… seal. Yeah, instead of the jewel—the Yasakani no magatama—we have a royal seal, instead.
Is this a seal received from one of the continental courts, confirming the sovereign of Yamato as the “King of Wa”? Or is it referencing the jewel, the magatama, but using a term that, in the classical language of the time, would have been expected in a continental enthronement ceremony?
Truth be told, the list of items included as required imperial regalia would vary over the years. Even by the 14th century the regalia was not necessarily firm, as pointed out by Thomas Conlan in his book, “From Sovereign to Symbol”, though the sword, mirror, and jewel do appear to be at the heart of it. In fact, Kitabatake Chikafusa, writing his national history, “Jinnou Shoutouki,” in the 14th century certainly identifies those three sacred objects as being at the heart of the institution of the sovereign and, by extension, the entire state. They are also mentioned in the Tale of Heike, where it is said that the Sacred Jewel and the Sword were taken up by Taira no Tokiko, widow of Kiyomori and grandmother to the infant Tennou, Antoku, as she leapt into the sea with him at the Battle of Dan-no-ura in the 12th century.
Now, just because we see these three regalia, don’t expect them to be coming up all the time from here on out. In fact, in 536 we will see only the sword and the mirror once more in the enthronement of the sovereign known as Senka Tennou, and then it seems to disappear from the narrative until the enthronement of the sovereign known as Jitou Tennou, wife of Temmu, in the 7th century, where again we get the sword, the mirror, and the seal.
In fact, the sword and mirror seem to be more constant than the jewel. In the 10th century Engi Shiki, or Procedures of the Engi Era, only the Sword and the Mirror are mentioned as part of the enthronement ceremony, or Daijousai. Herman Ooms, in his work in the Temmu Dynasty, “Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan,” suggests that the jewel was more of a private matter, passed within the house, perhaps even immediately upon a sovereign’s passing, while the sword and mirror were for public ceremonies. Whatever the case, it seems that in the Nihon Shoki, at least, the royal seal is more important. That fits with the general oeuvre of the genre, seeing as how they are doing their best to mimic the style of the continental chronicles, as well as continental systems of governance.
And so, Wohodo was raised up as sovereign, becoming the one who would later be called Keitai Tennou.
But who was this Wohodo, really? What do we know? What qualities did he possess that made him the rightful heir to the throne?
The Nihon Shoki’s explanation is somewhat lacking on this front. It is simply mentions that he was a descendant of Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, in the 6th generation, through his paternal line—his father being the 5th—but it also makes him an 8th generation descendant of Ikume Iribiko, along his maternal line, through Furu Hime. Effectively, they claimed that he was descended from both of the previous dynasties, giving further support to the theory that they are, indeed, separate.
The entry for Wohodo in the Kojiki isn’t much more help. It does give his descendants—and a brief mention of some conflict in Kyushu. However, there is an odd entry earlier, around the death of Homuda Wake. That covers the lineage of a seemingly unimportant son of Homuda Wake, named Waka Nuke Futamata. It is an odd entry, and might seem to just be lineages of various family lines, as he has a son, Oho-iratsuko, aka Oho-hodo no Miko—that is “Oho-hodo” as opposed to our current “Wo-hodo”, but if you see a connection, that does seem to be the intent. We are told he was an ancestor of, among others, the lords of Mikuni—Mikuni no Kimi. And of course, our current sovereign also has connections to Mikuni, according to the Nihon Shoki, though they say it is through his mother.
So even the Kojiki is a bit cagey on this subject, and it isn’t exactly a fully detailed lineage—there are plenty of gaps large enough that you could drive an ox-cart through. The Sendai Kuji Hongi doesn’t seem to be much better. It largely repeats the lineage given in the Nihon Shoki, without further details.
In fact, the most detailed lineage comes from somewhere else entirely—from a work called the Jouguuki, the biography of Prince Shotoku Taishi. This is thought to have been written around the 7th century, though unfortunately it only remains in fragments, such as in the Shaku Nihongi, which was written between 1274 and 1301 and contains fragments of many earlier works that are no longer extant as separate documents, including various fudoki, biographies, etc.
According to that biography, Wakanuke Futamata was the son of Homutsu Wake and Ote Hime Mawaka, the daughter of Kawamata Nakatsu Hiko. Futamata married Momoshiko Mawaka Nakatsu Hime—in the Kojiki we are told this is Momoshiki Irobe, aka Oto Hime Mawaka Hime no Mikoto. They had a son, Oho-hodo, again just like the the Kojiki. Ohohodo then had a son, Oi, who had a son, Ushi, who married one Hifuri Hime no Mikoto.
Prince Oi then becomes the connective tissue between Ohohodo in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki account, who has Hiko Nushi-bito marrying Furuhime. Assuming that Hiko Nushi Bito might be something like Hiko no Ushi Bito, and Furu Hime is the same as Hifuri Hime, this appears to line things up. They, of course, were the parents of Wohodo. Hifuri Hime’s lineage is also taken all the way back to Ikume Iribiko, as well, so that fits.
Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that any of this is true. After all, the compilers of the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki may have been drawing from the Jouguuki, or vice versa, and if any part of that lineage was constructed wholecloth then it brings everything into question.
Kitabatake Chikafusa, in his writings, even suggested that Wohodo was descended from Ōsazaki’s rival, Hayabusa Wake. Then again, he could just be misremembering, as it is said his work was written without access to the source material, while he was in exile. Nonetheless, an interesting takeaway.
The various lineages of Wohodo do seem to acknowledge two dynasties, however, and I can’t help but wonder how much these biographies were projected back in time. Perhaps it is because of Mimaki Iribiko and Ikume Iribiko’s connection to Wohodo that we see stories about them, rather than about Himiko or Toyo, or others. After all, it is from Wohodo forward that we get the current lineage, and it should be noted that rarely do the Chronicles actually name the sovereign in their reign—the statements are simply that the ruler did this or the sovereign did that. So it would be easy enough to replace one sovereign with another to keep the biographers happy.
Some, such as Russell Kirkland (Kirkland, R. (1997). The Sun and the Throne. The Origins of the Royal Descent Myth in Ancient Japan. Numen, 44(2), 109–152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3270296) have suggested that it was from about this same period that many of the founding myths about the kami would havearisen. In particular he suggested that myths of heavenly descent from Takami Musubi probably originated around this time, followed by the introduction of Ōhirume as a sun goddess in the late 6th century, with Amaterasu herself not taking center stage until about the 7th century. Either way, it is likely that many legends and content of earlier chapters was at least massaged to better support the current dynasty, which claims decent through Wohodo.
I also wonder if Wohodo’s connection to two dynasties doesn’t indicate something about the co-rulership theory. Were they trying to bring two lines of co-rulers into a single entity in Wohodo? After all, from here on out, it looks like Kishimoto’s theory simplifies down to a single sovereign. In all there are a lot of questions, and unfortunately very few answers. We could go back and forth about all of the things it *could* indicate, and there are literally shelves and shelves of books written on the topic.
There is one curious thing that is probably worth mentioning, however, and that is a bit of evidence from outside of the Chronicles. It is an inscription, found on a bronze mirror. This mirror is a treasure of the Suda Hachiman Shrine, in modern Wakayama Prefecture, in the Suda district of Hashimoto city, on the Kii peninsula, south of the Nara Basin, though it is now kept at the Tokyo National Museum.
The mirror has a rather intricate back, with various figures displayed around it, but it is most notable for the inscription along its rim. The inscription is clear enough, but unfortunately not great. Besides numerous grammatical errors—from using the wrong characters to some characters even being reversed, which was apparently not that uncommon given how mirrors were cast for production. Then there are some characters that are out of order, all of this suggesting that this was not a native speaker but someone from another language group trying to write in Han characters.
David Lurie, in his article on the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror, gives a possible translation of the transcription as follows:
“On the tenth day of the eighth month of the twentieth year of the cycle”, Here Lurie suggests the year 503, though 443 has also been proposed by others, “during the reign of the Great King, when his younger brother the prince resided in Oshisaka Palace, Shima thought to serve him for a long time, and had Kawachi no Atai and Ayahito Imasuri, the two of them, take two hundred-weight of white bronze and make this mirror.”
Other than the inscription, the mirror appears to be from the same mold, or a copy of the same mold, as various other mirrors found in the archipelago, copying mirrors from the continent. That there is writing tells us that someone involved with the production knew how to write—and presumably read—though there are also an inner series of graph-like markings that appear to be a kind of pseudo-inscription: an imitation of writing but without any actual meaning. Personally, I wonder if that just wasn’t part of the mold that they used as a basis to create the mirror in the first place.
The inscription seems to give us several things. First of all, there is mention of the Oshizaka Palace. Princess Oshizaka no Ohonakatsu Hime, aka Osaka no Nakatsu Hime, is said to have been sister to Prince Oho-hodo, our current subject’s supposed great-grandfather, and we are told that she married Oasatsuma Wakugo, aka Ingyou Tennou. If that is true, perhaps we are seeing some mention of their relationship.
Other readings have suggested the name Ohodo or Oho-hodo as well, possibly indicating either the current sovereign or his great-grandfather. There are even suggestions that the “Shima” here is the Baekje King, Muryeong, and that perhaps there is even a peninsular connection—and there are certainly quite a few entries about Baekje in this reign. Either way, there seems to be some historical evidence surrounding bits of what we are finding in the Chronicles, but nothing links up quite as nicely as we would like for it to do so. Sometimes this stuff is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, except that half the pieces are missing, and some number of the ones that are left are from a different box entirely. The Chroniclers’ answer was to do the best they could, even if that meant redrawing the pieces, or cutting them so they would fit together better, and the picture on the box is completely different than the pieces you have.
Clearly, though, Wohodo was being brought in from outside, and starting a new line. Whether or not this lineage is a fabrication to justify his rule, or perhaps the Chronicles themselves are a projection of his own lineage back into the ancient stories, he was the one placed on the throne. And the person doing that appears to be none other than Ohotomo Kanamura.
And here is where I suspect that Kanamura may have been the architect behind a lot of this. After all, he is the one that “finds” Wohodo. He had been politically ascendant during the reign of Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou, and now here he is selecting the next sovereign. Once he brings Wohodo in, the next step is that he has Wohodo marry Tashiraga no Iratsume, one of Wakasazaki’s sister. So now we have an heir with claims to Homuda Wake and Ikume Iribiko, and, through this marriage, we have a direct continuation of the previous lineage, though as we’ll see, that may take a few tries before it comes to fruition.
There are still questions about how this all came to be. Was it really a peaceful transition of power? Or was this another series of bloody wars and invasions? A few things to note suggesting that things are up.
First, although Wohodo is made sovereign in 507, there is a note in 511 that the “capital was transferred to Tsutsuki, in Yamashiro,” traditionally located north of Nara in modern Kyotanbe. Then, in 518, the capital moved to Otokuni, also in Yamashiro—in modern Muko city, just southwest of Kyoto. Finally, in 526, it moved to Tamao, in Iware.
So Wohodo gets selected as the new sovereign of Yamato, but then for about twenty years he is living outside of the Nara Basin, in areas not traditionally associated with the capital of Yamato. So what was going on for those first twenty or so years? Was there conflict? Was there something else going on in the Nara Basin?
Unfortunately, the Nihon Shoki glosses over any conflict and presents a picture of unified support of the new sovereign. Yet I doubt that a new sovereign could just be brought in and be immediately acclaimed by all. Rather, it all seems to have been orchestrated by Ohotomo Kanamura and his allies at court, and that may have been much more contentious than is depicted.
In the end, we are left with what we have. We are told that Wohodo accepted the throne, and was invested with the mirror, sword, and the official seal. He took to wife Tashiraga Hime, and thus he became the next sovereign. In the next episode we can cover what the Chronicles say about his reign.
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And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

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Kirkland, R. (1997). The Sun and the Throne. The Origins of the Royal Descent Myth in Ancient Japan. Numen, 44(2), 109–152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3270296
Kiley, C. J. (1973). State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato. The Journal of Asian Studies, 33(1), 25–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2052884
Aston, W. G. (1972). Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times to A.D. 697. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN0-80480984-4
Philippi, D. L. (1968). Kojiki. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN4-13-087004-1

Episode 74: Yamato and State Formation

October 16, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Haniwa figure of a woman from a 5th century tomb in modern Fujiidera, in Osaka—the ancient area of Kawachi.

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This episode we’ve returned to the archipelago from the continent, and we return at a moment of change. According to the Chronicles, the sovereign was dead and there were no immediate heirs designated for succession. We are on the cusp of a new dynasty—a new line of rulers. But before we get too much into that, let’s pull out and look at how we got here. As head down in the individual stories as we’ve been, sometimes as they say: “you don’t see the forest for the trees.”

So this episode we look at a larger story—the story we’ve been telling, page by page, but look at where we’ve come. This is the story of the formation of the State.

It would be easy to simply say that the State started with Queen Himiko. After all, she’s a queen, right? Except, “Queen” and “King” were thrown around with some abandon by those Han and Wei courts. It was a mark of respect, but there is the question of just what it meant in terms of control. What is it that we mean by “state”?

While I don’t try to promote it as a primary resource, in this case people may want to read the Wikipedia article on State formation for an overview. Among other things are the various categories and qualities that people point to. One of the key definitions, though, is that the State is the only authorized dispenser of violence in its territory. In other words, nobody else can legitimately commit physical violence against other people in the territory without state backing or approval.

Why violence? Shouldn’t it be something else—a sense of belonging, or perhaps rules and laws? And yeah, that’s true—and it doesn’t even mean that the state has to be extremely violent, nor even cruel. But that sense of belonging typically means that there is an “othering”. There are those who are part of the state and those who are not, and even in that, there is a certain amount of violence that is often involved. Then there are the rules and laws—the social contract between people. But what happens when that social contract breaks down? Who enforces those rules and laws? At the end of the day, there is a threat of violence backing up those rules and laws, in one form or another.

This is part of where people see Yamato as an early state, but doubt its authority throughout the archipelago. Sure, it may have had influence—in business today, a common thing is to talk about “leading from where you are”, exerting influence over other people through a variety of means, but that doesn’t make you the boss. Influence may lead to authority, but they aren’t necessarily one and the same thing.

So what do we actually see in the record. Control of legitimate violence and influence may be there, but what does that look like in the history or in the archaeological record?

Well, things like the spread of the keyhole shaped mounded tombs demonstrates a certain affinity that groups in the archipelago had with Yamato and the state at the heart of that movement. In fact, we explicitly see some other shapes, including square mounded tombs, circular round tombs, and those particular square tombs up in Izumo. If you look, you can see some of the untold stories of influence and control that play out in the different tomb mounds of the early and middle kofun periods.

Complex trade is another indicator of connectedness. Early on, the fact that sites in the Miwa region demonstrate examples of artifacts from around the archipelago is something that we can point to regarding their reach. Trading for goods is one of the things that is thought to drive complexity in societies. There are structures and bonds and agreements that are struck so that goods can travel from one point to another. There are also hierarchies that often form in the management of goods and just who gets them—the creation of elite structures.

There is also warfare. We see evidence of warfare on the islands, but also with the peninsula. Interestingly, for Yamato to launch raids against Silla, they would have to have relationships with the communities between the two of them. It seems a rather massive feat for Yamato to simply take to the seas, particularly with any sizeable number of warriors. I tend to believe that these battles must have been coalitions of multiple groups, of which Yamato may or may not have been the head. Certainly by later centuries they were, but early on it may have been the case that other proto-states were just as likely to be leading men off on a profitable raiding trip.

All of these activities take an evolution of government structures—of statecraft. Some of this was no doubt homegrown, but some of it was just as likely imported. Writing helps immensely with communication—no longer do you need to rely on someone hopefully communicating your intent when you can write it down and show them. Horses not only provide an advantage in battle, but also make it much easier to travel from place to place.

Then there are foreign relations. The ability to engage with other states at that level. After all, why would they even deal with you if they didn’t agree you had some level of authority over others in your group? This is a problem that plagues the Ming court in the 16th century, as numerous daimyo in Japan’s Sengoku Period would attempt to represent themselves as the legitimate government representatives. At one point the court had to institute something of a first-come-first-served rule, refusing to recognize other embassies that arrived in the same year, requiring that they sort it out back in the islands. This happened during a time when the authority of the state was, of course, quite weak, leading to a period of warlordism.

In the end, I don’t know that there will be consensus around any one particular year or event for the formation of what would become the Japanese state. It was, rather, a complex evolution, and there were times when the state was ascendant, and times when it was in decline, especially in the early days. It was, after all, a new idea and a new concept, and it would take some time to work out the kinks.

Generally, I tend to see the early state in the time of Wakatake, aka Yuryaku Tenno. He seems to have had control over a wide swath of the the archipelago. I imagine that control slipped somewhat after him, but I see something else that is important—the elite families. The nobles and the courtiers who supported the state. By tying themselves and their fortunes to it, they bolstered it. That meant they also vied for power, but in that context. Importantly, they could keep the structures in place and moving forward, even during times of weak or even non-existent sovereigns. It was more than just having a powerful, charismatic ruler—it was about having those institutions that were larger than individuals, and which people tied themselves to. And so when the next ruler comes to the throne—however that actually happened—his dynasty would already have the infrastructure in place to move it forward.

Still, we are only talking at this point about the growing power of Yamato. We have not yet come to the point where we first see the term “Nihon”, or “Japan”, but that is coming. For now, we’ll continue looking at the paramounts of Yamato and their rule and keep an eye out as we enter more and more reliably historic periods.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 74: Yamato and State Formation.
We are finally back on the archipelago, after taking a few episodes to look a little more in depth at the continent, particularly at the culture that grew up in the Yellow and Yangzi rivers between the 3rd and late 6th centuries—the same period, generally, as the Mounded Tomb Culture in the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula. We’ll probably be going back there, especially as the 6th century is going to see the arrival of several new things from the continent, including Buddhism and various aspects of material culture.
This is going to be a shorter episode, and mostly recap, as we are going to re-ground ourselves in the archipelago and try to set the stage for the rest of the 6th century. To start with, let’s look back what we know, so far. A lot of this is going to be things we’ve covered before, but sometimes it helps to step back and look at the larger picture of what is going on in the story, especially in terms of state formation.
This topic – state formation, or in other words, exactly when “Japan” came to be - is something we’ve touched on, but it is an important point as we try to piece together the history of Japan. Of course, the Chronicles claim that Japan is and always was a state, more or less. They even use the term “Nihon” well before its attested existence, as well as the term “Sumera no Mikoto” for the rulers—something that basically claims the sovereigns were not mere rulers, or kings, but heavenly emperors, equal to those who sat upon the Tang dynasty throne, over on the continent.
But states don’t just appear out of nothing. Groups of people gather together, create systems by which to govern themselves, and then, at some point, come to see themselves as a nation. When and how this happens is often murky, however, and there is rarely a single moment when one can definitively say that a polity is a state, short of a written document declaring it so—and even that can’t always be trusted. In fact, there may be multiple peaks where a polity starts to show the traits of statehood, but then there is the question of whether or not they are sustained beyond just a single strongman and his—or her—ideas and cult of personality. To that end, let’s look at what we know of the Kofun period and what evidence we have, besides just what the Chronicles try to tell us.
First off, in the 3rd century, we have reference in the chronicles of the Cao Wei dynasty to Himiko, the so-called “Queen of Wa”, in Yamateh, the largest of several Wa states—for more on her, go back to Episode 13.
From what we know of this period, “Wa” was more an indication of ethnicity than any kind of state, and ethnic Wa people were likely still resident with other ethnic groups on the Korean peninsula at that time. In addition, there are other groups on the archipelago that are mentioned later in the Chronicles, and we know that there were descendants of the Jomon populations still resident in parts of the islands. Whether or not the Kumaso, the Hayato, the Emishi, or Tsuchigumo refer to simply different Wa groups or to individuals of other ethnicities, speaking another language isn’t necessarily clear, as the Chronicles seem more focused on their position vis-à-vis Yamato. Still, we see enough evidence that there are both common practices and diversity throughout the archipelago.
While we have no direct evidence of Himiko in the islands—or nothing that the scholarly community as a whole can come together around—we do have physical evidence that this was a period of change, and there is a lot to point to Yamato, and specifically to the area at the base of Mt. Miwa. Not only do we have the remains of the palace found at Makimuku, and archaeological traces from around the archipelago, but it is also where we see the first of the monumental keyhole shaped tombs.
To be clear, this wasn’t the start of the mounded tomb culture. On the archipelago, that goes back to the funkyubo, mounds with multiple burials, which began back around the middle Yayoi period. And we also see mounded tombs on the peninsula as well. For the funkyubo, these were typically communal burials—even if only for a portion of the community. These mounds eventually became tombs for individuals, and the keyhole tombs, with their rounded, circular rear mounds and the trapezoidal front were a particular feature of the Yamato region, at least at first.
The existence of these large tombs is generally taken as an indication that the community—and by extension the leader of that community—was able to organize considerable amounts of labor. Many have theorized that the organization of such labor arose from the need for communal agriculture, but once such labor exists it can be used in various ways, from building and expanding agricultural fields, but also for military and other state actions.
The expansion of the keyhole shaped tomb mounds is seen as an expansion of the influence of what Gina Barnes refers to as the Miwa Polity, our early Yamato community. Here a lot of people struggle to refer to it as a state. Sure, they can organize labor and make things happen, but what really is a “state”? Typically it consists of government, defined territory, a set of belonging by the people in it, laws, that sort of thing—you know, the sorts of things that don’t show up in the archaeological record all that well. Exact definitions of when something becomes a “state” can vary from person to person, depending on whom you talk to, but it is something other than simply a familial or clan structure. The people in the state are connected by something more than kinship. Max Weber described the state as a body that monopolized the use of legitimate physical violence in a given geographic territory. In other words, the state can arrest people, incarcerate them, and even put them to death, and it is generally considered “legitimate”. Meanwhile if one person were to try to do that to another—or even one group, or gang—then that is typically considered illegitimate. You can’t just go and hit your neighbor, no matter how many “hit-me” pheromones they might be putting off. Unless, of course, you can claim to be part of the state and you have a good reason, like they looked at you funny.
Many have built on Max Weber’s theories, and there is more nuance than just the person with the biggest club, though many still fall back on his definition as the baseline.
The general theory in the archipelago at the time we are looking at it is that we are still working on a more tribal basis, with groups associated through bonds of real or fictional kinship. Earlier scholars linked these bonds with the “uji” structure of groups like the Mononobe and the Ohotomo, but more recently this appears to be a late development.
Early authority may have stemmed from spiritual authority, emphasizing the Yamato sovereign’s connection to the deity of Mt. Miwa, though it was also likely based on their position in a complex trade network that ran from the continent, through the peninsula, and on to the archipelago. The development of trade networks are one of the theorized mechanisms for how societies get more complex. Here many people point to the mirrors that Himiko has said to have received, and there have been efforts to connect mirrors found at various tombs around the archipelago with common batches that likely came over from the continent at the same time. In effect, the Miwa polity was setting itself up as an authority on not only spiritual matters, but in what made someone “elite”.
Still, evidence of influence is not the same as evidence of control. Just because mirrors and tombs show up in different areas does not meant that Yamato had direct control over that region like some kind of vassal state. Later on it may have actually been the case that there were regulations on different types of tombs for different individuals, but early on it may have been simply related to how much labor a single group could organize.
Early on, many kofun appear to be carved out of the landscape, from existing ridges and hills. This would certainly have cut down on labor costs. Effectively these early tombs, impressive as they are, are little more than a platform, with a standard burial dug into the round back half of the mound, and decorated with a variety of haniwa—circular, terracotta decorations. As we previously mentioned, these haniwa were probably originally pillars for other kinds of vessels, possibly for offerings of some kind, but they morphed into various shapes. From the fourth century we have figures of birds, houses, and various weapons.
Then there are the various goods found inside different kofun. While those tombs designated as belonging to ancestors of the current Japanese imperial house have been largely been off-limits to full-on, intrusive excavations, there are others that have been made available, or tombs that have been opened in previous centuries, either officially or otherwise, and the grave goods deposited with individuals have also given us some idea of what life was like.
Early on we see bronze mirrors and elite items, as well as beads and jewelry, sometimes from quite far away, indicating extensive trade routes. And in the third to fourth century we also find armor and weapons. Trading—or raiding—for elite goods was likely an important part of the culture, and possibly something that helped encourage groups to work together, particularly when it came to raids on the Korean peninsula. Based on stories in the islands and on the continent, the kinds of attacks that the Wa are said to have launched appear to have required a number of groups to band together. Ishimoda Sho suggested that these attacks were one reason that different groups worked together, and lists it as one of the causes for eventual state formation.
In the latter part of the 4th century, things were changing. In the islands we see the arrival of horse equipment showing up in the tombs, and the tombs themselves change. They grow large—the largest that the archipelago will see. This era is associated with Homuda Wake and Ohosazaki no Mikoto, as well as the massive Daisen Kofun—which we generally covered in episodes 40 to 52. From Homuda Wake onward is generally considered the second dynasty, sometimes referred to as the Kawachi court, given that many of them are said to have ruled from Naniwa and their monumental tombs are in the land of Kawachi.
The changes during this era have led people like Egami Namio to postulate that there must have been some kind of new rulers that made their way to the Kinki region from Kyushu, or possibly all the way from the peninsula. Proponents of the Horse-rider theory pointed to the new assemblages in the tombs and the connections to Baekje and suggested that a new warrior culture had come in and defeated the existing rulers, setting up their own, paramount state. Stories of conquest from Kyushu certainly are not uncommon. After all, that is the story given for Iware Biko himself, aka Jimmu Tenno, as well as Homuda Wake—or perhaps more appropriately his mother, Okinaga Tarashi-hime.
Either way, it does seem that there was a new dynasty in place, and they seem to have been at the height of their power under Ohohatsuse Wakatakeru, aka Yuuryaku Tenno. This dynasty is better attested to than the previous, with actual names on swords and other such things. We also see various changes in the archaeological record, some of which we’ve mentioned in terms of the placement of the tombs and the horse-riding gear, but there is also an increased presence of people and items from the continent in general.
Note that I’m not hawking the horse-rider theory, here. While certainly horses changed the archipelago, that doesn’t mean that some Buyeo prince came galloping through on a campaign of conquest. It is just as likely that this was all part of the archipelago’s increased contacts with the peninsula. In addition, the build-up is gradual, and so even though we talk about things like a new dynasty and changes in the kofun, this didn’t happen overnight. The rate of change that we do see is consistent with a society that is simply more connected with their neighbors, and who were taking on those things—particularly technologies—that were the most beneficial to them.
Some of those technologies were not necessarily physical, which makes them hard to verify or track down—at least until the history gets a little more reliable. For example, some of these are religious ideas; Gina Barnes has pointed to the cult of the Queen Mother of the West, popular on the continent during the time of the Cao Wei and Queen Himiko, as one example. Most of the physical evidence for this belief coming into the archipelago is in the form of those bronze mirrors I’ve already mentioned, that were imported, likely in large batches as part of the diplomatic missions sent by Himiko or someone from the islands. Many of these mirrors contain depictions of the Queen Mother of the West and her counterpart, the King Father of the East. Furthermore, some similarities can be drawn with later Japanese beliefs and religious ideas, but that still isn’t solid evidence.
We likewise have other evidence of connections in various stories and legends with the Korean peninsula—Susanowo, comes to mind, as do stories of Ame no Hiboko, whom we discussed in episode 16 and episode 30, respectively. Some of these contain details that may date them, such as the descriptions of the underworld that liken it to later kofun styles, with their horizontal entrances rather than vertical shaft burials.
It isn’t all just stories, however. New techniques for governing large amounts of people also were likely imported into the archipelago, probably along with the ethnic Han scribes that were coming over from places like Baekje. Once again, new tools of statecraft don’t necessarily show up clearly in the archaeological record, but we have some evidence for their use.
For example, we can see the Wa playing on the world—or at least regional—stage during the Liu Song dynasty. At least five rulers sent missions to the Liu Song court. Previous missions had gone to the Cao Wei and Jin courts from Himiko and Toyo, but most of the concerns seem to have been localized to the archipelago and focused on the goods that were being brought over as part of the missions. However, the missions during the Liu Song seemed more focused on the claims of the Wa to the Korean peninsula in general. Regardless of how realistic such claims may or may not have been, they show a concern, at least, with the type of political structures created in the Yellow River region, and which Han scribes and officials spread to outlying areas along with Sinitic written culture. In fact, it is highly likely that there were descendants of Han bureaucrats who, themselves, were assisting these emerging polities in the finer points of statecraft as they also brought in other ideas from the Sinitic corpus of knowledge. Furthermore, trouble on the Korean peninsula was pushing refugees to the islands, who would likely have further supported these cultural changes.
Written culture would not only have opened up the archipelago to ideas about governance, but it also would have helped provide methods to better control large areas of land. While local magnates would still be required, written edicts and orders could be carried to the far reaches of one’s influence. With the advent of horse-riding, that would have only helped bring groups closer together, making distances shorter and increasing the ability to communicate clearly between center and periphery.
Despite all of this development, I can’t help but notice that we are still talking about the “Wa” in general. This appears to be an ethnonym, applied to Japonic-speaking groups by the Han and Wei dynasties, and it may have even been how they referred to themselves as a group. However, it isn’t the same as the name of a state, like Yamato, or even Baekje and Silla. This could be purely apathy on the part of the Han scribes writing this down on the continent, but then again, those other states emerged to be known as themselves, so it is hard to say what is going on. Perhaps they had simply adopted the name “Wa”—certainly it has continued to be a general term for Japan down to the modern day. Things like “Wafu”, meaning “Japanese style” is used for anything from food to clothing. A “washitsu” is a Japanese room, while “wagyu” is the term for a special (and delicious) breed of Japanese beef cattle. Still, “Wa” as used outside of Japan seems to refer to a broad swath of people, not all of whom were necessarily under the direct authority of a centralized court in the islands.
In the period between Ohosazaki and Wakatakeru, covered in episodes 53 to 56, we see a clear rise in the power of the Kawachi dynasty, but if the Chronicles are to be believed, it is regularly plagued by succession disputes. Therefore, each reign is almost a one-off—a charismatic and powerful ruler, perhaps, but with very little control—and possibly even little care—for what happens after they pass away.
And so, by the end of the 5th century, the Wa polity in the Kawachi region was certainly commanding tremendous forces—just look at tombs like Daisen, as I mentioned before. But as a state it was still growing and evolving.
We also see a continued evolution in the archaeological record, and in the Kinai region certain changes appear to coincide with the end of the Kawachi court and the rise of a new dynasty. Whereas previous burials were vertical pits, dug straight into the tops of the mounds, these changed to horizontal stone chambers, with a corresponding corridor leading in from outside. These chambers were, themselves, often made of giant stones, over which the dirt was placed.
Horizontal corridor-chamber tombs are seen at least as early as the Han dynasty on the continent—so by the 3rd century at least. Han dynasty style tombs with horizontal corridors leading to burial chambers were brought to the Korean peninsula along with the Han commandries. This corridor-chamber style was subsequently adopted and integrated into the tomb mounds of Goguryeo, and then eventually spread to the rest of the peninsula—to Baekje and Silla. Finally, it crossed the straits to the archipelago.
Horizontal corridor-chamber tombs allowed easier access, as they could be sealed with a door that could later be removed if anyone needed to get back in. We also see horizontal tombs evolve with multiple chambers, also with some evidence of multiple burials—such as a wife and husband being buried together. This likely indicates a change in the type of burial customs and rituals.
These changes are first seen in Kyushu by about the 4th to mid-5th century, showing up in the Kibi region by the late 5th and early 6th, and then in the area of Kawachi and Yamato by the 6th century—roughly the time of our next dynasty. From this point on we also see more human-like figures and different types of objects and animals displayed among the haniwa. There are, of course, more equestrian goods and continental-style swords—some of which we do find earlier, meaning there is no clear, consistent break where we can definitively state that there was a sweeping change, like one might expect if there was a military conquest and cultural replacement. Rather, these are all changes that could be attributed to the natural changes in culture, though with clear indications of continental influence. For example, when we see mural paintings emerge, these would seem to have obvious connections to continental traditions.
Tomb mounds would eventually decline in popularity. Rather than building giant tombs, labor would be shifted in support of the new religion that would arrive in the 6th and 7th century: Buddhism. Over time, the building of temples, which was, itself, an act of merit-making in the Buddhist system, took the main focus of state-sponsored labor. Eventually, even Buddhist burial practices, including cremation, would be adopted, the and the building of giant mounded tombs would largely subside until a resurgence in the late Edo period in mounded tombs—at least for imperial mausoleums. Mausoleums for Emperors Taisho and Showa can be found in Hachioji city, for example. But I digress.
The change in burial practice in the late 5th to early 6th century also hints at changes to some of the religious practices, or at the very least the stories around them. We mentioned Susanowo and the depictions of traveling into the underworld, often by an entrance in a hillside. Then there are some connections between the story of Amaterasu and the heavenly rock cave. Amaterasu herself in those stories is connected with weaving, an activity that came over from the continent, as Michael Como points out in his book, “Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan”. Add to that her apparent death—indicated by her entering the cave—and then eventual “resurrection” when she comes out, which also seems tied to the concept of these horizontal style stone rooms. Finally, there are the various kami present, representing families like the Imbe and the Nakatomi—powerful ritualist families whom, to be honest, we haven’t seen too much of up to this point. Rather our narrative up through the first two dynasties has been more focused on the likes of the Mononobe no Muraji, the Wani no Omi, and the Heguri no Omi—and more recently the Ohotomo no Muraji. Spoiler alert: Expect to see further changes as different families vie for and achieve political prominence. Certain names will become more common in the narrative while others might decline. In some cases, such as with the Soga and the Fujiwara, these may be more explicit than in others.
This is the changing state of things in the beginning of the 6th century, which is where we will next pick up our narrative in the chronicles. The emerging state, centered in the Kinai region, between the lands of Kawachi and Yamato, certainly has influence and precedence with many of its neighbors. However, there seems to have been some kind of crisis in the late 5th or early 6th century. Interestingly, Wakatakeru despite his own record of cruelty, does not appear to take any real blame for it. Rather, it is a descendant of Prince Oshiwa, whom Wakatakeru assassinated, who is the last sovereign of that dynasty. Ohatsuse Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou, is described as young, immature, cruel, and, most importantly, without issue. So when he dies at a relatively young age, the throne is left open—see episode 69.
Next episode, we’ll deal with how the court fills the gap left by Wakasazaki, and by what twisted logic they are able to claim a so-called “unbroken” lineage from today all the way back to the Heavenly Grandson and Amaterasu, herself.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
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And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

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Episode 73: The Southern and Northern Dynasties

October 1, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Man v. Tiger. Era of the Southern and Northern Dynasties. From the Art Gallery of New South Whales.

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This episode looks at the period generally known as the Southern and Northern Dynasties on the continent, focusing mostly on the Yangzi and Yellow River regions. It is an extremely confusing period if you try to keep track of everything, particularly among the northern kingdoms of the Yellow River Basin region.

By the way, if you look elsewhere you will often see this translated as the Northern and Southern dynasties. This is usually because “North-South” is how we tend to organize in English, but in Asia it is often reversed. This goes hand in hand with the maps, which tended, before the modern period, to place South at the top—assuming there was a “top”. This, in turn, comes from the idea that the ruler sits in the north, looking south, so many maps are made with the idea of the ruler sitting in the north and looking out towards the south to read them. That tends to flip the script and put South above or before North.

Now, for a brief outline: The period starts with downfall of the Western Jin dynasty. Not to be confused with a later Jin (金) dynasty, this was really the continuation of that Cao Wei under the new Sima sovereigns, who had overthrown the descendants of Cao Cao and briefly unified the Yellow River and Yangzi River regions. They couldn't keep it together for long, however, and in 317 CE Luoyang was sacked, and the Sima court fled south to JIankang--modern Nanjing. Quick note here: Nanjing (南京) literally means “Southern Capital”, and while it would go through many different hands, Jiankang would largely remain the southern capital on the Yangzi until the late 6th century.

Meanwhile, in the north, we have the era known as the Sixteen Kingdoms—or at least that’s one name for it., and it pretty adequately captures the level of chaos from the 3rd to 6th century. Sixteen kingdoms—I hesitate to say dynasties, as many fell apart pretty much as soon s the founder died—all in the span of three centuries. Even more confusing, many of them either took the name of existing dynasties—so we get the Han, the Qin, the Zhou, the Wei, etc. all showing up again and again in the histories. Later historians have broken them out into either “Former” and “Later” or else “Northern”, “Eastern”, or “Western” depending on the site of their capital city.

In the south, we see the continued development of Han culture, in both material culture and in speech. Generally speaking, the South is going to be considered the more culturally elegant exemplar, for some time to come. That said, they were also more political and less connected to family. Also, they tended to be more patriarchal.

In the north, we see a mix of Han culture with the surrounding nomadic groups. From the Xiongnu, or Hongna—possibly Huna—people to the Xianbei tribes and others. They brought in different values, often built on the practical realities of living through times when family was often more important than the state, which could change at any moment. That didn’t mean people didn’t vie for control and didn’t dream of being the next great dynasty, but those not on the very top often remained braced for something to happen at any moment.

So let’s hit some of the basic dates, first, in the South:

Jin dynasty warrior, from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Photo by author.

Jin dynasty warrior, from the Tokyo National Museum. Photo by author.

318 - Eastern Jin retreats to Jiankang (modern Nanjing) on the Yangzi river.
383 - Eastern Jin successfully repels an attack by the northern state of the Former Qin.
402 - General Huan Xuan leads an army against Jiankang and purges the officials, but he is overthrown by a general, Liu Yu, who restores the Eastern Jin, but at the same time he takes power for himself.
417 - An expedition by Liu Yu of the Eastern Jin briefly retakes Chang’an and Luoyang.
420 - Liu Yu officially overthrows the Eastern Jin and the Liu Song dynasty takes over at Jiankang. Over the course of their history they’ll be visited by envoys from at least five different Japanese sovereigns—or at least people claiming that title.
479 - Southern Qi takes over at Jiangkang
502 - Liang dynasty comes to power in Jiankang. There are paintings of individuals said to be envoys from various countries to the Liang, but it is unclear to me if all of these were actually envoys, and how accurate their portrayal is. On top of that, it looks like the original has been lost and what we have are painted copies, which may or may not accurately reflect the original.
557 - Chen dynasty takes charge at Jiangkang. Meanwhile, the Liang dynasty court continues to operate, sometimes called the Western Liang, out of Jianling, in a very small, reduced area along the Yangzi between the Chen and the Northern Zhou.
589 - Chen dynasty—and the remnants of the Western Liang—fell to the Sui.

Up in the NORTH, however, things are more chaotic, as I said. It is even more chaotic when you realize that these dynasties often changed their names, and used classical names to try to add further legitimacy to what were basically the states of strongmen warlords:

Northern Wei Official, from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Photo by author.

Western Wei soldiers, from the Shaanxi History Museum. Photo by author.

Western Wei official (? - Dark lord of the Sith?) from the Shaanxi History Museum. Photo by author.

Northern Qi hunter, from the British Museum. Photo by author.

N. Zhou cavalryman, from the Shaanxi History Museum. Photo by author.

317 - The Xiongnu state of “Han”, officially founded as of 304, destroys Luoyang and sends the Jin court south. They set up their capital in Chang’an.
319 - Around 319 the Xiongnu Hanchange their name to “Zhao”, generally known to history as the “Former Zhao”, as a bandit-turned-general named Shi Le sets up his own Zhao dynasty, known as the Late Zhao.
320 - Without the Jin, the western areas of Gansu come under the sway of the Liang (or Former Liang) dynasty
328 - Shi Le and his “Later Zhao” brutally unified much of the north, but in 333, only five years later, Shi Le dies. His son and heir are killed by a cousin, Shi Hu, who rules through violence. Shi Hu even kills his own heir, his heir’s wife, and twenty-six of his children.
337 - While the Later Zhao rules over the yellow River, the Murong tribe of the Xianbei set up the state of Yan—known to us as “Former Yan”—around the Liaoning area.
342 - Former Yan destroys the capital of Goguryeo and then, in 346, devastates Buyeo, freeing itself up to concentrate on the Yellow River Basin
349 - Shi Hu dies and—surprise, surprise—his state falls apart. Three of his heirs were killed and replaced within a year, and then an adopted, ethnic Han son (Shi Le and Shi Hu were still from the Xiongnu tribe), Ran Min, seized power and established the Ran Wei, using the name of the old Wei kingdom.
351 - In the chaos after fall of the Zhao, general Fu Jian creates his own state, naming it the Qin (aka Former Qin) and setting up the capital at Chang’an, near the original Qin capital.
352 - The state of the Murong tribe of the northeast defeats Ran Min and takes control of the Yellow River Floodplain. Their capital by this time is at Jicheng (or just Ji City)—modern Beijing, or Northern Capital.
357 - Former Yan relocated to the city of Ye, the ancient capital of Cao Cao and the Later Zhao.
376 - The Former Qin defeats its rivals and once again unifies the North
383 - The sourthern Eastern Jin repels an attack by the Former Qin, who lost. That loss led to various uprisings against the Former Qin
384 - The Murong Xianbei once again instituted the Yan dynasty. In fact, the found two “Yan” states, known as the Western Yan and the Later Yan. The Western Yan take Chang’an from the Former Qin in 385. At the same time, a member of the Qiang people sets himself up as emperor of the Qin—what we call the Later Qin.
386 - The Liang dynasty is re-established under an ethnic Di sovereign in much of the territory of the Former Liang. Meanwhile the Tuoba, or Tagbatch, tribe of the Xianbei set up their own state, taking the name “Wei”, or more commonly the “Northern Wei”.
387 - Another Xianbei dynasty sets itself up west of Chang’an. It had a variety of names, but mostly it is known as the Western Qin, and it was often a vassal state of more powerful dynasties. There is even an interregnum from 400-409, but then it returns.
394 - The Former Qin is finally defeated, as is the Western Yan
397 - Two states break off from the Later Liang, creating the Northern and Southern Liang. The Northern Liang had a dynasty descended from the Xiongnu while the Southern Liang had a dynasty from a Xianbei tribe.
403- Fall of the Later Liang
407 - Rise of the Xia, who ruled out of the Ordos desert, in the north, and eventually included Chang’an in its territory
414 - The Southern Liang falls to the Western Qin.
417 - The Later Qin falls, and the Eastern Jin briefly recapture Chang’an and Luoyang. The general who does this, Liu Yu, goes back south to take over and found the Liu Song dynasty a few years later.
431 - Western Qin falls, as does the Xia.
439 - The Tuoba kingdom of Northern Wei re-unifies northern China; the Northern Liang moves to Gaochang, in the west, which eventually becomes its own Gaochang kingdom.
493 - The kingdom of Northern Wei moves from Pingcheng to Luoyang and adopts ethnic Han dress and language for the court, distancing itself from its semi-nomadic roots and alienating many of the Tuoba tribesmen serving in border regions.
524 - Mutinies along the frontier of Northern Wei due to lack of provisions—especially food. The garrisons are moved further south, where food is more plentiful, but they continue to destabilize the government.
534 - Northern Wei disintegrates, ending by 535. From that, rises the Eastern Wei, ruling out of Luoyang and controlling the lower reaches of the Yellow River, and the Western Wei, ruling out of Chang’an and over points to the West.
550 - The Eastern Wei falls to the newly founded Northern Qi, ruling out of the city of Ye
557 - Fall of the Western Wei, who were replaced in Chang’an by the Northern Zhou.
577 - Northern Zhou conquers the Northern Qi.
581 - Sui dynasty established, overthrowing the Northern Zhou dynasty.
589 - Sui dynasty had conquered the Chen dynasty and reunited the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 73: The Southern and Northern Dynasties
Thanks for coming back. We only have a little more time that we are going to spend on the continent before we get back to the archipelago, so please bear with me and we’ll soon get back to Japan and the rise of the imperial family with the latest dynasty, in the 6th century.
This episode, we are going to look at capital cities, gardens, hermits, and finish up with a very brief account of the political changes in the South and in the North. Like the past couple of episodes, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a comprehensive history of this period—I’m mainly just hoping to get enough of an outline that we can refer to it as we head back to our main topics. I’d like to say that I’m going to make this period make more sense, but honestly, it is extremely chaotic, so that is not likely. But we will try to hit the major highlights.
Given all of that, why are we even talking about it? Well, as we’ve seen in the Chronicles, there is plenty of contact with the continent at this time, and understanding some of the things that go on here might help us later on as we see things coming to the archipelago. There is also a tendency, in my opinion, to take a look at the continent—and especially the area of modern China—and make assumptions that the Middle Kingdom is the pinnacle of civilization in the Asia at the time. Certainly, at this point, groups around the Yellow River and Yangzi region are utilizing complex instruments of statecraft that far outstrip what we currently see in the archipelago—even on the Korean peninsula. But until the 6th and really the 7th centuries this area is in flux. While dynasties continued to make grandiose claims, which Yamato rulers would piggyback off of—like the Five Kings of Wa and their request for titles from the Liu Song court—their control was tenuous, and fraught.
In addition, when Japan does start to adopt more continental culture, it may be helpful to understand just where the roots of that culture came from, even as it sees a particularly insular twist.
Finally, this will give us context as we start to see the archipelago ingest other things from outside, particularly as we examine the influx of Buddhism, which arrives in about the 6th century, and other connections to the larger trading routes, generally known as the Silk Road.
So, last episode we covered up through the fall of the Han dynasty in the 3rd century and the rise of the three Kingdoms of Shu Han, near modern Chengdu; Cao Wei, up around the Yellow River, and Eastern Wu along the central and lower reaches of the Yangzi. The Cao Wei eventually changed to the Jin dynasty, started with the Sima family, who replaced the Cao family of Cao Wei and then went on to conquer most of the Yangzi as well as the Yellow River region. However, their northern capital at Luoyang was sacked in 317 by a state calling itself the Han. Founded by Liu Yan, this so-called “Han” state claimed the name of the previously highly successful imperial dynasty, despite the fact that they were actually ethnic Xiongnu, one of the main nomadic people who challenged Han hegemony in the north.
We’ll hear more about Liu Yan and his Han dynasty later. For now I’ll just note an interesting tidbit about the Xiongnu—or perhaps something more like the Hong-na or even the Huna, based on the pronunciation of the time. You see, they were a major nomadic empire across the Eurasian steppes from at least the 3rd century BCE, and they appear to be connected to—if not the same group—as the Huns who traveled west in the 5th century to the Volga and eventually invading the Roman Empire. That’s right, the same group that was giving the Han dynasty and its successor states so many problems may have been the ancestors to the people that eventually went on to threaten Rome and its allies.
With the destruction of Luoyang in 317, the Sima emperors moved the court down to the city of Jiankang on the Yangzi river. With them came much of the ethnic Han northern aristocracy—those who did not or could not stay and find a place in the new Hongna, or Xiongnu, Han kingdom. All told there were probably more than a million people who fled south with the destruction of Luoyang.
Now as we’ve seen throughout history humans have always been accommodating when a large in flux of newcomers shows up and suddenly puts down roots, right? Well, maybe not quite so much. There is plenty of evidence of tension between the northern and southern families, but the newly displaced Northern court found ways to woo the Southerners over—pun intended, as all puns should be—and some of the Northern families even intermarried with the Southerners.
The Southern Elites—those who had established themselves in the area of Wu for generations—mostly had their country estates southeast of the capital city, Jiankang, around Lake Tai, near the site of the capital of the old state of Wu, around Suzhou. The northern emigres, on the other hand, settled east of the city, in an area known as Guiji, since the land around Lake Tai had largely been taken generations back.
These villas and country estates were often expansive affairs, with various orchards, animals, etc. This can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the landscape of the south, as we’ve already discussed, was a little different than that of the north. For one thing the city, Jiangkang, was not a walled city, like those in the north—at least not at this time. As I mentioned some time back, the city didn’t initially have walls—or, well, not the giant city walls common elsewhere as a necessary security requirement. There were walls around the segregated palace area, a common feature of most capital cities, but the city otherwise relied on the river and surrounding mountains as their main defenses. And so the city, unlike most up to that point, had a natural flow from an urban to rural environment.
And this is a pretty big change from cities in the north. While we have limited information on most of these cities—after all, they were built up time and again, usually destroying traces of what came before—we have some idea of their evolution. Early on, the capital was the place where the elite sovereigns conducted their rites—it was basically the site of the sovereign’s ancestral temple. Later, it was distinguished as the site of the royal palace, with walls and towers. In the Han dynasty, it became a ritual center conforming—or at least attempting to conform—to a Confucian ideal as laid out in the Zhou-li, the Rites of Zhou, the classic that Confucius lauded and which is said to have been penned by the Duke of Zhou himself, though many things attributed to it may have been later innovations.
According to the Zhou-li, the ideal capital city was a square or rectangle, with a walled palace in the center, and three gates on each side. Nine roads would run east to west, and nine roads would run north to south, creating a classic grid pattern. There were other ritual requirements, but this basic pattern was held up as the ideal for an imperial city.
More often then not, however, capital cities merely aspired to these dimensions. The palace compound—a walled “inner city” itself, where the sovereign and the courts conducted their business—was typically set not in the center, but in the northern districts, as the throne was expected to face southward. This also had the side effect that maps—at least those where directionality was important—typically placed south at the top, rather than the bottom, as it was assumed that the ruler would view them from a southward facing position.
These cities were places for the business of government and for housing the people who made that government run, and were decidedly urban in their characteristics. Rural areas and farmland only existed outside, beyond the walls of the city.
In some ways this ideal city plan also matches up with the characteristics of communities along the Yellow River floodplain. While low, flat land made for good farming, villages and communities would often cluster together on higher ground to avoid the inevitable floods that would eventually come when the Yellow River broke through the banks containing it, creating a distinction between the rural fields and living spaces. As violent clashes broke out in the north, many people would seek shelter in walled communities—cities or fortresses—to defend themselves from the raids.
And so imagine what it must have been like for the northerners who made their way down to the new capital of Jiankang. Along the Yangzi, farmers were much more likely to live in amongst their fields, not huddled together, and even the city transitioned smoothly from urban to rural in a natural flow. It is little wonder that there was a greater emphasis on the natural environment in the south.
Those serving in government offices would have had property in the city. After all, nobody wants a longer commute than necessary. But the Great Families would also have their rural estates, and so people would go back and forth between the rural and urban environment.
This led to people incorporating the rural into their own lives. Descriptions of Jiankang suggest that there was a lot more nature in the city than in the northern capitals, often in the form of gardens. There was a preserve for the sovereign and his chosen guests, like a private Central Park, but elites also cultivated their own gardens, sometimes stealing the view beyond the urban environment and incorporating the far mountains. These gardens were carefully crafted and designed, meant to provide myriad views.
In the archipelago, we see a similar incorporation by the Japanese aristocracy of gardens into their estates. The Shinden-zukuri style often incorporated a lake and a pond, complete with a fishing pavilion, and “stolen views”, where features beyond the owner’s own property were incorporated as part of the overall experience.
In addition, there were the mountains, right there. Han culture had long attributed to the mountains spiritual significance. They were places of great power, and the idea of immortals or others going off to live in the mountains was already a trope in Han society. With the renewed interest in hermitism, which we talked about last episode, it seems that some people took that quite literally. One example is Guo Wen, who lived in the early 4th century. Guo Wen is really the archtype of the southern mountain hermit. It is said that he went up into the hills and wore clothing made only from animals that had died of natural causes, and he ate only things he found or grew himself. The stories even claim that he had tamed a tiger!
Guo Wen’s style of hermiting was certainly the extreme end of the scale. It was the Survivorman version, and hard core. Most people were content with more of a Bear Grylls or perhaps even just a David Attenborough approach. A century after Guo Wen, during end of the Eastern Jin and the early Liu Song dynasty, a man named Xie Lingyun, known as the father of poetry on mountain scenery, broke down the different ways people chose to “Dwell in nature”, coming up with four different categories.
First off there was what he called “cliff-resting”, where you went out, hard core, Guo Wen style, and lived off the land, using caves and whatever shelter you could find. It puts me in mind of the later mountain ascetics in Japan, like the yamabushi, although I’m not sure even they went to such lengths.
Then there was “dwelling in the mountains”, which is what Lingyun himself did. He built himself a house, and not exactly a hut either—it was a full on villa with a garden, orchards, and groves of bamboo. He even had workers landscape the surrounding hillsides to give him a more picturesque view.
If that was still a bit much for you, then there was the idea of Hills and Gardens—a country villa, like those around lake Tai and in the Guiji region. Large estates with carefully managed so-called natural surroundings meant to impress and to be a place where the well-off literati could “retire” from government service, but not necessarily from society at large. These were places where powerful families could host scholars, poets, artists, and others, and through their connections and their relatives still influence the workings of the imperial court.
Finally there was living “Beside the City Wall”—basically an urban or suburban location, usually referring to gardens that individuals would build within their urban properties. Thus even government officials could spend their time off in a constructed natural setting.
One such garden was constructed by one Wang Dao. He was a powerful man in the Sima court of the Eastern Jin dynasty, and one of the forces behind the relocation to Jiankang. He was the one who helped overcome the Southern families’ initial objections, plying them with gifts in terms of court honors and appointments, and he maintained a powerful position in the court. In fact, the Sima emperor by this point was, himself, largely a puppet figure, and it was powerful court nobles like Wang Dao who were, in fact, the true power behind the dynasty.
Wang Dao’s political position meant that he largely would have resided in the capital city, in the city of Jiankang. Whereas many of the elites could retire to their country villas and estates, Wang Dao decided that he would simply build his country villa in the capital, thus cutting his commute drastically. Given his political capital, he apparently had an ability to build quite the garden, one that would start a trend. In so doing, he knew just what his garden needed if he really wanted to impress. It wasn’t enough to replicate the orchards and bamboo groves. The rocks of the mountains and the gentle streams and water. No, he needed his own hermit. And not just any hermit would do—you couldn’t expect to just hire someone off the street to come and live in your garden, as the English often did for their garden follies in the 18th and 19th centuries. No, Wang Dao needed a real hermit. Someone with experience. And fortunately for him, there was a rather famous one right there.
You see, despite warnings by Confucius, who advised against the idea of retiring from life to go live in the mountains, lest you were forgotten by society, the eccentric hermit Guo Wen was apparently something of a celebrity. Word of his extreme hermitism reached Jiankang, and while some of it—such as taming a tiger—was probably a bit of hyperbole, he was exactly the kind of hermit that Wang Dao was looking for. And so Wang Dao enticed Guo Wen to come down from the mountains and to live in his garden, where he could partake of the natural fruits and all that was available there. Wang Dao even attempted to replicate some of Guo Wen’s own mountain habitat, to make him feel at home.
And this arrangement seems to have worked for a while. Guo Wen continued to do his thing, but now within the confines of Wang Dao’s garden, and Wang Dao now had an actual, been-there-done-that hermit that he could show off to his guests during gatherings at his house.
However, it wasn’t too long before Guo Wen tired of the garden. No doubt it was small, and for all that it had what he might need to live, it was still an urban garden and nowhere near as expansive as the mountains themselves. Guo Wen requested permission to leave, but Wang Dao, not accustomed to having people refuse him, would not let him go. And so Guo Wen eventually went on a hunger strike, insisting that he would rather die than continue to live in this city garden. Wang Dao refused to give him, however, and eventually Guo Wen, true to his word, passed away in 334.
While this tale may have a dark end, it does describe the lengths that people would go for their gardens, and gardening and garden criticism—that is, judging other people’s gardens—became a major cultural activity in the South. Whether it was the expansive scenery surrounding a country villa, or an urban garden retreat, having a sophisticated garden was a huge get for anyone with pretentions to nobility.
In Japan, gardens would be a key part of many estates in the capital cities. The Chronicles talk about gardens in some of the stories, including koi ponds and the like, but the clearest example of early gardens shows up in the 8th century in the purpose-built capital of Heijo-kyo, in Nara, and they would be a standard feature of any cultured residence. The ideas behind gardens would certainly evolve and take on a decidedly Japanese aesthetic, but some of the concepts have their roots all the way back on the continent.
The Eastern Jin lasted from 317 until it fell and the Liu Song arose around 420. The Liu Song continued to rule out of Jiankang, however, and so in many ways it seems it was more simply a matter of a change in management. They did eventually build up walls around Jiankang, as the capital would regularly come under threat time and again. Some of this was internal strife. Wang Dao’s cousin, Wang Dun, was a general posted to the Central Yangzi, and in 322 he marched his army to Jiangkang to purge those he saw as a threat. He took control of the Jin, but died two years later in 324 from illness.
Still, it was not uncommon for those posted out in Central Yangzi and on the frontier borders with the north to be just as likely a threat as they were to protect the court.
When the Hongna state fell, many pushed to try to retake the north. That’s the Han state that had destroyed Luoyang, though they had later changed their own name to “Zhao”. There was certainly a desire to retake the Yellow River region, the traditional ethnic Han heartland, but doing so was fraught. First off, there was simply the logistical challenges involved. Second there were the internal politics. After all, anyone who was sufficiently successful would have the popularity and power to challenge the power of the court, themselves.
The South did manage to briefly retake Luoyang and Chang’an several times over the following centuries, but nothing really held. In 479, the Liu Song gave way to the Southern Qi. In 502, they yielded to the Liang dynasty—sometimes called the Southern Liang. The Liang dynasty lost the upper reaches of the Yangzi—the area of Shu—to the northern state of the Western Wei. In 557, the Chen dynasty overthrew the Liang dynasty, and they would rule until submitting to the rule of the Sui in 589, marking the end of the Southern and Northern dynasties period.
Throughout all of this, Jiankang remained the capital of the south, and it seems to have stayed largely in the hands of ethnic Han rulers. The Japanese sent envoys to the Eastern Jin and the Liu Song, and possibly to others—we’ll discuss this as we get back into the Chronicles. But this does seem to have been their main contact until the reunification under the Sui and then, in 618, the Tang dynasty. This was the dynasty that had perhaps the greatest influence on Japanese culture, which we will discuss in time.
Meanwhile, let’s briefly look at the north. We talked about the Hongna state, which itself fell in the early 4th century. There were a series of different states that rose and fell. Many of them were founded by members of the various nomadic or semi-nomadic people of the northern regions. The distinct cultural differences with these groups was apparent in various ways in how they ruled. Often they would reserve high positions for members of their particular tribal or ethnic group, employing Han administrators to assist with running the state and overseeing the farming communities.
One of the more successful states was that of the Murong of the Xianbei tribes. They emerged in the Northeast and eventually took over as the Yan, using the name of the old Han state in the northeast area. They pushed up against groups like the Buyeo and Goguryeo, which had ripples down the Korean peninsula. They also pushed into the Yellow River Floodplain.
Because the Murong were Xianbei, or possibly pronounced “Sa:rbi”—one of the frontier people that the Han had often contested with and even brought in as mercenaries to provide scouts and cavalry for their armies—they understood a different type of fighting. This is perhaps why they had success where the Han and others had not—combining their cavalry with ethnic Han foot soldiers, the Murong Xianbei were the first dynasty to rule over the Yellow River Basin and yet have actual military success against other nomadic groups. This was both because they understood their tactics and because they understood their politics. They knew how to keep tribes divided and fighting each other to prevent them from banding together to rise up.
Even the Murong would only last so long, however. During this period, often known as the sixteen kingdoms because of all of the different dynasties that rose and quickly fell in the north, being on top of the heap often meant that you had painted a large target on your back. Strong rulers, particularly those with military victories, could reward their followers and keep on top, but politics were literally cutthroat. Many of the ethnic Han families that had remained since the time of the Jin stopped involving themselves in politics, instead focusing on their roles as local magnates and defending what was there as the dynasties came and went. Men who went to serve at the court might have hopes of temporary power, but that could easily be taken away as one dynasty fell to the next.
This constant fighting led to several developments.
First, it often meant that rulers had very little direct authority, beyond their direct military might. Defeated generals and their followers might be incorporated into the victor’s government, but as soon as they showed any weakness it was just as likely that those generals would change sides. Loyalty to the state, rather than to a strongman warlord, was rare.
This meant that the rulers were effectively little more than primus inter pares, first among equals. The state itself often only really controlled the area directly around the capital, acting as the largest landlord amongst a sea of landlords. Each new dynasty set up a new capital, and then to supply that capital with the food and goods needed to run it they often resettled captive populations—dependent farmers and the like—onto the land around it. War and chaos meant that many of the people of the Yellow River Floodplain had died or fled south or else into the mountains. And so when armies fought, it was more likely that they were fighting over people, rather than land.
Also, there was greater and greater mixing of cultures and cultural values. Hong-na and Sa:rbi tribes attempted to apply Han style administration, leaning on Han scholars and literati to help them run their states, much as Baekje, Silla, and Goguryeo picked up the scribes and scholars after the fall of the Han commandries in the peninsula. And so there seems to have been a greater role for women, for instance—women playing a greater public role in the nomadic tribes—and food more based on a pastoral diet—mutton and yoghurt feature heavily in descriptions of the cuisine. And yet Han culture was often incorporated in terms of dress, language—especially writing, and more.
This wasn’t always the case. In some instances, Han or non-Han groups would be isolated from government positions. Such was the case early on with the Tuoba or Tagbatch, another Xianbei tribe that rose to power after the Murong and who actively excluded ethnic Han from positions of authority in the government, at least on the outset. Their dynasty is often referred to as the Northern Wei, taking the same name as the earlier Cao Wei kingdom.
About a century into the Tuoba’s reign, in 493, emperor Xiaowen attempted to make the Northern Wei into a more Sinified state. He moved the capital from the northern city of Pingcheng down to Luoyang, and required that Han language and dress be adopted for members of the court. He even merged the Han and Tuoba elite, rotating ethnic Han into military positions.
This ended up being disastrous for the dynasty, as the Sinified government looked inward, while the frontier military garrisons—maintained by Tuoba tribal members who retained closer links to their indigenous lifestyle—were often left neglected. In 524, a governor refused to issue grain to a starving garrison, leading to revolt. In response, the government moved the garrisons southward, into the more fertile regions of the Yellow River, but this just brought more conflict as the garrisons continued to rebel against the increasingly Sinicized court.
The Northern Wei broke into the Eastern and Western Wei, and then there was the rise of the Northern Qi, and finally the Northern Zhou, whose name hearkened all the way back to the era before the Summer and Autumn period itself. The Northern Zhou reunited the northern territories—as well as down into the area of Shu and the Min River basin—but it was eventually overthrown by one of its own generals who then, in 581, set up the Sui dynasty, which, only 8 years later, conquered the southern Chen dynasty and reunited the Yellow River and Yangzi river regions under a single ruler.
The Sui itself was short-lived, but they had quite the impact. For one thing, they got rid of the appointment system of the Nine Ranks—the ranking of positions continued, but no longer could local judges or administrators appoint people to government service. Instead, all potential candidates—or at least those who did not inherit a position through their father--would need to come to the capital city and partake in a civil service exam, testing their knowledge and skills.
In addition, the Sui connected the Yellow River and the Yangzi through the famous Grand Canal. Much like the Great Wall was created by connecting previously extant local walls and geographic features to help guard the borders, the Grand Canal was an ambitious project that connected previously existing canals and waterways such that travel was actually possible from one river system to the other. In an era before cars and trains and other mechanized forms of travel, this played a huge part in connecting the north and south through trade. Travel and communication between the two regions became much easier.
Unfortunately, this grand work—considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site, today—largely bankrupted the government, and is often considered one of the reasons for the Sui dynasty’s downfall. The canal may only have been partially responsible, however. The Sui also exhausted a large number of troops and resources trying to subjugate or destroy Goguryeo, at the head of the Korean peninsula. Goguryeo resisted, however, and their resistance no doubt also cost the Sui dearly. Internal rebellions eventually caused its downfall.
One of these rebels was Li Yuan. The Li family is a perfect example of the kind of intermixing that had been going on in the north for the past several centuries. Though they claimed descent from ethnic Han ancestors—in fact, they claimed a rather dubious connection all the way back to the founder of Daoism, Laozi himself—they had served in the Northern Wei and even taken the Xianbei surname of Daye. Li Yuan, then, was steeped in both the cultures of the nomadic people of the north as well as the ethnic Han. When he rose to power as Emperor Gaozu of the Tang dynasty in 618, he created a blended administration. Not only did he rule as an ethnic Han emperor, but his son, Li Shimin, aka Emperor Taizong, also took the title of the “Khan of Heaven”, representing his rule over the various tribes, including the Turkic people who lived in the deserts to the west, and who controlled large portions of the northern Silk road. Some have attributed the Li family’s success to the fact that they understood both worlds, and certainly the Tang dynasty would be one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan periods in Chinese history.
With all of these centuries of fighting in the north, it is unlikely that there was much contact with the Japanese archipelago directly—or at least nothing that amounted to much for very long. However, the constant fighting put pressure on Buyeo and Goguryeo—and by extension spurred some of the conflict on the continent. This was also one route by which Han culture filtered into the peninsula, as well as through the direct contacts between the peninsular states and the Southern dynasties. During this period, Sinitic language—particularly the writing—as well as government, religion, and even burial practices would find their way to the peninsula, and, from there, over to the archipelago. Some links were direct, but much of what Japan experienced was based on what filtered into and through the peninsula to the archipelago, particularly through the states of Kara and Baekje.
This is probably where we’ll stop for now. There is a lot more information for those who are truly interested in this period. It was significant enough that when the Japanese court split into a northern and southern branches in the 14th century, that they would also hearken back to the phrase “Southern and Northern Dynasties” to describe the period, though of course, their own fracturing was on a much smaller scale, relatively speaking.
I’ve left off discussion of a few other things that came through this period. For instance, religious ideas, from the Queen Mother of the West to Daoist concepts, and even Buddhism, came to the archipelago during this period. Then there is the silk road—at some point we will look more in depth at the connections between the archipelago and the greater trade routes that saw things like Roman and Sassanian glassware making their way into 5th century tombs, not to mention all of the treasures in the 8th century Shosoin collection itself. We’ll get to all of that in time.
For now, we’ll go back to the archipelago and concentrate again on what was happening over there. We’ll take another look at the progress made so far and deal with the fall out of the end of Ohosazaki’s line and the rise of a new dynasty that would come and take the throne and which would continue, as far as we can tell, down to the modern day.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Lewis, Mark Edward. (2009). China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. ISBN 978-0-674-02605-6

Kohn, Livia (ed.) (2004). Daoism Handbook: Volume I. ISBN 0-391-04237-8.
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (ed.) (1993). Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. ISBN s0-02-908752-X.

Episode 72: The Three Kingdoms Period

September 16, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Ming dynasty painting of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo grove, from the Cleveland Museum of Art

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This episode we take a look past the fall of the Han and into the rise of the Three Kingdoms of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu, followed by reuinification under the Western Jin, followed by the Eastern Jin, when they moved their capital down to the old Eastern Wu capital on the Yangzi River.

In that time, we see the creation of the Nine Rank system for government ranks and offices, as well as a glorification of refusing government service—or even retiring and taking up the arts.

Despite the chaos of this period, there is still a lot happening and a lot of innovation that will make its way over to the archipelago, eventually.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 72: The Three Kingdoms Period
Greetings, and welcome back. We are currently still in a pause on the archipelago while we catch up with what has been happening on the continent. Specifically, right now, we are focused on the various dynasties that arose around the Yellow and Yangzi rivers.
Last episode we covered the rise of the Qin and then the Han, who ruled for four centuries from the Yellow River region—first in Chang’an, modern Xi’an, and later from Luoyang. These traditional capitals would be used again and again over the centuries.
This episode we’ll cover turbulent era immediately following the fall of the Han, including the rise of the Three Kingdoms—Shu, Wei, and Wu—and eventual reunification and then dissolution under the Jin.
This period sees a lot of changes happening, both in population movements and in cultural phenomena. Our focus is going to be on some of those things that would, in one form or another, eventually be transferred over to the archipelago. Things such as the system of government ranks as well as cultural phenomena, like the famed Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.
Our story starts towards the end of the Han dynasty—the Later Han, sometimes known as the Eastern Han, as the capital had moved to Luoyang, east of Chang’an. At this time, there was massive migration south to the jungles and forest of the Yangzi river region. While there had been ethnic Han emigres to the region in the past, it was nothing on the scale of the millions of people who would seek refuge there during the chaotic fall of the Han dynasty. What they did when they got there was partly dependent on just where they settled along the reaches of the Yangzi river.
The majority headed to the lower reaches of the Yangzi,. This area must have been both similar to and radically different from the Yellow River Floodplain, where many had come from. The Yellow River floodplain was extremely flat, and the Yellow River was known to regularly overflow its banks, as it was constantly depositing sand and other detritus, which, in turn, raised the bed of the river itself. In fact, there are places today where the Yellow river towers some ten meters—about three stories—above the surrounding countryside due to the constant attempts to pen it in and prevent devastating flooding. When the Yellow River did flood, the flow of the river could shift drastically across the largely flat floodplain.
In contrast, the Yangzi river was more easily tamed. While it still had problems with flooding, the mountainous and hilly terrain provide more natural containment for the river, and its headwaters in the rocky, mountain regions bring a lot less sediment downstream. How much? Well, one figure I found suggested that the Yangzi, which is Asia’s largest river, has a flow rate of over 30 thousand cubic meters of water every second, and discharges about 480 million tons of sediment every year. Compare that with the Yellow River, which has a flow of only about 2500 cubic meters of water every second, but over a billion tons of sediment. For those trying to do the math in their heads, the Yellow River has a flow rate about ten times less than that of the Yangzi and yet it discharges over twice the amount of sediment every year.
So, you can imagine that it was generally a less chaotic area for farming, and indeed, many of the peasants who settled in the lower reaches of the Yangzi became farmers, often working for elite families who had set themselves up in the south. This was the location of the ancient state of Wu, which had had ethnic Han inhabitants since at least the eastern Zhou dynasty, so at least the 3rd century BCE, and whose old capital was around modern Suzhou, on the shores of lake Tai, in the precincts of modern Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi river.
Now we’ve heard of the state of Wu before on this podcast: you may or may not recall that Wu was the state known in Japan as Kure, though where, exactly, that name comes from seems to be a bit of a mystery. Back in Episode 48 we talked about weavers coming to Japan from “Kure” during the reign of Homuda Wake, and then in episode 60 we see envoys from “Kure” coming over in 470, during the reign of Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuuryaku, though at that time it would have almost certainly referred to the Liu Song dynasty which was still centered on the lower reaches of the Yangzi.Here’s where I should probably note that the name “Wu” itself is the modern reading of the character used, which in ancient Sinitic language was probably something more like “Nguo” or even “Ngwa”. Even today, this area has its own Sinitic language, called “Wu Language” that is occasionally spoken there, though mostly as a “kitchen language” spoken at home, rather than an official language or dialect…and that leads us to some interesting additional connections between this area and the history of the Japanese language.
We know the Japanese archipelago felt the reach of the continent since at least the Qin and Han dynasties - we have the famous seal of King Na of Wa, as well as the Han dynasty mirrors that came over and which the Japanese were keen to replicate – but how much else they took on of the cultural aspects is somewhat hard to say at this point. But looking at the language, one thing we can observe is how the various Japanese on'yomi readings of Sinitic kanji characters connect to pronunciations of different times and places on the continent, suggesting that different periods and locations of contact are reflected in the Japanese language itself.
Many kanji have multiple on’yomi readings in different categories – one is the Kan-on, or “Han” reading, while another is the Go-on, or “Wu” reading, “Go” being a reading for the character Wu, likely pulled from the old pronunciation, “Nguo”. (And so for instance the same character read as “Mei” could also be read “Myou” or “Ka” could be read as “Ge”, or even “Jitsu” as “Nichi”.) The Go-on is typically assumed to be the older reading, which likely came over in the 6th century or earlier, while the so-called “Han” reading probably reflected more the Tang dynasty and later. This doesn’t necessarily mean that those Go-on readings came from Wu itself or the ancient Wu language, but more likely that they were simply older or regional readings that differed from the northern dialects in vogue in later centuries. And even though Mandarin and Cantonese didn’t evolve into their current forms until later, there were distinct regional differences in language between the northern and southern areas as early as the 6th century, as Yan Zhitui noted in his writings. The south had a reputation as more culturally refined, though alternatively that could be seen as lazy and archaic, whereas the north had perhaps a coarser dialect, and was also seen as more hard-working and industrious, though one should note that Zhitui was a native of the north and therefore likely prejudiced in his views.
Language differences aside, over time, of course, the people of the original state of Wu were largely absorbed or replaced by the Han people migrating south, especially with the uptick at the end of the Han dynasty. And as I mentioned before, many who settled in this region became farmers, working for elite families, many of whom had set up around Lake Tai, near the old capital. Eventually another city would come to take precedence, however, and that was the city of Jianye, known today as Nanjing, the Southern Capital, and we will see why in a little bit.
Before that, though, let’s talk about the rest of the Yangzi. While farmers were moving into the relatively flat and fertile areas in the southern reaches, those in the more mountainous regions often had a different experience. While there were certainly farms producing food, many of the communities in the middle reaches had more of a military focus, setting up various fortified communities, often taking advantage of the mountainous terrain. In the mountains, communities had to be relatively self-sufficient.
Further upriver is the Min River basin, a relatively flat area, highly suitable for agriculture, but surrounded by mountains. This is the home of the modern city of Chengdu, in modern Sichuan. The relatively flat, fertile land meant that various states could arise here, and many different ones had indeed risen and fallen by this time. There had been a growing Han presence since at least the Qin dynasty, but interactions with others were awkward, requiring the traversal of difficult and mountainous terrain to get out of the river basin. The same things that would allow states to form in this region, often protected by the mountains from outside forces, would also be the things that kept them isolated at the same time, preventing them from expanding and conquering much beyond their own region.
So these – the southern reaches, the central mountains, and the Min River or modern-day Sichuan basin – were the three areas of the Yangzi that people were moving to in the Han dynasty. And that migration only increased as the turbulence towards the end of the Han dynasty increased.
After the Yellow Turban rebellion, things in the capital region remained uneasy. A regent attempted to bring in a frontier general, Dong Zhuo, to help check the power of the eunuchs, who had a stranglehold on the court, but before the general could arrive, the regent was assassinated. In retaliation, two officers of the newly created capital army seized Luoyang and massacred the eunuchs. This left a power vacuum, and when Dong Zhuo arrived, he captured the emperor, and took power as a military dictator.
By this point, military rule was the order of the day, and even though there was still an emperor, the Han dynasty was as much a going concern as a Norwegian blue parrot. Dong Zhuo eventually spirited the boy emperor, Xian, to his home base in Chang’an, while his soldiers burned Luoyang to the ground. This triggered a whole slough of generals to set themselves up as warlords, and for some 30 years, the territories from the Yangzi river north found themselves in various conflicts.
The north seems to have seen the lion’s share of the fighting, as one of the generals who had opposed Dong Zhuo went on to put down his rivals and unify much of the Yellow River Basin and points north, including the Han commanderies on the Korean peninsula. His name was Cao Cao, and he unified the north under his rule by 207, and then turned his attention to the south.
At first, things seemed to be going well for Cao Cao. His initial push into the south met with little resistance, and he even gained more men. However, Cao Cao’s sizeable army required food, and it seems his supply lines were drawn out a considerable length, as there are reports of famine, and disease—possibly a result of the subtropical forests that were still considered untamed wilderness, not to mention the many areas of marshy wetlands that had yet to be drained and cultivated. For an army made up of largely northern soldiers, one can imagine how they fared in this humid and unfamiliar terrain.
Additionally, fighting in the south was not the same as in the north. Battles in the south had to make use of the Yangzi’s extensive river system, meaning that you were looking at a lot of effectively naval warfare. There are many incredible exploits that could be discussed here. About Cao Cao’s inadvisable attempts to chain his boats together to provide a more stable platform for northerners who were not used to sleeping on the water like this, to a feigned defector, who instead of coming to Cao Cao’s side sent a barrage of fire ships—that is ships that were deliberately set on fire and placed on a collision course with Cao Cao’s fleet.
Eventually, the fate of Cao Cao’s incursion was sealed in the famous Battle of Red Cliffs—an event that has spawned poetry, literature, and not a few movies. There Cao Cao was opposed by rival southern warlords, and he suffered a decisive defeat. It stopped his advance, and provided space for the southern regions to develop.
And so there developed an uneasy peace. The north was unified under Cao Cao and his successors, under what would become the Wei kingdom, while the south was split into two regions; Shu, in the west, under the command of Liu Bei, and Wu, in the east, under the command of Sun Quan. Eventually Cao Cao’s son, Cao Bi, would set himself up as the emperor of Wei, finally doing away with the charade of the Han dynasty, and Liu Bei and Sun Quan would follow suit.
This is the period known as the Three Kingdoms in Chinese history. It was a relatively brief period, all things considered—only about 60 years—but it was memorialized in various ways. First off is the Record of the Three Kingdoms, by Chen Shou, which is where we find the Wei Chronicles, which provides our first glimpse into the Japanese archipelago in the stories about the intriguing Queen Himiko. This was also part of the basis for the more fantastical 14th century novel, the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, one of the most popular literary works in East Asia, inspiring numerous plays, spin-offs, and even movie and television series. Of course, that is a work of historical fiction, building off of the history, but also incorporating the fantastic and romantic stories that had sprung up around the various characters in those stories.
The Three Kingdoms—perhaps “Three Countries” is more appropriate—were the three we’ve just discussed: Wei, Wu, and Shu, also known as Cao Wei, Shu Han, and the Eastern Wu to distinguish them from the many other states that had those same names throughout history. Of these, Liu Bei’s Kingdom of Shu is perhaps the least interest to us, centered as it was on the area of modern Chengdu and the Min River basin. As noted above, the mountains provided him refuge, but also limited the Shu kingdom’s ability to truly menace Wu or Wei.
In contrast, Sun Quan’s Wu held control of the lower reaches of the Yangzi, up into a portion of the middle reaches. Wu’s capital was set up at Jianye, modern Nanjing, as we mentioned earlier. Built along a bend in the Yangzi river, it was naturally fortified with the river and mountains around it. In fact, despite being the capital of one of three warring states, the city was built without walls, relying on those natural fortifications. One consequence of this was that the southern capital was more connected with nature, rather than walled off from it - just one example of the different conditions in the south that would drive cultural innovations often separately from those in the north, cultural innovations that would over the next several centuries make their way as seeds to the archipelago: garden layouts, poetry, and more.
One such innovation was evolving to the north, in the country known as Wei. As its founder, Cao Cao, pulled together his administration and conquered the surrounding regions, he was determined to correct some of the problems that he saw in the previous Han administration. For one thing, the influence of the Eunuchs at court was broken, but Cao Cao was not about to hand over power to the Great Families and Han dynasty loyalists who might try to restore the Emperor and Imperial power.
Cao Cao, perhaps given his military experience, wasn’t so interested in all of the Confucian ideals. Filial piety, uprightness, and incorruptibility were not things that really concerned him. He wanted talented men wherever he could find them. Even if that meant, *gasp* promoting commoners.
One aspect of this system was to set up a series of ranks—nine ranks in particular, although these ranks, themselves, would be divided into junior and senior, and some eventually would be further divided with “upper” and “lower” divisions. Individuals in government service were given a rank and that came with a government stipend, paid in “stones”, or “koku”, in Japanese. As we discussed last episode, this was a carry-over from the Han dynasty system. There, government positions were paid stipends, but this seems to have been decided on a case-by-case basis.
Under the Nine Rank system that developed under the Cao Wei state, government jobs were also ranked, and generally speaking a person of a given rank was expected to perform a particular job, though there were situations where the rank of the individual and the rank of the position might not exactly line up. This helped to standardize positions and awards. This same system—with modifications—was eventually adopted by other states attempting to emulate the Sinic style of government, including those on the archipelago and on the peninsula. It even went so far as to dictate the amount of space one would get for an estate in the capital district, something we’ll see in the Nara period in Japan.
Now, in theory this seems ideal. It appears to be a meritocracy, and that was certainly the stated goal. You find talented people, put them in positions, and you get good government. You don’t worry about where they are from, you just worry about getting the best and you put them in charge.
Since the sovereign couldn’t oversee every application, and he wanted to draw from across the realm, how to do this effectively. In the Han dynasty, men were recommended to government service by local administrators, but by the time of Cao Wei, war and turmoil had displaced many of the locals, so the local system of recommendation didn’t exactly make sense. And so they instituted a system of “impartial judges”, who were assigned specifically to go to the home commanderies to recruit officials and assign them rank. And this was great in theory, but the question remained: how do you know who is the most talented?
This is where Confucian thought began to again enter into the picture. Scholars and philosophers debated about what made an extraordinary person, and what they came up with, well…here’s where we see Cao Cao’s pure meritocracy idea start to backslide a little bit.
Mark Edward Lewis uses Liu Shao as an example. Writing in the mid-3rd century, he made the argument that talents were hidden, and could only be perceived by extraordinary judges of character. They would see external signs—in the face and the voice, for instance. On top of that, Liu Shao claimed that talents were inborn—nature, not nurture—and therefore it was largely a matter of heredity. Finally, these characteristics would manifest in moments of change.
This all sounds rather suspicious to me. In practice, it meant that your family connections played a huge part in getting a job, as did your ability to show things that were considered cultured and refined—Cao Pi would add literary achievements, meaning that poetry was a standard for office holding. Cao Zhi, another of Cao Cao’s sons, attempted to impress a visiting scholar with such things as dancing, juggling, fencing, as well as talking up various topics.
This effectively meant that, however much Cao Cao may have wanted to draw from all strata of society, the path to holding office was effectively barred to anyone without the privilege of being born into a noble, or at least wealthy, household, where they could be educated in these things as well as be afforded the luxury of leisure time to study and perfect these arts.
All of this was further modified by the Sima family, who would eventually become more powerful than the Cao family themselves, and wrest power away by 266 to set up the Jin dynasty – which expanded and conquered Eastern Wu by 280, briefly reunifying the Yangzi and Yellow River basins.
The Sima allowed modifications to the Nine Rank system, many of which provided greater control to the Great Families. Local governors were removed from the judgment and selection process, which left the highest ranking local nobles—typically members of local and powerful families—with the greatest say in who was judged worthy of a government post. In addition, the sons of high ranking nobility were granted automatic entry into the rank system. This was based on their father’s rank—members of the imperial family, whether they were directly in the line of succession or not, entered into service around ranks three and four—rank one being the highest in the system—while nobility could guarantee placement for their own children, but only if they were rank five or higher.
Similar practices were found in the Japanese version of the system, which is often accused of having bastardized the meritocracy that they had imported from the continent to fit the needs of their own elite families on the archipelago. And while certainly family often took precedence in Japan I’d like to note that the idea of hereditary succession in the nine rank system is hardly something new. In fact, I’d argue that the idea of the nine rank system as a meritocracy was more of an ideal than a realized system of government.
With the unification of north and south under the Jin, the Nine Rank system spread. And when the Jin dynasty itself fell to internal politics and infighting, and they were forced to flee Chang’an and reestablish their court at the old Wu capital of Jianye on the Yangzi, they continued to use this rank system, at least nominally speaking.
During the Jin dynasty, those without hereditary access would likely top out at ranks four or five, while those who had a lofty pedigree might *start* their careers at ranks four and five. We see a similar thing with the rank system in Japan, where there were eventually so many people being born into the upper ranks there was no headroom for people in the lower ranks to advance, which meant that it was eventually hard for one’s children to even succeed, let along surpass, their parents.
Furthermore, just because people were of the right rank due to their birth did not mean that they were actually suited to do, well, anything. And so we see another thing happening in the Jin, where some offices come to be known as substantive offices—in other words, you had actual power and responsibilities that would have a real affect on the state—while others were merely sinecures. In addition, you had another quality attached to positions, and that was whether they were considered “sullied” or “pure”.
This term was a marker of whether a given post was considered socially acceptable for someone of good breeding. A sullied post was considered acceptable for someone of a lower social status, while only a pure post would do for a member of the hereditary elite. And it wasn’t that all pure posts were simply sinecures and vice versa. There were certainly posts that were considered pure and substantive while others were pure and insignificant. Others, like a censor, was considered sullied by the nature of the work they had to do, but was also highly substantive and meant that the individual could wield some actual power.
This system, which does not appear to have been a part that was imported into the archipelago, seems to have placed a check on the formation of a full on aristocracy. As new men came in, they could gain posts and make a name for themselves through government service, rising through the ranks such that their children would also be granted a high position. But for members of the hereditary elite—those families who had already built their reputation and who often had their own sources of income, they were often praised for refusing to serve in the government, instead devoting their time to more cultural and artistic endeavors.
This is, in part, the paradox that many people see in the dual nature of a society that practiced both Confucianism and Daoism, often side by side, and without apparent contradiction. Confucian thought praised the family and government service, but in Daoism you see a kind of Hermitism that was much more highly praised. Laozi, himself, is said to have written his famous Dao De Jing just before heading off into the western frontier at the venerable age of 80, and in the works attributed to Zhuangzi in the late 4th century BCE you get stories such as that of the turtle in the mud.
In that story, Zhuangzi is fishing by the Pu river when two ministers come with a message from the Prince of Chu, asking Zhuangzi to join his court and work for him. Zhuangzi retorted that he had heard that in Chu there was a sacred tortoise which was said to have died 3,000 years ago, but which the Prince of Chu kept in a box in his family temple, covered with a cloth. He asked the ministers whether they thought that tortoise would have preferred its fate—to die and have its shell venerated—or would it preferred to have lived out its life, dragging its tail through the mud.
“Of Course,” the ministers replied, “it would have preferred to live, dragging its tail through the mud.”
And so Zhuangzi dismissed them and the prince’s request, telling them to go, and that he would keep dragging his own tail in the mud.
Here we see the kind of glorification for refusing government service that would come about in the Cao Wei and Jin dynasties.
This all gave the elite noble families a certain cachet, and they redefined their relationship with the court. By refusing service they had a certain independence. They were also able to set up their own cultural institutions, such that celebrated artists and poets might gather around a particular figure, and the idea of going out into the woods—or perhaps even better, the safety of a well-crafted garden—groups could get together and practice their cultured hermitism, together.
An exemplar of this imagined ideal can be found in the depictions of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. These are seven historical (or mostly historical) figures from the 3rd to 4th century, mostly centered around the philosopher poet, Xi Kang and his friends. Xi Kang was a critic of Confucianism, and died in 262 at the age of 39, executed by a military general, though the circumstances are unclear. His other six compatriots include Shan Tao, a holder of one of the highest ranks in the land, and some 18 years Xi Kang’s senior, as well as Xiang Xiu, who was 5 years his junior. Then there is the drunkard, Ruan Ji, who corresponded with Xi Kang, at least, and Ruan Xian, a renowned musician. Then there is the enigmatic Wang Rong and the early naturist, the eccentric Liu Lang, who wrote the poem Ode to the Virtues of Wine. A fifth century anecdote about him records that on many occasions Liu Ling, under the influence of wine, would divest himself of all of his clothing and sit naked in his room. One day he was spotted and chided for this habit, to which Liu Ling retorted: “I take heaven and earth for my pillars and roof, and the rooms of my house for my pants and coat. What are you gentlemen doing in my pants?”
While all of these individuals lived around the same time—they would have probably been about 18-57 years of age between the years 252-262—and certainly many had connections to Xi Kang, it is unlikely that they all actually gathered in one place together to drink a share stories, and that is more likely early fanfic by a poetry superfan of the era, much as authors and screenwriters today love putting together individuals who might have met each other all in one place, forming a super hero team of famous people in history.
In this case, it was popular fanfic, and we have visual representations of the seven from at least the 5th century, and they show up in Japan at least as early as the 9th century. Their model of a life devoted to friendship, poetry, music, drinking, and, dare I say, drugs, all outside the confines of the urban setting and traditional morality, was something that appealed to people for centuries, regardless of the actual truth behind it. You can see in this kind of image many of the things that were praised by the Nara and Heian aristocracy, and it was around this time that such concepts were arising that would eventually have such an influence on our archipelago.
And when it comes to the mindset of those interacting with the archipelago, and what the people there were hearing about the mainland, it’s important to understand how the Han dynasty was held up as a period of unity and remembered as a high point on the continent and beyond—and given what came afterwards we can understand why. Talking about this period gets confusing and does not lend itself to an easy, straightforward story. Philosophy from the previous Warring States period had been recovered and many of the ideas were added to or expanded upon in the Han, and that would continue into the period of disunity. Much of what we think of in terms of Daoism or Confucianism went through changes during these period, including bouts of syncretism, where philosophical ideas that were initially distinct and different were brought together and rationalized in such a way that they would be seen as one. An area known as “Dark Studies” actually attempted to blend such things as Confucianism and Daoism, both of which claim to speak about the “Dao” or “Way”. The difference is that Confucianism attempts to define the “Dao” as a way that people can follow, modeling certain virtues and living life or running the state or just a family in a particularly virtuous way. Daoism, on the other hand, eschews any attempt at defining the Dao, elevating it to a cosmic principle. The Dao De Jing actually opens with the famous lines: “Dao ke dao feichang Dao”, often translated as something like “The Dao that Can be Defined is not the True Dao”, automatically calling out Confucianism as a false doctrine. And yet, centuries of philosophers would use them together, side by side, attempting to reconcile their innate differences in some larger theory, like a philosopher’s version of the Grand Unified Theory.
And so, the Jin and later dynasties had other things to contribute, and we’ll touch on those in later episodes, but the movement of the court to the south—the period known as the eastern Jin—is important for our purposes. As noted, they moved into the old Wu capital of Jianye—which they later renamed Jiankang—in about 317. The north devolved into fighting as warring tribes and factions sprang up and were almost as quickly extinguished, with many so-called dynasties not lasting much beyond a single ruler, or perhaps only controlling a small area. This led to the period known as the sixteen kingdoms, in the north, which lasted until the rise of the Northern Wei around 386. Meanwhile, the south seemed to generally thrive, though they had their own issues and their own infighting. The south, the Jin held on until 420, when it was replaced by the Liu Song, though it seems as though, for the most part, even that was more a change of who was at the top of the heap. The Liu Song period is, of course, where we see the Five Kings of Wa that show up in the Song dynasty chronicles—see Episode 58.
During the eastern Jin and the Liu Song, it is likely that the archipelago was primarily dealing with the court on the Yangzi River, rather than traveling to the courts of the various and ever-changing states along the Yellow River itself. This path would have also been an easier trip from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, avoiding the perils of sailing through Goguryeo’s territory.
It seems likely that this area, despite the change in dynasties, continued to be known as Wu, or Kure, to the Wa. After all, from their perspective it was all in the same space. This, then, was likely where Yamato and Baekje had their connections to the mainland, and so likely to be a focus of our studies, although we can’t entirely ignore the north, as much as we might want to.
Next episode we’ll continue looking at the impacts of all of this, including what it meant to have many Great Families from the north seek refuge in the south, where the local elites may have been glad enough for the status bump their region would receive, hosting the imperial court, but that was balanced by these northerners with their own systems and ideas.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Lewis, Mark Edward. (2009). China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. ISBN 978-0-674-02605-6
Kohn, Livia (ed.) (2004). Daoism Handbook: Volume I. ISBN 0-391-04237-8.
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (ed.) (1993). Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. ISBN s0-02-908752-X.

Episode 71: The Yellow River and the Birth of Han Culture.

September 1, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Han era statue in the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. Photo by author.

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This episode we start our more in depth look at what is happening on the continent, breezing through the Qin and Han periods. We focus on the culture that grew up along the floodplains of the Yellow River, and how that really became the touchstone for Han culture, which then spread outwards in many directions—though our primary focus is on the Yangzi river system to the south.

Image showing Sinitic civilization around the time of the Qin dynasty. You can see how it is mostly concentrated in the north along the Yellow River, with some pockets along the Yangzi. That would extend farther south, especially in the later Han period. Image by User Yuninjie on en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons.

This episode is fairly broad, only lightly touching on various subjects. Expect to dive into it again. In the meantime, here are some artifacts from the period that may be of interest:

Han TLV mirror from the Forbidden City in Beijing

This mirror has a pattern that looks suspiciously like the game known as liu bo, which may have arisen from some kind of divination. It is unclear just how the game would have been played, but it seems to be connected with Sinitic concepts of the universe. TLV patterns would make their way to Japan on the backs of these mirrors, although there is no record of liu bo having also made the journey, and it may have simply become a common decorative feature.

Stone carving of liu bo, from the Tokyo National Museum

Here we see a carving of two people playing the game liu bo in a Han era carving.

Han figures playing liu bo, from the New York Metropolitan Museum

Here we see figures playing liu bo, from a Han era tomb.

Han musicians, Shanghai Museum

Here we see a pair of Han dynasty musicians. One is playing the qin, or an early relative thereof. This zither would come to Japan and eventually become the koto, a vital part of Japanese court music.

Terracotta Warrior, Shaanxi History Museum

Here we see a typical member of the terracotta army set to guard the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty.

Terracotta Warrior, Shaanxi History Museum

Face of one of the terracotta warriors from the tomb of the first Qin emperor. Each one was unique, with its own features and exquisitely detailed. They even had slightly different hairstyles.

Terracotta Warrior, Shaanxi History Museum

Another example of one of the unique terracotta warriors.

Terracotta Warrior, Shaanxi History Museum

Face of one of the terracotta warriors from the tomb of the first Qin emperor. Each one was unique, with its own features and exquisitely detailed. They even had slightly different hairstyles.

Terracotta Warrior-boots, Shaanxi History Museum

Here we can see the pattern on the soles of the shoes of one kneeling feature—even this detail was preserved by the unknown artists who created these statues.

Terracotta General, Tomb of Qin Shihuang

Example of a general, wearing a different type of armor. His armor was probably less effective, but it is also unlikely he would have been fighting on the front lines. There are similarities here with conjectured armor in Japan between the Nara and Heian periods.

Terracotta Warrior - Pigmentation, Tomb of Qin Shihuang

Here we see some of the remaining pigmentation on the red cords of the armor. It was likely black, to represent lacquer, with red cords to help hold it together. The armor itself may have been metal or simply lacquered leather plates.

Terracotta Warrior - Pigmentation, Tomb of Qin Shihuang

Here we can see evidence of the pigmentation that the original statues would have had. Unfortunately, oxidization typically causes the colors to fade, quickly, after exposure, leaving the grey remains that most people know.

Terracotta Warrior - Pigmentation, Tomb of QIn Shihuang

Another example of pigmentation that seems to be remaining, in this case on the face. Still, there is only a little left at this time.

More photos by the author from various museums can be found at the following links:

Qin Dynasty

Han Dynasty

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan! My names is Joshua and this is Episode 71: The Yellow River and the Birth of Han Culture.
Before we get started a quick shout out to Arnold for donating to support the show. If you would like to join him you can do so over at our Ko-Fi site, that’s Ko-Fi.com/Sengokudaimyo, or find us on Patreon.
So we’ve been working our way through the Kiki—the Japanese chronicles—and we’ve made it through to the very start of the 6th century. In that time we’ve seen the state of Yamato grow, though in all likelihood its direct influence likely remained contained in the area immediately around the Nara Basin and out to the area of modern Ohosaka. Which isn’t to say that they weren’t a leader in their confederation, or that their dealings were confined to that area any more than later daimyo would be confined merely to the area of their own domains. It is still a question as to just how much influence Yamato had, but clearly they were a trendsetter, and had connections with the other lands of the archipelago and the continent.
And from the continent, the archipelago was receiving new technologies and new ideas. Envoys from Yamato were being sent, all the way to the court of the Liu Song, near modern day Nanjing, along the easternmost reaches of the Yangzi river. And they, as well as continental visitors and immigrants, were bringing back horses, writing, weaving, and more, including ideas of statecraft. Over the coming centuries we’ll see more and more of this, as Yamato grows and becomes ever more connected with the mainland.
And because of that, I want to once again take a detour away from our islands, and focus for a time on what was happening in the mainland at the beginning of the 6th century, as a lot of this is prelude to what we will see going forward in the archipelago. The governmental systems being used, refined, experimented with, and, some might say, corrupted, on the continent would become the model on which the future Japanese court would base their own system—with some twists of their own.
And yet it’s important to remember that the continent was not a monolith - it was home to various groups and ethnicities and cultures. However, just as the Roman empire had its impact on the various cultures of Europe, eastern Eurasia was heavily impacted by the culture that arose out of the Yellow River Basin.
Speaking of the Yellow River basin, I’d like to start by painting a picture. When we started this whole project, we talked about the islands of Japan and their geography, which impacted the development of Japan and continues to be a factor today. Therefore I figure it is likewise useful to talk somewhat about the geography of the continent.
If we start with the Korean peninsula, we see that it is similar to the archipelago—mountainous, with areas of flat land. In fact, like Japan, some 70% of the land is mountainous. This continues into modern China until you hit the Liao River basin in the west and the Amur River to the north. We know this as a home to Tungusic speaking people, as well as Mongols, and the Nivkh on the coast, but there is little enough in the written record, though there has been archaeological research in the area. This is likely where the people of Goguryeo came from, and Amur and West Liao DNA has been seen in the people on the archipelago, so we know there was contact.
This may be an area to explore more. Certainly the area played a large role in more recent historical events. But for now, I want to turn south, to the main part of what is known today as China.
That name, by the way, is something I’ve touched on before: “China” is something of an overloaded term, as is the concept of “Chinese”. It can be used for just about anything within the bounds of the modern state of China, which includes much of the area from the Amur River in the north all the way down to modern Vietnam in the south and all the way west to modern Kyrgystan and Tajikistan. At the same time, there are clearly differences between the Uighur, Mongol, Tibetan, Han, and many other cultures, as China is a nation with many cultures and ethnicities living within its borders.
So I’ll try to be specific, and often speak in terms of ethnic Han people and Sinic culture, broadly referring to the ethnic group and cultural norms that grew up largely along the Yellow River, which is one of two main rivers that run through the area of China – the other being the Yangzi, to the south.
Looking at a modern map, you can largely divide eastern China into roughly four regions. First, there are the northern region of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria.
Second, south of this, there is the Yellow River. The Yellow River starts up in the mountains and flows through the Loess Plateau, the source of the sediment that gives the river its brownish-yellow color—and thus its name. It then passes through a mountainous region and then the lower regions of the Yellow River flow largely through wide, flat land, before the river empties out into the Yellow Sea – likewise named for the color of the sediment that the river disgorges into it. The Yellow Sea opens out past the Shandong peninsula and is bordered on the east by the Korean peninsula until it reaches the East China sea. This Yellow River area was the homeland of the Han ethnic group, and the origins of the Shang and Zhou dynasties—as well as many of the dynasties up to the Han.
The third region, south of the Yellow River is the Yangzi River and its surroundings . Compared to the flatlands of the lower Yellow River, the Yangzi tends to be more hilly. In the east it is relatively flat, along its lower section, where it empties into the East China Sea around modern day Shanghai. The central region is more mountainous, and in the west is the Sichuan basin, a largely flat area surrounded by mountains, which proved both a help and a hindrance to people living there. Originally, the Yangzi was populated by numerous ethnic groups, who are often lumped together as the Bai Yue, or Hundred Yue. We will talk more about them, later.
Last there is the far south, which is a largely mountainous region that extends to the South China Sea. This was largely considered foreign or frontier region through most of the time we will be talking about, with some outposts and commandries, like those in the Korean peninsula, but for our purposes, right now, we will largely leave them be.
And so, let us go back to the Yellow River region. As I noted, the river brings down sediment from the Loess Plateau, and deposits it along the river bed. This was particularly true when the riverwould flood—due to either heavy rains or melting ice in the mountains near the river’s source. These floods would inundate the flat lands of the lower Yellow River, and deposit that soil across the land. This made the land incredibly fertile, but the unpredictability of the floods was a constant danger. This, in turn, led to settlement patterns where people built communities on the occasional high ground in an attempt to avoid the floods.
Early organization appears to have been built on the idea of taming the waters, and yet it was a constant battle. Dikes would be built and the sides of the river could be built up, but over time the sediment would deposit on the riverbed, raising the riverbed. Without constant dredging and building up of the riverbanks, the river would eventually flood. Sometimes this could change the location of the river—or at least its main branch—by over 400 km or more.
In many ways, then, good government in and around the Yellow River basin was, indeed, tied to mitigating natural disasters—or at least flooding. A government that kept up work on the river and ensured that it was properly managed would reduce the damage caused by flooding, while a government that was negligent would eventually allow the precautions to collapse. This is a theme we see early on in Chinese documentation, and it prompted the German philosopher Karl Wittfogel to form a theory called the “hydraulic hypothesis” which says, basically, that people banding together to manage flooding and irrigation was what prompted the formation of complex states. The real explanation is more complex, but it’s easy to see where this idea comes from.
The Shang and then the Zhou were early, powerful states. Much as with Yamato, the question of just how powerful is still somewhat up in the air, but this does appear to have been the foundation of early Sinic thought, and in particular the Duke of Zhou was often credited with creating the various rites and rituals that were considered at the core of good statesmanship.
In some ways, I’d say this was similar to what we see in Yamato, in that there were certain rituals that the sovereign was expected to perform that, along with administrative and military might, helped maintain the state. But the geography of the Yellow River Basin allowed for larger populations and, in some ways, allowed for greater control by the state, at least early on.
From what we know about the Zhou, it appears to have been a feudal system, with a social hierarchy. The sovereign sat at the top, with courts of nobles—members of elite families. These families were given control of large territories themselves—they were basically the hegemons of their own states, with Zhou at head of the coalition. And that seems to be part of the Zhou’s eventual downfall. While the nobility initially owed their place and lands to the ruling sovereign, over time they amassed their own, independent power. Combined with external threats, the Zhou weakened, and the situation quickly deteriorated. The various families became insular, and each state set against each other.
Many of these states would have names that will become all too familiar in later eras—names such as the Song, the Jin, and even the Wu, read in the archipelago as “Kure”. This turbulent time led to a certain diversity of thought and ideas. Confucuis, Laozi, Sunzi, and many other famous philosophers came from this period.
This is the Warring States Period, from about the 5th to 3rd century BCE—and yes, it is the same name as the period in Japanese history, the Zhanguo Shidai, or Sengoku Jidai. This is no accident, but rather a deliberate call-back by Japanese of that era and later periods to connect their own turmoil with that of China’s classical age. This era of conflict and division on the continent would eventually be brought to an end by forced unification under the state of Qin, the westernmost of the various kingdoms, situated around modern Xi’an, along the Wei River, which runs east to the Yellow as it heads out onto the plains of the lower reaches.
It was the Qin who unified the warring states through military conquest and instituted a harsh regime. The ruler of Qin took the name of Emperor, or Huangdi, and is still remembered as Qin Shihuangdi, the First Qin Emperor. He instituted a state based on the legalist system that had brought Qin to power, and he did well for himself. After all, his is the tomb of the terracotta army in Xi’an, a tomb on par with that of Daisen kofun in Japan, in size, and even moreso considering everything else in the complex – which is still being actively mapped and excavated, although the main tomb remains undisturbed at this time. The terracotta warriors themselves are truly remarkable, each one with unique features and tremendous detail down to the hobnails in their boots. These statues were originally vividly painted, though the pigments rarely survive long after being exposed to the open air. They provide us an unmatched view of what the Qin army looked like, such that it is suspected that each statue—or at least their head—was likely a depiction of an actual soldier in the army.
As I mentioned, the Qin state was organized around Legalist principles. Legalism insisted that all people follow exactly the rules and laws of the state. The theory was that if everyone played their role exactly, then the state would run smoothly. Ideally it eschewed favoritism and familial ties for a strict interpretation of the laws that applied to everyone, equally. It enforced this through draconian punishments. For example, there is a story that the emperor was out one day enjoying himself, and he fell asleep. He had with him two servants, one who was responsible for his cloak, and another who was responsible for his umbrella. As time dragged on, the servant responsible for his umbrella fell asleep as well, and so did not notice that the sun had shifted and the emperor was exposed. The other servant, thinking little of it, simply moved the umbrella so that the emperor remained in the shade.
When the emperor woke up and found out what had happened, he had both men punished. The one for falling asleep and not doing his job, but the other for trying to do someone else’s job instead of tending just to his own.
As one might imagine, this was considered a mite harsh by many, and it tended to rub people the wrong way. Still, Qin Shi Huangdi maintained power over a unified nation for nine years, despite numerous assassination attempts. He was eventually undone not by assassins, but by his own quest for immortality—the same quest that had him send people out looking for the famed Island of the Immortals, which we discussed back in episode 10. He was apparently drinking elixirs made with mercury, which likely poisoned him.
After his death in 210 BCE, court ministers tried to hide the news and eventually planned to have his son rule as a puppet sovereign. But this left the court weak, and fighting and rebellion once more broke out.
This could easily have devolved back into the Warring States period, which would have made the Qin dynasty simply a blip in the record, if it weren’t for a peasant-born commander named Liu Bang.
Liu Bang was a local Qin official who was working as a penal officer. We are told that he was taking prisoners to go work on the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi when some of them escaped. Under the Legalist penal codes of the time, allowing prisoners to escape was considered a dereliction of duty, and punishable by death, and the court was not known to be merciful. With no other options, Liu Bang decided to voluntarily free the rest of the prisoners—after all, it wasn’t going to get any worse for him—who were so grateful that they joined him. Together they took up residence in an abandoned fort in Mangdang, where they set up to resist any who might be sent after them.
But the death of Qin Shi Huangdi, and the subsequent rebellions that broke out the year after, provided an opening for the ambitious Liu Bang, who fought for the state of Chu, but eventually ended up taking power for himself. Thus Liu Bang, son of a commoner, became Emperor Gaozu of the Han dynasty.
The Han dynasty maintained much of the political apparatus of the Qin dynasty, but changed it in subtle, yet significant ways that would keep it in power for the next four centuries—minus a brief interregnum by one Wang Mang. This is one of the reasons why, while the Qin dynasty is the root of the English word for “China”, many Asian sources refer to Han—such as Hanzi, or Kanji in Japanese, for Sinitic writing—and it is generally used to refer to the ethnic Han people, or Hanren, in Mandarin, a term that appears to have been used since the period after the fall of the Han dynasty to refer to the major Sinitic speaking ethnic group of that and later dynasties. That’s how much of an impact this period had on the development of the people and thought of China.
Although the Han dynasty inherited the Qin governmental structures, it did away with the strictly legalist interpretation. This allowed some of the philosophical thought that had been oppressed under the Qin to flourish. In particular, Confucian classics had been confiscated by the Qin, and most were lost when the library they were stored in burned down, though some were saved by scholars who defied the Qin orders. Later, an official hunt would be made to find as many of these old works as possible, and by the end of the first century BCE, Han policy was that government officials had to be men trained in the Classics—generally speaking that meant Confucian classics, espousing Confucian values.
Setting up the government so that officials had to be trained typically meant that there had to be tests. It set up the semblance of a meritocracy—where one’s learning and cultivation would lead to jobs with the government, and thus access to political and social power. This would theoretically ensure that men in government positions—and, yes, generally speaking, it was only men who were considered, thanks to the patriarchal structure Han society inherited from past generations—so these government officials were, theoretically, men of learning and good character, and not just men from Great Families, who still had considerable power in their local areas. Government officials would be provided a stipend, often assessed in terms of the amount of grain that their stipend provided. The term for this, “dan”, would later be used in Japan as well, with the character, which also means “stone”, pronounced as “koku”.
Early on, the Han court knew it had to find a way to either blunt the power of hereditary families or at least get them working for the good of the state. The Zhou had done this through feudal bonds of fealty, and the Qin had attempted to do it through draconian legal measures after crushing them with their military force. Indeed, I suspect that many were still rebuilding after first falling to the Qin and then the rebellions thereafter.
So the Han attempted to tie families more firmly to the State. First, they recognized many of the ancient kingdoms, but placed members of Liu Bang’s own family in charge. Theoretically, the family ties would keep them loyal, but over time, this would break down. At the same time, Confucian values, growing at court and with anyone who wanted to hold social or political power, also emphasized the family. The concept of filial piety, expanded through all social relationships, formed the ties that bound people to the families and the families to the government, thus incorporating them and making them an extension of the government system.
This may have worked for a while, but nothing lasts forever, and there are almost always unintended consequences. For one, the court was still located along the Yellow River. A rising population, no doubt assisted by high yields from the Yellow River and the relative stability of the Han dynasty, put pressure on the land, and the Han expanded into frontier territories—for instance, settling large numbers of people on the Ordos plateau, with outposts far out in the western deserts, and the commandries in the Korean peninsula and the far south. And yet, despite this expansion the court, and thus, political power, remained concentrated largely in the capital regions. This included Chang’an, modern Xi’an, near the capital of Qin on the Wei river. Later, they would move to the capital of Luoyang, just a little further to the east. This was the center of power and prestige in the empire, and the families that were closer to the center had an advantage in playing the politics of the court. This was further emphasized by a worldview that placed the court at the center of the world. The further out from that center, the more uncultured and barbaric the people were thought to be. Han elite who were too far from the capital often found themselves as political outsiders—seen as country bumpkins and hicks. In turn, these outside families would often set themselves up at the center of their own cultural sphere. This idea of the center of the Court versus those on the periphery has some rather direct similarities with actions that would take place in Japan, as well. Great families were part of the ruling court, but outside families built up their own bases of power.
Back in the capital, the growing influence of certain families seemed to be a threat. How could even the emperor know whether someone’s loyalty was to themselves or to their family? And so they came up with a strategy that they thought would overcome this problem. To ensure that certain positions were only loyal to the court and the emperor, the court employed eunuchs—men who, through birth, accident, or voluntary action, had been castrated, losing the ability to reproduce. The theory seems to have been that men who could not produce an heir would not be so busy playing politics for their family, and they would be solely devoted to the court.
This really was a thing—and one part of court culture that I don’t believe Japan ever attempted to reproduce. Eunuchs could do well for themselves in the court, however. In fact, they could do so well that men voluntarily underwent castration so that they could apply for a position.
And, of course, many found ways around the idea that castration would prevent them from having heirs, too. In some cases, men would undergo castration after having fathered children, in the hopes that their service could provide a better life for their family. In other cases, eunuchs would “adopt” an heir. This was important in a society where it was your ancestors who were supposed to carry out the proper rites after you passed away, and keep your memory alive. Without heirs to perform the rites, what would your afterlife be like? Probably not pretty.
That said, without heirs, and without the hope of better life in the hereafter, it seems that some eunuchs were, instead, tempted to acquire social and material power in the here and now. In fact, it grew so bad that even today the trope of the evil, greedy, court eunuch is still quite common, despite the fact that it was likely only a small number for whom that was true—or at least no more true than for any other elite official anywhere in the world.
Still, according to the histories, the fall of the Han came at the hands of just such eunuchs, whose desire for worldly comfort led them to play fast and loose with the empire’s finances.
You see, as the eunuchs were amassing power, there was another dynamic going on. Much as the Roman empire did in Europe, the Han dynasty often enlisted and employed ethnic groups from outside of their own borders and brought them in. The idea was to let barbarians fight barbarians, and so they would resettle nomadic groups inside of Han territory, giving them land in exchange for fighting on their side.
However, these outside cultures were literally foreign, and they often clashed in contact with their Han neighbors, often leading to raids inside of Han territory by the very same people that had been brought in to protect them.
With no other recourse, local communities had to create their own armed groups to fight off these horse-riding warriors. Some of these groups would be organized around more than just local community pride. After all, in times of chaos, religious zeal often brings people together, and this seems to have been the unifying factor of more than one group. Organizing around a place usually meant that you attracted people from that place, but organizing around religion or around an idea meant that you could bring together disparate groups from all over.
One such idea was the Way of Taiping, or Great Peace. This is unrelated, by the way, to the Taiping Rebellion of the late 19th century, in case you were wondering. In this instance, the Way of Taiping was based on Daoist ideas, though, despite their name, they were anything but peaceful. Their adherents were militants, and they believed that, with the disorder in the land, a millennium of Great Peace was due to either reform the Han or sweep it away.
A series of rebellions broke out, often known by the headgear that these adherents wore: A yellow piece of cloth, wrapped around their head. Thus the name, in English at least, of the Yellow Turban Rebellion—sometimes also the Yellow Cloth Rebellion, for a more accurate but less romantic description.
Of course, people begged the Han court for assistance against these rebels, but the Han coffers were empty—there wasn’t enough money to raise an army. This was compounded by the fact that Yellow Cloth adherents and sympathizers were found even among the palace guards and amongst the powerful eunuchs. Armed rebellion eventually broke out in the 16 commandries, largely in the area immediately surrounding the Yellow River basin. Without a centralized military response, private armies, led by members of powerful families who were in opposition to the powerful eunuchs at court, ended up putting down the rebellions themselves.
This, of course, brought nominal praise from the Han court, and the generals were lauded for their success. But then, almost immediately, they were removed from their posts and shoved aside, with eunuchs taking over, as they were the ones officially in charge of the army.
Infighting continued, and the weakened Han dynasty never recovered. The Han dynasty would effectively end in 190, which led to a period of warlordism known as the Three Kingdoms, which in turn would lead to the era of the northern and southern dynasties, during which the empire largely remained fractured, with only short periods of unification. This would last into the late 6th century. It was in this environment of fractured and warring states that the Japanese archipelago—and specifically Yamato—would be conducting most of their early interactions. This includes Himiko and the Wei, as well as the Jin and later the Liu Song dynasties—not to mention those interactions we don’t have records for. Many aspects of continental culture, often filtered through the Korean peninsula, would be arriving during this time. .
And speaking of arriving in distant foreign lands, the archipelago wasn’t the only place that was getting new ideas. While the Han dynasty imported new ideas and people from the outside—mostly from the north and west—there were also pressures sending people—and ideas—out in all directions as well. The Han culture complex was an amalgamation of different philosophies and cultural ideas, brought together in one place, but even as that was happening, conflict and population pressures were also pushing people out to the frontier areas. In the west and north, Han people were often the minority, but in the southern regions, especially along the Yangzi, Han people began to emigrate in droves. This escalated towards the end of the Han, especially in the period of violence that surrounded its downfall.
It is estimated that several million people—mostly ethnic Han peasants—headed south in the last century of the Han dynasty, settling along the Yangzi river basin. As they moved in they would start the process of draining swamps and wetlands and making the region more habitable for rice paddy farming. This area had been the southern frontier for years—described as a place of jungles and strange people and cultures, but now it was becoming Sinicized in ways that it had not before.
The majority likely took the easiest path, from the Yellow River floodplain to the Huai River basin in central China, and then on to the Yangzi river, mostly ending up in the fertile lower reaches. Some, however, settled further upriver, in the more mountainous reaches of the central Yangzi. This was accessible from the Han capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang via a daunting route that included traversing the Qinling Mountains at Wuling pass—a 7,000 foot climb that traversed a plank road built along the cliff walls.
That was nothing compared to the third path, however. The truly adventurous took the famous Road to Shu. This road went west out of Chang’an to Baoji, and then turned southwest to the Min River basin—modern Chengdu, in Sichuan. It was 270 miles, about a third of which were those same type of cliff-side trestle roads. Historically speaking it was the least important—it wasn’t exactly likely that someone would be marching their armies down it any time soon—but it was immortalized by the Tang poet Li Bai—known as Ri Haku in Japan—in a poem entitled Shu Dao Nan—the Difficult Road to Shu.
In the course of these migrations, the ethnic Han farmers tended to monopolize the flat lowlands for growing rice, leaving the highlands for forestry products. This drove the indigenous people—various ethnic groups generally lumped together as the baiyue, or hundred Yue—up into the more mountainous and less desirable areas. The Yue are thought to be the ancestors of the Vietnamese people, who once ruled large swaths of areas from the Yangzi river south.
Those mountain tops and highlands would make a good location for temples and fortresses, creating myriad small, and independent communities.
This will all play out in our next episode as we talk about the aftermath of the fall of the Han, the rise of the Three Kingdoms, and the cultural changes that came with it—all happening at the same time that Yamato was being born and starting to take its own place out in the archipelago.
I’m thinking this will probably take at least 3~4 episodes to get through, which is a bit, and I’m going to do my best to avoid getting too far into the weeds, but as we go I think there are a few important facets of continental culture that we want to focus on, especially as the 6th century will start to see even closer ties. So we’ll try to condense several centuries into just a few episodes for you.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

Lewis, Mark Edward. (2009). China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. ISBN 978-0-674-02605-6
Kohn, Livia (ed.) (2004). Daoism Handbook: Volume I. ISBN 0-391-04237-8.
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (ed.) (1993). Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. ISBN s0-02-908752-X.

Episode 70: End of an Era

August 16, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Model of a reconstruction of a Korean style fortress built in the 7th century in Kibi, some 200 years after “Kinouhe” is recorded as having been built.

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With this reign we look at the events of Wohatsuse Wakasazaki for the full eight years he is said to have sat on the throne.

Who’s Who

Wohatsuse Wakasazaki

The son, it is said, of Ōke, aka Ninken Tennō, and Kasuga no Ōiratsume, herself a daughter of Ōhatsuse Wakatake, aka Yūryaku Tennō, If that is his parentage, he likely was born between 482, when his father was brought to Yamato, and 494, when he had to have been born to be named Crown Prince.

There are later entries in the Nihon Shoki and other sources that would suggest he was born around 450—but that would have been around the time of Woasatsuma Wakugo no Sukune. There are definitely questions about this entry.

Heguri no Matori

Current Ōmi (大臣) at the start of Wakasazaki’s reign. Descendant (possibly the son or grandson) of Heguri no Dzuku no Sukune, previous Ōmi and son of the legendary Takeuchi no Sukune.

Ōtomo no Muruya

Ōmuraji of the Ōtomo family, appointed at the end of the reign of Wakatake to help his son, Shiraga. He is mentioned in the reign of Wakasazaki, but there is some confusion as to whether or not it is him or Kanamura. This may be an indication that the years for this reign aren’t quite right.

Ōtomo no Kanamura

Kanamura pops up in this reign. The last Otomo no Ōmuraji was Ōtomo no Muruya, who was tasked with assisting Shiraga, aka Seinei Tennō, in governing the land. There is an assumption that Kanamura is his descendant, but it isn’t clear, other than they are both of the same family.

Kudara no Otara (aka Itarang of Baekje)

Otara, or Itarang (百済意多郎), is only briefly mentioned. Aston suggests “Witanang”, using modern Korean reading. He is often known by the modern Japanese reading, though that probably was not how it is pronounced at the time. The other part, “Kudara”, is literally a reading of the characters for “Baekje”, though it is unclear exactly how that reading came to be used in Japan. It isn’t even clear to me that the Chroniclers themselves would have used that reading.

Donseong of Baekje

King of Baekje from about 479 to 501 or 502. He attempted to strengthen Baekje after the move to Unjin. The Samguk Sagi appears to blame his fall on his clack of concern during a famine around 499, though he may also have fallen afoul of local politics. He was killed in 501 or 502.

Muryeong of Baekje

King of Baekje from about 501 to 523. The Nihon Shoki claims that he was born on the way to Yamato, and thus was given the name “Shima”, meaning “island” in Japanese. The Korean sources have his personal name as something like “Syeoma”, though no indication that it means something similar. Unfortunately, the language of Baekje is not well attested, so it is hard to tell what it might actually mean.

Early Castles

One of the entries from this period is the creation of a castle, named “Kinouhe” (城上). This would actually seem to refer to the area “above” a castle. It was apparently built in “Minamata”, but where exactly this is is unclear. Regardless, I suspect it was in the style of early peninsular castles. From what I can tell, this would have included rammed earth walls, though possibly made of stone. These were probably more like walled garrisons.

Some of the peninsular castles specifically utilized the terrain, often being built on mountaintops. They would use natural features and simply enhance it with walls and gates. Later we see more traditional rectangular walls around cities and the like. The character used for “castle” in Japanese just meant “city walls” or “walled settlement” when it came over from the continent. As such, “Ki no Uhe” could refer to a fortress or to walls around a settlement of some kind—though probably still the rammed earth and stone walls, rather than simply a palisade or similar.

Many of these features were built up again and again over time, or perhaps have disappeared into the landscape. Some of these walls are still found on occasion. In 2016, excavations were performed on the site of the old Naseong City Walls, uncovering the walls thought to have been built around 538 to protect the new Baekje capital. Today, this is part of the larger Baekje Historical Area that is considered a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. This is episode 70: The End of an Era.
Content warning up front: This episode catalogues a lot of senseless and even psychopathic violence, against both men and women, including forced abortions and sexual assault. I will do my best to present the information respectfully, and we’ll put most of it at the end of the episode, with a warning so anyone who wants can stop after we cover the more relevant part of the reign.
Last episode we talked about Wohatsuse Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou, and how he came to the throne at an apparently extremely young age. Tradition says he was as young as 10 years old… but we’ll talk about that.
As I mentioned, this episode will be split into two parts. First, we will cover various events regarding Yamato that are recorded as having happened during the eight years of Wakasazaki’s reign, most of them having to do with Yamato’s relationship with the Korean peninsula and events happening over there. Then I’ll cover the other stories—those outlining his apparent sociopathic tendencies. I’ll be blunt: the Chronicles contain some very, very nasty stories about Wakasazaki, and indeed paint him as unredeemably evil. If Wakatake had numerous accounts which didn’t show him in a good light, Wakasazaki is something else altogether. And we do have to ask the question of whether these are accurate stories, or whether there were other things going on that led the Chroniclers to paint such a scathing picture.
One of the first questions I have, however, is the question of how old Wakasazaki was when he came to the throne, when he died, and what the situation was with the royal lineage at the time. As noted, tradition states he was 10 years old when he came to throne, and if he reigned for about 8 years, as the Nihon Shoki claims, then he would have been about 18 at the end of his reign.
On the other hand, the Nihon Shoki at one point says that Wakasazaki was not actually 18 when he died, but instead that he was 57. Kitabatake Chikafusa likely pulled on this when he wrote in the Jinnou Shouki that Wakasazaki died at the age of 58. Chikafusa doesn’t talk about any of the other acts that are said to have taken place, but instead focuses on connecting Wakasazaki’s evil acts with the downfall of Ohosazaki’s lineage—that’s right, spoiler alert, Wakasazki would be the last sovereign claiming descent from Ohosazaki—which is why I mentioned last episode how interesting it is to me that they both use “Sazaki” in their names, rather like an overly convenient pair of bookends. We’ll talk about this more at the end of the episode as we explore just why the Chroniclers didn’t exactly stan Wakasazaki.
So keep that in mind as we look at this reign and the scorn that is heaped upon it.
One thing to consider as we read through the Nihon Shoki is that the Chroniclers operated under the assumption that all reigns were linear—that there was only ever one sovereign was on the throne at a time. According to Kishimoto’s classification of kofun, the secondary line of kofun appears to have died out in the late 5th century, with the kofun he identifies with Wakatake, who supposedly died in 479. The main line of kofun, which share characteristics back to Hashihaka, believed by some, yours truly included, to be the tomb of Himiko herself, continued into the early part of the 6th century, overlapping with a new line, identified with changes in the kofun structure.
So it is possible that there was, for a time, members of this older and newer dynasty both alive—and possibly co-ruling—at the same time.
I mention this mainly because it is possible that Wakasazaki was around for more than the 8 years given for his reign. What if he did live until his 50s? Or at least longer than age 18. What if he wasn’t the son of Ohoke? There are so many what ifs and not enough answers. And I suspect the Chroniclers weren’t too concerned with challenging any of that. After all, Wakasazaki being an evil bastard that ended the dynasty of the virtuous Ohosazaki fit nicely into the worldview of the time—and as humans we love simple stories. It is so much easier when things are black and white—right and wrong—good and evil.
But enough of that—let’s take a look at this reign.
So we left off with Wakasazaki calling on Ohotomo no Kanamura to help destroy Heguri no Matori no Oho-omi and his son, Shibi no Omi. He then took his place on the throne, ascending in Namiki, in Hatsuse.
That was in 499.
In 501, we are told that he had Ohotomo no Muruya call up a levy of laborers in the land of Shinano—modern Nagano prefecture—in order to build a castle, called Kinouhe, in the village of Minomata.
As a side note, Aston notes that Ohotomo no Muruya had been made Ohomuraji in the reign of Wakatake, and tasked with assisting Shiraga, so surely he wasn’t still alive and they instead meant Kanamura, the current Ohomuraji. And that may be the case. Then again, this entry could be misplaced, especially if the dates for this reign—and Wakasazaki’s actual age—aren’t exactly correct.
But what’s more important about this bit is that this appears to be the first time that we’ve seen any discussion of actual castle building in the archipelago, at least outside of the truly legendary tales. We’ve seen hastily constructed inaki, or rice castles, a time or two, and there has certainly been discussion of castles on the Korean peninsula, but this appears to be the first record of a permanent castle on the islands.
Of course, when we say “castle”, we should set some expectations. Japanese castles certainly were never the kind of stone keeps found in Europe, but these early castles were even distinct from those that you might imagine, like Matsumoto or Himeji, which generally date to the Sengoku era or later.
Early castles in the archipelago were probably little more than earthen walls, likely built up around natural features, like the sides of a mountain or hill, though it doesn’t have to be a mountaintop. They probably would have been based on Baekje—or at least peninsular—traditions. There were a number of Baekje style fortresses built in the 7th century to defend from a supposed invasion from the continent, but what would this one have been built for? Nagano isn’t exactly on an invasion route, after all.
But then again, it might not have been built anywhere near Nagano. Given that the levy was raised in Shinano, one might assume that is where the work was conducted. However, there appear to be some suggestions that the castle may have instead been built in the Nara Basin, near modern Kawai, but the information is fairly sparse and I wasn’t able to find any good reasoning behind it, but it is as good as anything else at the moment.
Could this have indicated a desire to strengthen military defenses in Yamato? If so, was there some sort of military threat? Or was it, instead, a projection of more militant authority? Were the fortifications part of some kind of pacification or militarizing effort? Unfortunately, there is not a lot to go on, in terms of actual incidents, but it does nag at me that Wakasazaki was later given the posthumous title of Buretsu, or Martial Merit—perhaps there was more going on than the Chroniclers cared to share.
That said, the possible connection to Baekje and the continent, through this potentially Baekje style fortress, is a theme that continues in the account of Wakasazaki’s reign, as later that year one Otara—or possibly Itarang—of Baekje died and was buried on Takada Hill. This is not a name I could find earlier in the Chronicles, but if they are referencing him, here, it is likely he was a noble or even a member of the royal family—perhaps a prince, like those who had been sent over in past reigns.
If so, then it may have been important because of the events of 502, when the Chronicles tell us that King Donseong of Baekje was deposed and Prince Shima was raised up to be the king known as Muryeong—coincidentally, another ruler from this period whose posthumous title uses the same Bu/Mu character as in Buretsu, meaning brave or martial.
This entry is dated a year later than the same events in the Samguk Sagi, but they appear to generally align. Prince Shima—or Syeoma—by the way was mentioned back in episode 62. His mother, one of King Gaero’s own consorts, had been sent with Lord Kun to attend the Yamato court, but he was born on the journey, his mother giving birth on Kahara island—hence his name: Shima. This story feels quite apocryphal, to me, once again asserting a Yamato role in internal Baekje politics.
The Chronicles then tell us that two years later, in 504, Baekje sent its first emissary to Yamato in some time: possibly since the death of Otara, and possibly earlier. This embassy also was late from the perspective that a new dynasty had come to power and it took them two or more years to reach out to their neighbor and ally. Finally, on top of all that, the emissary they sent, a Lord Mana, was apparently just a regular noble, which was apparently a diplomatic faux pas, as the Yamato Court expected the head of the delegation to be at least someone of royal blood. Yamato decided to hold Mana hostage, and would not let him return until the new King of Baekje went ahead and sent a new envoy, Prince Shika, the following year, in 505. Prince Shika apparently had all the proper bona fides, and it seems that good relations were reestablished.
While in Yamato, Shika would have a son, Peopsa, who apparently stayed on in Yamato and became an ancestor of the Yamato no Kimi.
The following year, in 506, Wakasazaki died in the Namiki palace. He had no heirs, though he had created the Wohatsuse Toneri as a familial group to ensure some legacy. Still, none of them were of royal blood.
And those are the events that probably did happen during this reign, much of them probably coming from the copy of the Baekje annals available to the court, or possibly through family records, such as that of the Yamato no Kimi. The Samguk Sagi, I’d note, doesn’t really have any clear evidence of dealings with the Wa at this time, and are much more focused on intra-penninsular conflicts, once more indicating that Yamato’s direct influence on the continent appears to have waned.
So, after 8 years on the throne, Wakasazaki passed away. We are told that he had no heirs: although the Kojiki makes it sound like he had a brother, that is ignored by our other sources, and in any case all sources agree that there was no heir. The line of Ohosazaki—aka Nintoku Tennou—died out with Wakasazaki, and the royal lineage had to be picked up from somewhere else.
We’ll get to how that happened when we talk about the next sovereign, but I wanted to mention all of this because it may explain why there is so much that doesn’t make sense in this reign, not to mention the bad rap Wakasazaki gets.
And maybe it was deserved. After all, if they put a ten year old child on the throne and he was ruling through his teenage years, dying at the age of 18, what would you expect? If a young person really were given the reins of power, and people did whatever they wanted, then there just might have been some pretty grotesque things done.
On the other hand, Chikafusa goes with the idea that he is much older—taking the throne when he is 50. He then goes on and doesn’t talk about any of the other acts that are said to have taken place, but instead focuses on connecting Wakasazaki’s evil acts with the downfall of Ohosazaki’s lineage.
Before that, though, he quotes from The Spring and Autumn Annals, a classical work, ascribed to Confucius, chronicling the State of Lu from the 8th to 5th century BCE, and often used as a reference to help describe proper statecraft. Chikafusa pulls a quote about how the line of a virtuous sovereign—in this case Ohosazaki, or Nintoku—will last for a hundred generations. And yet, the various histories are replete with examples where lineages and dynasties die out, which is often attributed to a sovereign who lacks virtue.
Chikafusa then recalls Buddhist history in India, where the reign of Ashoka—often depicted as the model Buddhist king—eventually gives way, three generations later, to a ruler who loses the Mauryan dynasty, which is again blamed on a lack of virtue.
And while Kitabatake is of course writing many centuries later—and much of it from his prodigious memory—he’s drawing on the same lessons that the Chroniclers themselves were likely using to judge a sovereign and their virtue. This all hearkens back to the continental concept of the Mandate of Heaven. That is to say that Heaven will bless sovereigns who rule well, but that inept and unjust rulers risk losing the Mandate of Heaven, which will then pass to another dynasty.
That political philosophy contains a rather insidious line of thought, not dissimilar to the idea of the prosperity gospel in the West. The idea that good things will happen if someone is good and bad things will happen if someone is bad. It is a comforting thought, and appeals to our sense of justice, but unfortunately history shows that things don’t tend to work like that. People are complicated, and bad things happen to good people all the time for no particular reason. Likewise, people can acquire power and wealth through less than scrupulous means and get to die in their sleep—sometimes even praised for what they have accomplished.
But to the Chroniclers and later scholars, ideas like the Mandate of Heaven were often seen as a nearly immutable law, and it would not be the first time that facts were tainted through the lens of a supposed universal truth.
Of course, the Sinic philosophical construct of the Mandate of Heaven had to be slightly modified for the archipelago, given the assertion, at least in the 8th century, that the sovereign had to be descended from the original Heavenly grandchild, but it still held for various branches of that family. And so we see that very logic here—Wakasazaki ended the Ohosazaki dynasty because he was evil; and we know Wakasazaki was evil because he was the last of the Ohosazaki dynasty. Similarly, whoever followed must be a descendant of the Heavenly grandchild, in one way or another, regardless of whether there was anything firmly connecting them to that birthright.
Compare all of this to the way that the Chroniclers depicted Ohohatsuse Wakatake. He is clearly seen as mean and cruel, killing his own siblings based on the flimsiest of excuses, and murdering people because they didn’t immediately go along with his suggestions to change things up. And yet, he’s not the death of the dynasty and is actually depicted as leaving things in a pretty good state of affairs, all things considered.
And so let’s keep this all in mind as we go ahead and dive into the depravities that Wakasazaki is said to have committed, though I really do feel like these might be little more than character assassination. They seem to have just been dropped into the records, with not quite one per year.
Speaking of which, this concludes much the family friendly part of this episode—and probably the historically relevant part as well. In the next few episodes I’ll probably take a pause and survey what has been happening in other areas, outside the archipelago.
Also a quick reminder that if this is not your bag, feel free to stop here. None of these episodes really contain anything that you would need for later. So let me pause for those who want to nope out, now.
(Pause)
Still with us? Then let’s go.
So the first thing we find in the Nihon Shoki is in 500, and it is pretty disturbing if true. Traditional dating would say that Wakasazaki was about 12 years old, and we are told that he had a pregnant woman cut open so that he could inspect the womb. Which is just so many levels of not okay.
First, when I read something like this, I have to wonder who was enabling such behavior. It is one thing with grown adult tyrants, who have consolidated their power into absolute rule, but for a 12 year old child that was, until recently, overseen by a regent? Was Ohotomo no Kanamura helping him with this and just indulging his whims? It is easy to simply point to one individual and say it is their fault, but what about all those around them? This is important to realize in any system—rarely is anything accomplished in a vacuum.
That said, this probably never happened. Aston notes that it looks like a similar charge levied against a King of Shang in the Classics. This is an example of how the Chroniclers might pick and choose known stories and place them into the Chronicles, just as they also took various speeches and descriptions and used them elsewhere in the text.
Granted, some of the other entries seem more mundane, but just as likely to be pulled from elsewhere. So in 501 we are told that he plucked out men’s fingernails and then made them dig up yams with their raw, bloody hands—possibly as some kind of criminal punishment, but possibly just to watch them suffer.
Then, in 502, he pulled the hair of men’s heads and made them climb to the tops of trees, which were then cut down so that the men in them died in the fall. In 503, he made men lie down on their faces in the sluice of a dam, so that they would be washed away. As that happened, he stabbed them with a three-bladed lance—perhaps some kind of trident-like thing?
In 505, he again made men climb up into trees. This time, though, he had them shot.
Bentley suggests these may have been in imitation of charges levied against King Dongseong, of Baekje, though reading through the Samguk Sagi’s account there isn’t much mentioned until they reach the end of the reign, where a comment talks about how he ignored any kind of criticism, and he feasted with his nobles in the midst of a terrible drought. Then there were various other signs of disaster, but nothing like what we see in the Nihon Shoki, so I wonder if they are actually related or not. Regardless, it is unclear just where these might have been pulled from.
Finally, there is one last episode that I won’t even recount in full. Essentially it has Wakazaki, in 506, torturing multiple women with sexual violence, for no apparent reason other than his own curiosity as to how they would react. For those who are interested, you can find the full account in the Nihon Shoki, though even Aston chose to translate it into Latin—though that probably has more to do with the fact that it contains direct mentions of female nudity and sexual violence. If you do choose to go looking, just be warned.
But for now, I think this is a rather good stopping point at the moment. It is the end of the Nintoku dynasty at the start of the 6th century. From here we’ll head into the lineage that should take us right through to the end of the Kofun period, but first we might want to quickly discuss what else is happening and provide some context.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And 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.
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
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

Episode 69: A Deadly Serious Poetry Battle

August 1, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Modern marker at the traditional site of Wakasazaki’s Namiki palace in Ha(tsu)se. Photo by Takanuka, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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This episode we look at Wohatsuse Wakasazaki, known to us as Buretsu (or Muretsu) Tennō (武烈天皇). Tradition holds he was only 10 when he came to the throne, but was he? We’ll tell the stories for now, but keep a critical ear to them. This is a particular turning point in the Chronicles, coming at the same time that we just lost the stories from the Kojiki.

Who’s Who

Wohatsuse Wakasazaki

Heguri no Matori

Current Ōmi (大臣), Descendant (possibly the son or grandson) of Heguri no Dzuku no Sukune, previous Ōmi and son of the legendary Takeuchi no Sukune.

Shibi no Omi

A powerful courtier—either the son of Heguri no Matori no Ōmi or else an ancestor of the Heguri no Omi. The only thing that seems consistent is that he had a crush on the same girl that a soon-to-be-sovereign.

Kage Hime

The daughter of Mononobe no Arakahi. Arakahi was the son of Masara, son of Itabi, at least according to the Sendai Kuji Hongi. There, Arakahi was made Ōmuraji after 534, two reigns after Wakasazaki. He was the son of Masara no Ōmuraji, who was given that title during Wakasazaki’s reign. He in turn was the son of Itabi no Ōmuraji, who was appointed during the reign of Ōke, aka Ninken Tennō, and therefore likely the current Ōmuraji at the beginning of Wakasazaki’s reign. That would seem to have her at quite a young age at the start of Wakasazaki’s reign, but not impossibly so.

Ōtomo no Kanamura

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is episode 69: A Deadly Serious Poetry Battle.
This is going to be a short one. A quick look at the start of the next reign, following up with more next episode. For now we’ll introduce this next sovereign and a touch on his somewhat tumultuous rise to power at rather young age.
First, though, to recap: in the last couple episodes we’ve covered the sovereigns who followed Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuuryaku Tennou. These included Shiraga, aka Seinei Tennou, Woke, aka Kenzou Tennou, and his elder brother, Ohoke, aka Ninken Tennou. After the elder brother, Ohoke’s, death, there was apparently only one male heir left: Wohatsuse Wakasazaki, who would eventually be given the monicker of Buretsu—or Muretsu—Tennou. As Crown Prince, he was next in line to the throne, but given the description of his reign, I think he may perhaps be the most maligned sovereign in the Chronicles so far. I mean, sure, the description of Wakatake was hardly complimentary, but much of his capricious violence would not seem out of place for a ruler who was likely heavily involved in martial pursuits. Besides, there is also the method by which he rose to the throne, implying he was quite comfortable with violence.
Wakasazaki, on the other hand, is simply depicted as cruel. The account starts with a Chinese passage, lifted directly from an account of Emperor Ming Ti of the Later Han dynasty. As Aston translates it: “When he grew to manhood he was fond of criminal law and well versed in the statutes. He would remain in Court until the sun went down so that hidden wrong was surely penetrated. In deciding cases, he attained to the facts.” The record goes on to add that he also “worked much evil” and never accomplished any good thing. This is also attested to in the Sendai Kuji Hongi, where they use the same language, but then the Nihon Shoki takes it one step further and sprinkles accounts of Wakasazaki’s atrocities throughout the narrative.
John Bentley, in his translation of the Sendai Kuji Hongi suggests that many of these episodes were added in later by the compilers of the Nihon Shoki, likely taken from elsewhere, and possibly borrowing some themes from the rule of a near contemporary in Baekje, King Dongseong, who was eventually overthrown and killed by his own subjects in either 501 or 502.
Was Wakasazaki really so bad? We’ll take a look and by the end of the next episode, maybe you can decide for yourself.
Now, as you may recall from last episode, Wakasazaki’s father, Ohoke no Ohokimi, aka Ninken Tennou, died in 498. None of our primary sources mention Ohoke’s age, though later sources agree that he was 50 years old when he passed away. We do know that 456 is when his father was killed and he and his younger brother went into exile. That was 42 years earlier, and therefore he would have been about 8 years old at the time if he was 50 when he died, so that seems to line up. His younger brother assumed the throne in 484 and passed away in 487, presumably aged 38, making him about 7 at the time, which seems to fit with everything else.
So when was Wakasazaki born, and why do we care? Well, there is no specific date given, but some sources claim that he was 10 years old when came to throne. That seems extremely young, given the stories we have, but not unthinkable—in later centuries there would be even younger children, with crown prince Tokohito invested at the ripe old age of two, becoming known as the unfortunate Antoku Tennou. That was certainly a different time, however.
If Wakasazaki was 10 years old, that would put his birth around 488 or 489, just after his father had come to the throne, himself. He was named Crown Prince in 494, when he was six years old. None of this is too unreasonable, assuming other dates are correct. Likewise I figure it is unlikely he was born before 482, when his father and uncle were brought to the court—or if he was there may be some questions as to why his mother, presumably Kasuga no Ohoiratsume, daughter of Wakatake, would have married a servant in Akashi. So if we assume everything else is correct, he must have been between 10 and 16 years of age when he took the throne—probably on the younger side of that. Since he would only reign for eight years, that begs the question about any quote claiming to describe him when he “came of age”—just what age are we talking about? Granted, people in the past often had different ideas of what constituted adulthood, and many people described as adults would have still been in high school or middle school, today.
Still, he was probably not considered an adult when his father died, and the country of Yamato therefore fell into a kind of Receivership, with the Prime Minister, or Oho-omi, taking the reigns of government.
This Oho-omi we’ve discussed before. His name was Heguri no Matori. The Heguri family claimed descent through Dzuku no Sukune, son of the legendary Takeuchi no Sukune, the first to take the title of Oho-omi. Heguri no Dzuku no Sukune had helped Izaho Wake, aka Richuu Tennou, escape with his life. Later, Heguri no *Matori* had been made Oho-omi in the reign of Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuuryaku Tennou, who had also given him charge, along with Ohotomo no Muruya, of helping Wakatake’s son, Shiraga, govern the land. See episodes 38, 54, 64, and 65.
And so it is not surprising that he would step up to fill in the gap as regent while young Wakasazaki was still coming of age. We’ve seen regents in the past, though notably in cases where it is a member of the royal family, such as Okinaga Tarashi Hime, aka Jinguu Tennou. Here, however, Matori’s motives are called out and he is accused of usurping the throne, using his guardianship of Wakasazaki as an excuse and claiming to do things in his name, such as building Wakasazaki a palace and then using it as his own.
And that certainly would not be unheard of throughout history for a regent to take liberties and even do what they could to keep their status, such as forcing them to abdicate in favor of a younger heir to keep the regent in power. But is that what was going on, or was it something else?
Well there is definitely a bigger story, and it is almost entirely in the Nihon Shoki. According to that one source the young Wakasazaki—whom I would remind you is traditionally ten years old—decided that he would marry Kage Hime, daughter of Mononobe no Arakahi—a figure we will here more about in the future, as he was quite prominent in the future. Right now, though, it was likely his grandfather, Itabi, and father, Masara, who were leading the Mononobe, a fact I’ll come back to in a bit.
The problem that Wakasazaki would run into, however, had nothing to do with Kage Hime’s parentage, however, and everything to do with the fact that she was already seeing somebody: Shibi no Omi. Or, more properly, Heguri no Sibi no Omi, son of none other than the prime minister himself, Heguri no Matori no Oho-omi. Given that Matori had been a figure in the upper eschelons of the court since at least the end of Wakatake’s reign, I wonder how old his son was—but I suspect considerably more than 10 years old.
Now the Nihon Shoki claims that this tryst between Kage and Shiba was an illicit affair, though I’m not sure why that would have been except that Wakasazaki desired her. Still, when Wakasazaki sent a middleman to arrange a meeting with her, Kage Hime agreed, apparently too frightened of what might happen if she said no. She agreed to meet with him in a certain street.
Wakasazaki requested that Matori prepare horses for him to head out, and Matori agreed, but then did nothing—presumably because he already knew about Kage Hime and his son, Shibi no Omi. Wakasazaki fumed over the delay, but quietly, and he eventually made his way over to the place of assignation on his own. Once there, he joined the poets who were making up poems on the spot, which was sometimes called an “utagaki”, or poetry hedge.
When Kage Hime showed up, Wakasazaki tugged at the hem of her sleeve to get her attention. He was thinking of nothing in particular—or at least, nothing besides Kage Hime, when someone came between them and pushed young Wakasazaki away. This was none other than Shibi no Omi, son of Matori. Wakasazaki was having none of this, and he apparently recognized Shibi no Omi. He got in Shibi’s face and immediately threw down the proverbial gauntlet in true Ancient Japanese/West Side Story fashion by singing out an impromptu piece of poetry, punning on the name “Shibi”:
しほせの　なをりをみれば　あそびくる
しびがはたでに　つまたてりみゆ
o Of the briny current
The breakers as I view,
By the fin of the tuna
That comes sporting
I see my spouse standing.
With that, Shibi had little recourse but to respond in kind. They went back and forth, trading verses laced with metaphors, puns, and innuendo. They talked about bamboo fences, representing the bridal chamber, as well as great swords, which I imagine referenced something a bit different.
These kinds of poetry competitions were a staple of courtly life from at least the 8th century, and I have no problem believing they go back to at least the 5th, if not earlier. They could simply be friendly games, but they could also make or break a reputation, and in the cutthroat world of courtly politics, reputation was key. Embarassment could severely tarnish one’s standing in court.
As such, these were battles as much as any physical fight. You were expected to respond to your partner’s poems in ways that built on them or even twisted the meaning. There were also well known poetic tropes and memes that one would try to leverage to demonstrate education as well.
As such, the poems here went back and forth between Wakasazaki and Shibi no Omi. Much of it does easily translate into English, but eventually, Shibi made it clear that Kage Hime was his:
おほきみの　みおびのしつはた　むすびたれ　
たれやしひとも　あひおもはなくに
o The great Lord’s
Girdle of Japanese loom
Hangs down in a bow.
Whosoever it may be--
There is no one (but me) whose love she requires.
As realization dawned on Wakasazaki, he realized that the two were already a pair, and he had no more lines. He was at the end of words, so to speak. He blazed out in a rage and left the spot.
With that, Wakasazaki started thinking back on all the little moments where Shibi and his father had slighted him in one way or another. He decided to bring an end to it, once and for all. Wakasazaki headed for the house of Ohotomo no Kanamura no Muraji, where he ordered Kanamura to raise troops and punish Shibi no Omi.
The troops eventually found him—either at Narayama, or possibly at Kage Hime’s house—and put to death the son of possibly the most powerful person in Yamato at that time.
As Kage Hime mourned the loss of her lover, the troops regrouped. Kanamura doubtless knew that they couldn’t just leave Matori in charge of the court—not after killing his son. And so he convinced Wakasazaki to let his men finish the job. He too his men and they surrounded Matori’s house. Once in position, they set fire to it, killing anyone who might try to escape.
With Matori dead, Kanamura then insisted that Wakasazaki formally assume the throne. He agreed, and had a ritual platform built at the Namiki palace, in Hatsuse—modern Hase. He then took Kasuga no Iratsume—and not Kage Hime—as his queen.
Now there is a lot in here to make me wonder. The first is his age. Perhaps if we assume he is more like 16 years old, this makes a bit more sense—ten seems extremely young, even back then. Also, I wonder if Matori was really that treacherous—it seems more like a jealous rage on Wakasazaki’s part that turned deadly, possibly with the help of a rival faction in court, represented by Ohotomo no Kanamura.
What really gets me questioning this, though, is that the Kojiki has almost the exact same story. In that case, though, the protagonist was Woke, aka Kenzou Tennou, the youngest of Ichinobe’s two sons, and the one most known for his poetic capabilities. His opponent, however, is still the same: Shibi no Omi. Except here he is said to be an ancestor of the Heguri no Omi—his exact parentage is not detailed.
Similar to the Nihon Shoki, the two trade poetic barbs over a woman’s hand—with many similar verses, though not in the same order. In this case, however, it is the royal prince, Woke, who comes out on top. He shows off his poetic prowess and gets the girl.
Shibi was powerful, though—not the kind of person you casually piss off. Every afternoon, presumably when the business of court concluded, all of the courtiers would gather at Shibi’s residence, gathering at the gate, probably for a night of drinking, poetry, and who knows what else. Woke and his brother agreed that they would need to strike first, before Shibi could organize against them. So, just as Wakasazaki had done, they gathered troops, surrounded Shibi no Omi’s house, and killed him.
Now, generally speaking, the Nihon Shoki is considered more reliable than the Kojiki. In this case, however, I have to wonder. In both cases the story has a similar feel. The sovereign-to-be has a crush on a girl, and Shibi no Omi, a powerful courtier, stands in the way. After a poetry battle, the sovereign-to-be resorts to military force, which is, itself, apparently justifiable because of who the protagonist is.
So that is the story of the epic poetry battle with Shibi no Omi and its fall-out. Next episode we’ll look more into the actual reign as well as the atrocities that were mentioned in the Nihon Shoki.
Before we leave, however, a quick note on names. First, there is Wakasazaki’s posthumous name of Buretsu or Muretsu Tennou. The reason for the confusion is that the character for “Bu” can be read either as Bu or Mu depending on the word. Buretsu appears to be the more common form. It is also a strange choice, as it seems to translate to something like “martial merit”, and yet I’m not sure there is a lot to commend that particular name to this reign, as we’ll see next episode.
Then there is the name he may have been known by at the time: Wohatsuse Wakasazaki.
The first of those recalls the name of his maternal grandfather, Ohohatsuse Wakatake. Wakatake’s name starts with “Oho” or “Opo”, which means basically “Great” or “Big”, and Hatsuse—indicating where his palace was located. Meanwhile, Wakasazaki’s name uses “wo”, meaning “small”, also paired with Hatsuse, where he, too, had his palace.
The given name, however, while sharing the “Waka” with his grandfather, also contains “Sazaki”, much like “Ohosazaki”, aka Nintoku Tennou—his great, great grandfather. That connection is going to be interesting later, as it appears that Wakasazaki might indeed be the last of Ohosazaki’s line... and that is going to cause some real questions if he can’t father a child before the end of his reign.
Which we will get into next episode, hopefully.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And 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

Episode 68: Ōke the Elder

July 16, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Nineteenth century artist’s interpretation of Ōke, aka Ninken Tennō, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Interesting that, although he is the elder brother he almost looks younger than Woke, his younger brother (see Episode 67)

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This episode we are on to the next reign—that of Ōke, aka Ninken Tennō, the elder brother of Woke, aka Kenzō Tennō and Iitoyo Tennō. He was the eldest son of Prince (Sovereign?) Ichinobe.

While his brother, Woke, reigned only for a relatively limited time before he unfortunately passed away, Ōke is said to have reigned for ten years—a not insubstantial reign, to be honest. If you think about it, one generally assumes that each king is part of the next generation, and as such one would expect reigns to average around 20 years or so. However, in this case Ōke was the third—or fourth—reign in a single generation, considering that Shiraga, Iitoyo, Woke, and Ōke were all siblings or first cousins, rather than father and son.

Ancient “Capitals”

Prior to the creation of permanent, continental style capital cities—complete with grid-pattern roads and rectangular plots of land—the center of the Yamato court appears to have been the sovereign’s palace, which moved fairly regularly. Below is an attempt to plot the traditionally identified palaces from Jimmu to Buretsu. These are based on where Google places the traditional palace ruins.

Akitame’s family situation

This is a bit complicated, but for those who are trying to follow, here you go:

Funame married Hataye
Funame gave birth to Nakume
Nakume married Yamaki
Nakume gave birth to Akitame
Hataye died and Nakume died
Funame married Yamaki
Funame gave birth to Araki
Araki married Akitame.

Attempt to depict the family relationships in Akitame’s family.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is Episode 68: Ohoke the Elder.
First things, first, shout out to Hirumuto for supporting us on Patreon. If you’d like to join them, check out Sengoku Daimyo on patreon.com or you can always check us out on our Ko-Fi site.
A bit more housekeeping. First off, this episode does have mention of suicide, and while we shouldn’t be going into great detail, just want to make sure that is out there.
Also, this episode we will cover the reign that followed Woke, aka Kenzo Tennou, but as we’ll see, there are plenty of gaps. Although this next reign is said to have spanned ten years—an entire decade—there really isn’t a lot of detail in places. That said, we can see what we might be able to deduce based on other information that we have up to this point. I’ll try to be clear where I’m making conjectures, rather than just what our historical or archaeological evidence tells us.Now, we left off last episode with the death of Woke, aka Kenzo Tennou, the younger of the two sons of Prince Ichinobe. He had reigned for only three years, and in that time he had tried to find justice for his murdered father, but also had engaged in—possibly inaugurated—regular poetry gatherings on the third day of the third month, and he may have also been responsible for instantiating worship of Takami Musubi, possibly bringing his worship from Nimna, on the Korean Peninsula. In addition, at some point in there, we saw others from the archipelago causing trouble on the peninsula—though whether or not they were connected to the Yamato court I couldn’t actually say.
One can only imagine Ohoke’s grief at the death of his younger brother. Unfortunately, there were many things that could take someone before their time, and it would not have been unusual for an elder sibling to outlive their younger sibling—or even for parents to outlive their children. And yet, Ohoke would have had to balance his grief with the realities of the situation. After all, there were no other heirs to take the throne, so it was finally on him.
He had been appointed as Crown Prince during the reign of Shiraga, but he had abdicated his position in favor of his younger brother, and there had actually been two relatives who had sat on the throne since then—first his sister or aunt, Ihitoyo, and then his younger brother, Woke. Now, though, it was his turn to take control of the Yamato court.
All in all, it looks like this took about eight months, from his brother’s death to Ohoke taking the throne. In the past we’ve seen where there was some time from one ruler to another, as it was often contested. But here we see where it apparently wasn’t contested, and yet there still seems to be a gap. This can probably be explained in several ways.
First off, there may have been a mourning period. Even if a tomb mound had already been arranged and constructed, from what we can tell of burial practices at the time, there was some period where the body would be laid out before burial. This looks as though it could have lasted up to two years, presumably as various rituals were conducted and even just the determination of a successor.
There are also various ascension rituals. While Ohoke likely did not have to go through all of the same rituals that occur today there are some we know about—and possibly others we don’t. One of the more important festivals appears to be the Daijosai—the first Niinamesai, or feast of first fruits, of the reign. I suspect that it was Ihitoyo’s untimely death before conducting the Daijosai that effectively disqualified her from consideration as one of the sovereigns. In effect, she had not completed the ascension ceremonies. This is mostly just supposition on my part, however.
There is also the act of constructing a new palace. As I’ve noted in past episodes, every sovereign selects a new location from which to set up their palace. These palace names actually seem to be how the sovereigns were referred to before the creation of the posthumous names that we see in the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki.
There has been some conjecture as to why the palace would be moved so often. After all, it seems like it would have been much more efficient to simply use the palace of your predecessor, as it was already built and the court was set up around it.
Typically the reasoning behind moving the palace is given as an issue of ritual purification. Drawing on Shinto belief, blood and death are seen as a type of spiritual pollution. While a site can be cleansed and purified, it may have been easier to simply move everything to a new building, or a new complex. There may be some examples of this back into the Yayoi period, with examples of some homes apparently collapsed and possibly burned, perhaps deliberately for some sort of ritual purpose.
Yet it isn’t like they just built a new building next to the old. If the Chronicles are to be believed, they picked up the entire court and moved it to another location altogether. Granted, most of the time up to this current sovereign, the traditional locations, if they are to be believed, remained somewhere in the southeast corner of the Nara basin, with only the occasional foray outside—once, briefly, to Lake Biwa, and once out to Naniwa—modern Ohosaka. Then there is the somewhat confusing period of Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko and Okinaga Tarashi Hime—aka Chuai and Jingu Tenno—where they at least temporarily set up out near or on Tsukushi, modern Kyushu.
It is possible that for some of these, the palace was already built—especially if the new location was in an area that was a political stronghold of the incoming sovereign. These may have already been locations that the successor was living, either part time or fully. We really don’t know much about how a quote-unquote “palace” differed from a residence—or at least the residence of an elite member of society. We do make several assumptions, however, that it would be larger, likely made up of multiple buildings. There is also some mention of certain types of architectural features, like possibly the roof shape.
It also isn’t exactly clear what the court looked like in terms of people— who were the permanent members, constantly in attendance, and what went on, day to day.The later court would be filled with scribes. The written word would be a big part of governance. Whether writing out or copying various works of importance. I doubt, however, that Ohoke’s court was filled with nearly as much scribal activity, though there were likely individuals trained in the written word, carrying on traditions from the Baekje scribes who had come over long before.
There were the toneri and uneme—male and female attendants from various families who would look after the needs of Ohoke and his family, while also possibly bending an ear now and then. That family included any wives and consorts he had, who would have been lodged in their own buildings, most likely, housed on the same compound, but also given their own separate domains, based on descriptions so far.
Was there a purpose-built building from which to govern, and conduct the rituals of the state, or was it basically just the front of Ohoke’s residence? I suspect the former, based on what we know of the layout of the palace at Makimuku as well as later palace dimensions. There were likely special buildings for gathering in—whether raised buildings or even a large muro, or pit house.
How about the Ohomuraji and the Oho-omi, the influential families or clans that we’ve heard so much about? They appear to have resided in their home areas. These were families with names like the Hata, the Wani, the Mononobe, and others, such as the Ki and the Heguri. Most likely I suspect they served as local magnates, traveling as needed for various ceremonies and festivals, which were, in their own way, a vital piece of government.
Ritual was still an important aspect of the role of the sovereign and the court, though during Wakatake’s reign he seems to have had less of an explicit role in ritual, focusing more on his military role. This may indicate a movement away from the sovereign leading the ritual and instead delegating the ritual activity to others—like how the previous sovereign, Woke, the younger brother, designated various families to worship Takami Musubi. This wouldn’t have necessarily been an immediate change, but over time various families came to take charge of different areas of ritual.
Correctly performing the rituals, which were likely thought to bring in good harvests or protect from natural disasters, was an important part of what was considered good government by the people. The sovereign had particular duties in this regard, but so did the other elites, whose own positions may have relied on their participation.
Did these powerful families maintain residences near the sovereign? Did the designation of a new palace also bring a wave of subsidiary construction? It is difficult for me to say. Still, the Nara Basin is large, but not so large that it cannot be traversed. East to west, on foot, it is perhaps a three to four hour journey. Even north to south is probably doable in five to six hours, depending on the location. From Isonokami shrine to Naniwa is perhaps eight to nine hours, if you don’t stop too long to eat something. On horseback these distances would be considerably shorter. And so it would not be too difficult to arrange for people to gather as necessary—at least for those who were present in the region. These distances may have then also formed the de facto extent of direct Yamato control.
The composition of these early courts were certainly different from later times, when all of the major noble houses would come to reside in the capital city. But then again, administration of the land was likely much less tightly controlled—one of the reasons we still have to wonder about the general evolution of the Yamato “state” at this point in time. Certainly it seems that the sovereign Wakatake, aka Yuuryaku Tennou, had been able to accomplish much, and we know that he had elites in both the eastern and western reaches of Japan who were, in some fashion, subservient to him. Still, after his death, and with the fall of the Liu Song on the continent and the destruction of Baekje by Goguryeo—even though it would reconstitute itself—there was not a solid foundation for Yamato. And so, in all likelihood, while the court had the trappings of authority, that authority in the late 5th century was limited.
The fact that the throne had seen three sovereigns over the course of seven years does not speak well to any consistency. Ohoke himself would be the fourth. This is a far cry from the over two decades of rule under Wakatake.
As I said, we have no clear understanding of court life at the time, but I imagine that it had the trappings of a supreme paramount – a single sovereign ostensibly in charge - but perhaps with some question as to the actual effectiveness of this system.So, it is in this environment that Ohoke set up his palace—his court—at Hirotaka, in Isonokami, site of the shrine of the Mononobe clain.
There are a couple of other palaces that are mentioned in the Nihon Shoki as being used by Ohoke, by the way. One at Kawamura, and the second at Takano, in Shijimi. Shijimi you may recall from the origin story of Woke and his brother Ohoke, and I suspect it is connected with the hastily constructed brushwood palace built by Wodate when he first discovered the two brothers. It is also possible that these were summer or winter retreats—vacation homes, as it were. We’ve seen similar mention of staying at various palaces for long durations of hunting or similar activities.
Anyway, at the Hirotaka palace, Ohoke installed his wife, Kasuga no Ohoiratsume, as his queen. Unlike his younger brother’s wife, Naniwa no Wono, we have touched on Kasuga no Ohoiratsume before, though mostly focused on her mother. Back in episode 60 we talked about how Wakatake had a one-night fling with an uneme, one of the ladies attendant at court. This was Woguna, the daughter of Kasuga no Omi no Fukame. As you may recall, when a child was born of their union, Wakatake initially refused to accept it, but eventually he could not deny that the daughter was his own, and he raised up her mother’s status, such that she received the title of “Kimi” or “Gimi”, becoming known to us, today, as Woguna Kimi.
It is said that even at a young age, Woguna Kimi’s daughter had her father’s bearing. This daughter, as you may have guessed, was Kasuga no Ohoiratsume. A few key points here.
First, it is extremely interesting to me that she is the daughter of Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuuryaku Tennou, given how Wakatake had killed Prince Ichinobe, the father of Ohoke and his younger brother, Woke. So this means that Ohoke ended up marrying the daughter of his hated uncle, the man who murdered his father. Assuming the Nihon Shoki is correct, I have to assume this would have been a strictly political marriage. On the other hand, Ohoke may have been more forgiving given the fact that it was a son of Wakatake, Prince Shiraga, who had brought him and his brother back into the family fold.
It is also interesting here that we don’t really have much of a name for Kasuga no Ohoiratsume. “Kasuga” would appear to be a family name or even a locative—not that there was necessarily much difference at the time. “Ohoiratsume”, meanwhile, is basically a fancy word for “Royal Princess”. We’ve seen this same title used again and again in the narrative, and overall it tells us very little.
Putting this together with the story of her birth, however, it brings up a plethora of questions. Was she actually of royal birth? Or was the story of Woguna Kimi added to ensure she had the appropriate bona fides to be queen - perhaps even an attempt to ensure that Wakatake’s own lineage continued, given his impact. Of course, we may come back to this in a later episode, when we look at just what lengths the Chroniclers went to in order to justify the idea that there was an unbroken royal lineage all the way back to the gods in Takama no Hara.
Either way, there certainly seems to be a lot of justification going on. Ohoke, the sovereign, brought forth from obscure exile in the boonies. Kasuga no Ohoiratsume, the unexpected daughter of a one night stand between Wakatake and a court uneme. One would be totally within their rights to question what was going on in the Chronicles.
Speaking of which, from here on out we are mainly relying on the Nihon Shoki for the bulk of the anecdotal information. The Kojiki, from this point on, relegates itself to mostly providing genealogical information—naming the sovereign, their queen and consorts, and their offspring, as well as things like the location of their palace and their mausoleum. And even that only covers up to a point—ending with information for the early 7th century—still another hundred and fifty or so years. We’ll use it where we can, but just realize that even as our accounts get more reliable, we end up with even fewer sources to compare against.
Speaking of the genealogical information, we are told that Ohoke and his queen, Kasuga no Ohoiratsume, had seven or eight children. Most of them were daughters, but there was one son, Wohatsuse no Wakasazaki, who would become the next Crown Prince. There was also another child, named Mawaka, whom the Kojiki claims was a son, but the Nihon Shoki claims as a daughter. This may be simple confusion over the graphs used in the text or an attempt to justify later succession decisions—it is impossible to know for certain. The name certainly looks like it could be either male or female, to me.
There is at least one consort mentioned as well: Nuka Kimi no Iratsume. She was the daughter of Hiuri or Hifure, of the Wani no Omi. She had a daughter that was either Kasuga no Yamada or possibly Yamada no Ohoiratsume. The Kojiki gives her father’s name differently, but that may be a mistake that was made with a later entry for a wife of Kimmei Tennou, whose father’s name is given as Wani no Omi no Hitsuma.
Again, names are of great interest to me. The fact that this other consort, who is said to descend from the Wani no Omi, has a daughter who is given the name of “Kasuga” suggests to me that there was a fair amount of interaction with that family or area. Perhaps there is something else I’m missing. But I would expect that a Kasuga no Iratsume would be the daughter of Kasuga no Ohoiratsume, personally.
Speaking of queens and consorts, what happened to Naniwa no Wono, the queen to Ohoke’s younger brother, Woke, aka Kenzou Tennou? Normally, a former queen would be raised up, although this does not seem to have been automatic, and is most often the case when the former queen was also the mother to the current sovereign, thus making her the Queen Mother. Of course, Naniwa no Wono was only Ohoke’s sister-in-law. Furthermore, it seems that they may not have been on the best of terms.
Now, remember, everything we’ve heard about the brothers, Ohoke and Woke, they were tight. The bond between them was strong, and they are constantly described as deferring to one another in just about all things. There is no indication of any bad blood between them, and Ohoke directly promoted his brother to the throne.
For Naniwa no Wono, however, her position as queen may have gone a bit to her head. The Nihon Shoki gives us a taste of this in the form of an anecdote from the younger brother, Woke’s, reign. It was at a banquet where both Ohoke and Woke were present. There was a melon on the table, but no knife to cut it with, so the sovereign, the younger brother, Woke, asked his wife, the Queen, Naniwa no Wono, to get a knife and hand it to his older brother, the then-Prince, Ohoke.
Wono did as she was bade, but when she handed over the knife, she remained in a standing position. After all, she was the queen, and Ohoke was merely a prince. Later, when she poured out the sake for her princely brother-in-law, the Queen again did it from a standing position.
From what I can discern, this probably wasn’t improper, given her position at the time, but it wasn’t exactly respectful. Likely it was expected that she would lower herself, possibly to her knees, to hand over both the knife and the sake. This kind of abasement is still seen in various traditional arts. When bowing, for example, the lower one bows, the deeper the respect being shown. Likewise, even when handing things over to someone there can be layers of meaning depending on whether one uses one hand or two, and whether one grips the item being handed from above or from below. Depending on the social situation, there can be a host of meanings in just how one performs various actions.
The lack of respect for Prince Ohoke might have been overlooked if Wono herself had produced a male heir to the throne. After all, then Ohoke and his issue would have continued as merely royal princes. But without a male heir, Ohoke came to power, and we are told that Wono was afraid for her life because of the disrespect she had shown to him before.
Eventually, she couldn’t live with the sword of Damocles hanging over her any longer, and Wono took her own life in the ninth month of 489.
There is a bit to unpack here, and I suspect quite a bit went unsaid in the Chronicle. After all, from what I can tell this all happened a full year and change after Ohoke came to the throne, and over three years since the previous sovereign, his brother Woke, had died. If Ohoke was planning revenge for any disrespect shown to him, previously, then he certainly was taking his time with it. Perhaps he believed that revenge was a dish best served cold, but if so, he had basically put his on ice.
The only other indication that there was something may have been the failure to name Naniwa no Wono as a Dowager Queen. That may have been the kind of subtle and embarrassing blow that may seem like mere oversight, but could have been quite the political blow. Later, we will certainly see the kind of cutthroat politics that took place in the “hinter palace”—aka the women’s quarters. The politics behind supplying an heir to the throne often grew quite intense, with women playing out the family politics that infested the court.
And so perhaps that was enough of a snub such that Naniwa no Wono felt she had no other recourse left to her. Certainly it wouldn’t be the last time we see someone take their life in order to preserve some shred of their honor. Unfortunately, we just don’t have enough details to know for certain.
And that is perhaps the biggest theme of this reign: we don’t have enough details. Ohoke reigned, we are told, for some ten years. And yet we have scant details of what happened. Just a few things each year. We are told about Naniwa no Wono’s suicide, and the establishment of the Isonokami Be attendants and the Saheki Be. We are also given a tantalizing account of two men, Ikuba no Omi no Kashima and Hohe no Kimi, who were thrown into prison for “crimes”, but we aren’t told what they did, though they did die in there.
So given that we don’t have much else to discuss, that bit is interesting - what can we deduce about this ?
First off, these individuals are not simple commoners, at least if their names are to be believed. The kabane of “omi” was one of the most prestigious, indicating a family of some influence in the court. The “Ikuba” family shows up in the records throughout the 6th century, but not necessarily afterwards. They were first recorded back in the time when Ohosazaki, aka Nintoku Tennou, was sovereign, and we talked about their origin story back in Episode 53. They seem to have a connection with the Korean Peninsula in some way, shape or form.
I don’t see Kashima, of the Ikuba no Omi, elsewhere in the Nihon Shoki. There is Kashimada, or Kashima Fields, in the “upper road” of Kibi, or Kibi no Kamitsumichi. It is unclear, though, whether there is any connection between the individual and the location.
Hohe no Kimi is a bit more of a head-scratcher. I can’t find any other reference to him. “Kimi” would likely indicate a local lord. After all, the sovereign was “Oho-kimi”, the “Great Lord”.
I’ve seen some suggestion that the crimes referenced may have been effectively political in nature—perhaps they posed a challenge to the sovereign. That might make sense as to why the line was included in the Nihon Shoki, but there is one other piece that makes this somewhat intriguing, and that is the mention of imprisonment.
In early Japan, the penal system was not exactly what it is today. In fact, in most places in history, crime and punishment have been handled in very different ways. Today we may think about jail, imprisonment, and fines as the primary forms of punishment for criminals, but this hasn’t always been the case. For one thing, jails and prisons require an infrastructure—you need people who can run and maintain such an institution. Temporary incarceration is one thing, but long term imprisonment is something else.
It also has to do with the purpose of your punishments. Are you trying to prevent further transgressions? Are you attempting to find some way of balancing the scales—justice, as it were? Or is there something else?
Monetary fines may be enough in some instances. In ancient England, a weregild, or man price, was instituted, so that when someone was killed, the killer would be forced to pay a fine to the family. Now I get how that could seem like it is just a way for rich people to buy their way out of corporal punishment, and to some extent it is. But it is also important to realize that up to that point the main form of justice was retributive killings. So if someone from family A kills someone from family B, then someone from family B kills the killer, or some other member of *their* family, which leads to someone from family A going after family B again… well, you can see how that gets messy, and it isn’t exactly helpful in maintaining a stable society.
Early punishments that we’ve already seen in the Chronicles include fines, tattoos, exile, and, of course, death. We’ve also seen that the Mononobe were, at least back in Wakatake’s day, the apparent executioners as well as guards and general military support to Yamato.
Up to this point, however, incarceration appears, to me, to have been a temporary solution—such as when Wakatake detained the Silla delegation because of accusations that they were disrespecting the court uneme, back in Episode 56. They were thrown in prison, but we might better just refer to it as jail. Once they were questioned, they were released.
And so, returning to Ohoke’s reign and the two people in question: I have to wonder whether imprisonment was their punishment or if they were basically awaiting some kind of investigation into their guilt? Did they die before they could be questioned and punishment meted out?
This is all simply conjecture. Unfortunately, I doubt we’ll find much archaeological trace of judicial structures—or at least nothing that we can definitively prove. If people were kept in a raised building, it would look like any other. If they were kept in a pit building, then it might be similar. I doubt that they were imprisoned in anything like a cellblock as we might imagine it today.
Now, in another one of the more fulsome accounts from this reign, we have the mission of Hitaka no Kishi to the continent, once again seeking out artisans for the court. This is how families like the Hata and the Aya are said to have come over, bringing their knowledge of silk and weaving. In this instance, Hitaka was able to bring over artisans from Goguryeo with an apparent understanding of special leather tanning techniques. However, that isn’t the actual story, but just the background. You see, he had someone with him named Araki.
Now Araki might be all but forgotten if not for his wife and an extremely convoluted set of marriages and births. Because when he left with Hitaka no Kishi his wife, Akitame, lamented her lot in life in fine poetic form:
“Woe’s me, my youthful spouse!
For to me he is an elder brother,
And to my mother too, an elder brother.”
When someone asked her what she meant by this she produced a cryptic response worthy of some kind of mountain top guru: “Think of the autumn garlic’s ever-clustering growth.” – which, for any Spirit Island fans out there, also sounds like an awesome new Spirit. Just sayin’.
Now, first off understand that the sinograph used for “garlic” in this case seems to refer to older forms of onion-like bulb vegetables, and might more properly be referring to something similar to a spring onion. And while onions and garlic today are largely planted in the fall and harvested in the spring—at least in the northern hemisphere—it is unclear what exactly is meant by “autumn” here—and where the vegetable in question would be in its lifecycle. I suspect, however, that it refers to the period when the bulb might be budding off new growth, a phenomenon that would create bunches of onions, all clustered together. That would at least fit the description given by the anonymous person in the Nihon Shoki who heard of this and went on to explain how it related to the complex family situation that the woman in question was in at the moment.
You see it started when Funame of the Naniwa Jewelers’ Be married Karama no Hataye. Together they had a daughter, named Nakume. Nakume married a man named Yamaki, of Sumuchi, and together *they* had a daughter, named Akitame.
Unfortunately, Karama no Hataye, Akitame’s grandfather, and Nakume, her mother, both passed away. Her father, Yamaki decided to remarry, and since Akitame’s grandmother, Funame, was now a widow, Yamaki decided that he should just marry his own mother-in-law, Funame, which was apparently not quite Kosher. I’ll try to put a chart of this together, not that it makes it any easier.
Anyway, Akitame’s grandmother, Funame, lay with Akitame’s uncle, Yamaki, and they had a son, Araki.
And Araki married Akitame, despite the fact that he was both her half-brother, through their father, Yamaki, as well as the brother to Akitame’s mother, Nakume, through Akitame’s grandmother, Funame. And thus her declaration, which I’ll repeat once more:
“Woe’s me, my youthful spouse!
For to me he is an elder brother,
And to my mother too, an elder brother.”

The only thing that is a bit off then is the term older brother, but commenters on the Chronicles seem to have suggested that the terms today translated as elder brother or younger sister were, at the time, simply used for any brother or any sister.
This incestuous family relationship is just one of the last entries in Ohoke’s reign. The rest basically just notes how he made his son, Wakasazaki, Crown Prince, he had one really baller year—though in what way they don’t say. And then Ohoke passes away in the tenth year of his reign.
And as such, that closes the chapter on Ohoke, aka Ninken Tennou. Next episode we’ll look at the reign of his son, Wakasazaki, later known as Buretsu Tennou.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And 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

Episode 67: Woke's Grab Bag

July 1, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Nineteenth century artist’s interpretation of Woke, aka Kenzō Tennō, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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This episode we cover a variety of things from the reign of Woke, aka Kenzō Tennō, in the late 5th century.

Chikatsu Asuka (近津飛鳥)

Technically, there are several areas that are “Asuka”. The area in the Southeast Nara Basin seems to be where many sovereigns had their palaces, but there is also an area further to the west that might make more sense as “Near” Asuka, especially if Chikatsu Asuka was on the way between Naniwa and Isonokami. (Note that the map is approximate).

Banzai (万歳) — not bonsai

This is still used in modern Mandarin, or Putonghua, as “Wansui”. In both cases it is the same meaning, with the Japanese term originating in the Han dynasty or even earlier. It literally means “10,000 years”.

FWIW, “Bonsai” (盆栽) is something else—trees or similar plants that have been carefully trimmed and kept as a miniature version, usually very carefully and painstakingly shaped to look appropriately “natural”, sometimes specifically trained to a particular landscape. Groups will get together and often display their work to the public at castles, shrines, temples, and elsewhere.

While people may wish “banzai” to their “bonsai”, try not to confuse the two!

Kyokusui no En (曲水宴)

The “Winding Stream Poetry Banquet” is one of the hallmarks of Japanese noble poetic culture, and comes directly from the continent. Sometimes it is read as “Gokusui no En”, but it is the same idea. These parties were a big hit, and special streams were built for them.

Extant feeder stream uncovered at Motsuji, in Hiraizumi.

Unfortunately, over time many of these streams have been demolished, though there is at least one remaining stream—a feeder stream for the pond at Motsuji temple in Hiraizumi, in the Tohoku region. Back in the Heian era, elites in Hiraizumi did their best to emulate the culture of the capital even out in the provinces, leaving us things like this.

Today there are various temples and shrines that hold regular “Kyokusui no En” events, with people coming out in Heian era garments and re-enacting these poetry events.

Takami Musubi

We’ve discussed Takami Musubi before. He is one of several kami using the designation of “Musubi”, including “Kammu Musubi”. Takami Musubi is said to have come around before even Izanagi and Izanami, who are otherwise seen as the “creation” kami.

Ki no Ohiha

Probably “Ki no “Opipa” back in the day, and nowadays maybe more appropriately as “Ki no Oiwa”. The Ki family is known to have been active in various campaigns on the Korean peninsula.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 67: Woke’s Grab Bag
Warning up front: this episode we are covering a bunch of different events from the reign of Woke, aka Kenzo Tenno, in the late 5th century. I’m not sure that I could say there is clearly a single thread, but many of them have something interesting, at least in my opinion. So here you go.
In the last episode we saw how the brothers Ohoke and Woke, sons of Ichinobe, were found and returned to their position as royal princes in rather remarkable and poetic circumstances. The elder, Ohoke, was designated Crown Prince, but after the sovereign passed away, he abdicated his position in favor of his younger brother, Woke. As Ohoke and Woke went back and forth about who would sit on the throne, their dithering left it empty and so it was their sister—or possibly aunt—Ihitoyo who took her place upon the royal throne, putting an end to the back and forth between the brothers. Regrettably, Ihitoyo’s time on the throne would be cut short as she unexpectedly passed away less than a year after she had taken the throne, which is given as the main reason why she is not included in the list of official sovereigns, though some sources do name her as Ihitoyo Tennou.
And so, with the throne empty, the two brothers were soon back at it, bickering over who should be the next sovereign.
Finally, Woke gave in to the pressure from his elder brother and the Yamato court and agreed to take the throne. He is remembered to us, today, as Kenzou Tennou. Early on in his reign, he had a focus on finding justice—both for his father, Ichinobe, and for acts committed for or against him and his brother while they were in exile. We detailed these in the last episode, episode 67.
But that isn’t all of Woke’s reign. There was certainly more.
According to the Nihon Shoki, it started with him setting up his palace of Yatsuri in “Chikatsu Asuka”. Traditionally historians locate this in the southeast corner of the Nara basin, between the areas of Kashihara and Sakurai. This is the area we typically talk of as “Asuka”, referencing the area from which various sovereigns ruled relatively unopposed from the 6th to 7th centuries. It makes sense as it is also in the general region of Hase, where Wakatake is said to have had his court, and all in all it makes a logical location from which to set up the government.
On the other hand, there are others that place “Chikatsu Asuka” around the area of Asuka near modern Habikino—there is even a museum to this area. This all makes more sense from the earlier descriptions—back in Episode 54 you may recall that Izaho Wake fled an attempted assassination attempt when they burned down his palace in Naniwa, and he traveled to Isonokami. Along the way he passed by Chikatsu Asuka, nearby Asuka, as well as Tohotsu Asuka, or Distant Asuka. The Asuka in the southeast Nara basin is out of the way for such a distinction—if one were going from Naniwa, or modern day Osaka, to Isonokami, it makes much more sense to take the route through Habikino and then on across the basin to the eastern side.
It leads me to wonder just where this palace was. Of course, it could also be that this isn’t the palace at all, and may have simply been the coronation site. There are apparently records of an Ikeno palace and Mikakuri, which is also said to have been the site of his predecessor, Shiraga’s, palace, which is also identified as being in the area of Sakurai, just north of the historical Asuka region.
So, wherever his palace actually was, once settled on the throne, Woke took his wife, Naniwa no Wono, and made her his queen. She was the daughter of Wakugo of Oka, a descendant through prince Iwaki of Woasatsuma Wakugo no Sukune, aka Ingyo Tenno. Or so we are told. Once again, the Chronicles are emphasizing the need for an official queen—not just a consort—to be a descendant, herself, of the royal line. After all, we don’t want that family tree to get too wild on us.
The fact that she was apparently of Naniwa is also not insignificant. That was still the main port for accepting goods from the continent.
To celebrate all of this we are told that “general amnesty” was made—though whether this was actually the case or simply something to bolster Woke’s reputation I couldn’t say.
There is also another note here—something that could easily be passed by. It is said that the various ministers gathered and wished the new sovereign ten thousand years. Or, in other words, “Banzai”.
You are probably aware of this phrase, and no, it isn’t the same as bonsai, those miniature trees and landscapes. It is phrase used much as we might use “to your health”, and comes originally from a phrase in the Han dynasty, or possibly earlier. It literally means “10,000 years old”, though “10,000” in this case is a standard trope meaning a long time or a large number—hence a wish for a “long life”.
It is perhaps most widely known as the chant you would hear during WWII movies, especially from groups like the kamikaze pilots. Nationalist fervor had gripped the nation, and the cry became a shortened form of a longer cry of “long life for the emperor” or “Tennou Heika Banzai”, and it was not uncommon that Japanese soldiers would shout “Banzai” when they charged forward in an often fearsome attack. Whether or not it was actually shouted by any of the kamikaze pilots on their final approach, one cannot say, since most of them did not survive to tell us.
That said, it is often used, today, outside of this nationalist and imperialist setting, though I’d say there are still some right-wing strings attached. In those instances, however, it can be a more general exhortation to give it your all or best wishes for some person, group, or idea.
Now, assuming that the dating in the Nihon Shoki is accurate, this would appear to be the first use of the phrase, at least that I can tell. It is later used in more reliably historical parts of the Chronicle, so it was at least in use by the 8th century, and likely much earlier.
And the use of this phrase happened in the third month, on the day of the snake—which seems to have been designated for another activity, at least during Woke’s reign. You see, he apparently was fond of poetry competitions, and he sponsored one on the day of the snake, every third month.
You may recall that Woke’s ties to poetry were strong. He had announced himself and his brother in poetry during a celebration for a new muro, and the Kojiki has a story about how he entered into a poetry battle over the hand of a woman—though that may actually have happened during another reign.
Poetry competitions were certainly a big deal in the later Japanese court – which I’ll talk about a little later – but it’s interesting that there are only three of these gatherings mentioned by the Chroniclers, and all of them are found only here, in Woke’s reign. They read simply, but there are enough contextual clues that we can surmise more about it.
First off is the fact that these are not just random poetry get togethers. They are all described in the same way and they all happen on the same day every year. Clearly this was a date of some importance, though it only seems to show up in Woke’s reign for some time. Literally: 3rd month, Day of the Snake only seems to show up in the Nihon Shoki three times, and it is all in Woke’s reign.
That said, this festival is something that has continued down to us, even today, as the day of the Snake would have been the third day in the third month, which some of you may recognize as Hinamatsuri, also known as Girl’s Day or the Doll Festival.
This is one of five seasonal festivals, or Sekku. The first is on the 7th day of the first month. The other four are on double days. That is, a day where the number of the day and the month match. These are the third day of the third month, the fifth day of the fifth month, the seventh day of the seventh month, and the ninth day of the ninth month.
It is said that a festival on the third day of the third month, known today, at least, as the Shangsi festival, started in the Zhou dynasty, with a dinner party at the Qushui River. Others suggest that it started with a ritual bathing festival. Whatever the actual reason, it seems that the early festival was related to water.
Which fits with what we see in the Chronicles, as it talks about a “poetry water banquet”, a “kyokusui no en”. The image this brings is of a classic poetry gathering around a winding stream, which also brings up the idea of a dinner party at the river.
Such a winding stream party seems to have been associated with the spring festival from at least the middle of the fourth century, when cups of rice wine were floated on the waters down to the participants, who composed poetry and when the cup reached them they were expected to drink and recite their work.
In later centuries, at least, Japanese nobles would come out in their finest, set up around a winding stream, eating and drinking and sharing poetry and songs.
This stream could be natural, but we have plenty of evidence that streams would be deliberately built as part of a garden specifically for these kinds of soirees. The stream would be gentle—by at least the Heian era, the image is one of nobles with servants who could run back and forth to the stream in their stead while they, themselves, worked out their poetic verses.
Was this how it worked back in Woke’s day, in the late 5th century? It is hard to say, but it certainly looks like the roots of just such a celebration. Then again, it could be a complete anachronism, thrown in here to give the practice an even greater veneer of antiquity, and associated with Woke specifically because of his mad poetry skilz.
Now besides coining a new phrase and possibly importing a new excuse to sit around drinking and composing poetry, there was also a somewhat more spiritual development during this reign, having to do with the deities of the Sun and the Moon, and a tenuous connection with the Korean peninsula.
You see, in the 2nd month of 487 Kotoshiro Ahe no Omi had been sent to Nimna. To what purpose I’m not sure, but while he was there he met a man who had a vision from the Moon God themselves. Kotoshiro was told that they should make an offering to the Moon God and to his myriad relatives, including Takami Musubi. Thus upon Kotoshiro’s return, the court dedicated the Utaarasu rice fields to this purpose and put Oshimi no Sukune in charge of their worship.
Two months later, Kotoshiro once again got a spiritual knock on the door, this time from the sun goddess, who told him to dedicate the Iware rice fields to Takami Musubi. This was done and the Atahe of Shimo no Agata, in Tsushima, was put in charge of this.
So why do we care?
Obviously, we can’t state for a fact that Kotoshiro had communication of some kind with actual spirits. But the timing and connection do seem intriguing.
First off, there is the fact that he received his first vision in Nimna or on the voyage to or from. I’m sure there are plenty of scholars who would point out the transnational nature of many seemingly indigenous kami, and here we see that play out once again in the form of the moon god. In fact, this messaging is coming from someone—presumably a spiritual medium of some sort—on the Korean peninsula, which certainly suggests some connection to a peninsular tradition.
It is also interesting that in both cases we see them named as simply the ‘moon god’ and the ‘sun god’.
We first brought up the stories of the creation of the moon god, aka Tsukiyomi, and the sun goddess, aka Amaterasu, back in episode 15. There they were created by Izanagi, with Tsukiyomi, the moon, being created specifically as a counterpoint to the sun, Amaterasu. Meanwhile, Takami Musubi is one of the first deities to arise, even before Izanagi.
Also, as we detailed in Episode 22, both Takami Musubi and Amaterasu were claimed as ancestors of the royal family—specifically the Heavenly Grandchild. In fact, Takami Musubi is sometimes the sole ancestor—it is only in some of the stories that Amaterasu is mentioned.
That relates here as, once again, we see a de-emphasis of Amaterasu—she is simply mentioned as the “sun god”, and not even given one of the various names from earlier on. Furthermore, she isn’t asking for fields to be set up for her, but both the sun and the moon are requesting fields be set up to support the worship of Takami Musubi, who is actually worshipped at the court, whereas Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi are both mentioned as being worshipped at sites outside of the court itself.
This is an example of the kind of evidence we see in the Chronicles for the evolution of belief in the archipelago. Even though the Chronicles present an apparently chronological series of events, the first two sections are about the quote-unquote “Age of the Gods”, but it seems pretty clear that many of the stories were created—or at least codified—in a much later period.
For example, the similarities between entrances to the underworld and later kofun, where people are often entering through a doorway in a hill or similar structure to go down into the land of the Yomi—the dark land of the dead. This imagery doesn’t make much sense for a story from the early kofun period, as the kofun mounds of that time were simply that, mounds. The graves were actually vertical pits dug into the tops of the mounds, not unlike a burial on the ground, but with a more monumental surrounding.
It wasn’t until later—some time in the 5th or 6th century—that we really see the horizontal entrance into a stone chamber. These kofun, which appear to be influenced by continental tombs, have chambers made of stone that are entered from the side, rather than from the top. These sometimes even have evidence of people going into them multiple times, whereas the vertical pit would have to be completely dug out. These horizontal entrances provide a much better analogy with the various stories of death and the underworld, likely meaning that those same stories—or elements—evolved in the later part of the kofun period.
On the other hand, we have glimpses of interactions with deities in the sections from Jimmu onwards. In these we can see that aspects of belief have been co-located in the Chronicles with an apparent time period. Even if they aren’t fully accurate, that puts some veneer of chronology on those actions. The further along we are in the Chronicles, the more reliable these are.
So, for example, in many of the early stories we see kami represented by snakes, often living on mountains, like Mt. Miwa. This isn’t exactly how kami are usually depicted, today, but it is not impossible to think that this may be a reference to early beliefs in the archipelago.
Likewise, what we have here suggests to me that Amaterasu may not yet have taken her place as the chief goddess of Yamato and the royal family. We saw, early on, the Miwa cult, where Takami Musubi was emphasized, but a quick search of the Nihon Shoki demonstrates that Takami Musubi really doesn’t show up after Iware biko, aka Jimmu Tenno’s, reign until now, the reign of Woke. I suspect that this current account, where Kotoshiro is explicitly told to make offers to Takami Musubi, could indicate the *actual* founding of Takami Musubi’s worship by the court. Even then, I don’t see him much in the Chronicles, afterwards, but he does show up elsewhere, such as in the Kamuyogoto recited by the Izumo no Kuni no Miyatsuko when they arrived at the Yamato court to take up their office from at least the 8th century onward.
Speaking of Izumo, Takami Musubi shows up in several of the stories having to do with the subjugation of Izumo. Another name that shows up in those stories is none other than Kotoshiro. In that instance it is Kotoshiro Nushi, whose name is the same as that of the member of Ahe no Omi who traveled to Nimna and brought back the commandment from the moon god in the first place. Does this mean that Kotoshiro is the same as Kotoshiro Nushi? I am not prepared to go that far, but it does seem interesting that he shows up here.
Unfortunately, we don’t have too much more during Woke’s reign, as almost immediately after setting up the worship of Takami Musubi, Woke dies. We don’t know why, exactly—but then, this was a time when they likely didn’t know, either. There were so many things that were just considered a “natural death”.
However, there is an odd epilogue in the Nihon Shoki’s account, and like the account of the Moon God, it too had to do with Nimna, on the Korean Peninsula.
According to this story, Ki no Ohiha no Sukune made a base of operations in Nimna, and from there he made contact with the kingdom of Goguryeo. Now Ohiha had ambitious plans: he was going to establish a government, claim that he was a deity—a kami—and take control of the “Three Han of the West”. The Three Han, or Samhan, is traditionally a reference to the area of the Mahan, Jinhan, and Pyeonhan, which covered the areas of Baekje, Silla, and Kara, including Nimna. On the other hand, it also was used, later, to refer to just Baekje, Silla, and Goguryeo, encompassing all of the Korean peninsula. In this case I honestly couldn’t tell you what was meant, exactly, but it was clear that Ohiha was ambitious.
Together with several others he conspired and assassinated the heir to the Baekje throne. He then built a castle at a place called Tesan and “stood on the defensive as regards the eastern province.” More specifically he cut off access to one of the major harbors through which supplies were transported. That likely means somewhere along the southern coast of the peninsula, referencing supplies between the archipelago and the rest of the peninsula. A single area along the coast might be avoidable, generally, speaking, but you still generally wanted to keep sight of land as much as possible or else follow tried and true pathways across the straits. So there are several areas where I imagine one could effectively take control of the trade routes along various chokepoints.
All of this—though I suspect especially the assassination—pissed off Baekje to no end. The king of Baekje sent men against Tesan, but the castle held out against the initial assault, putting the men to route.
This was, however, a minor victory. Ohiha may have had positional advantage, but his forces were minor compared to those of the continent—and apparently Goguryeo wasn’t really getting involved. As such he was one against a hundred, and as such Baekje was able to surround Tesan and cut it off from outside supplies. After a while, the siege worked, and the defenders eventually ran out of supplies. Ohiha was able to escape, departing Nimna and returning, presumably to the archipelago. His co-conspirators and their men, however, were not so lucky, and we are told they were put to death.
This is one of those odd stories that I suspect has deeper connections if we really look into the characters. Because otherwise, why do we care? The Ki family is certainly implicated in many of the adventures against the Korean peninsula, so that isn’t out of the ordinary, but otherwise it doesn’t look like Ohiha has much impact on the narrative. This may simply set up later relations between Baekje, Nimna, and Yamato.
Personally, I think it is probably indicative of the fact that Yamato’s control remained somewhat tenuous. There were still various actors out there who were able to rouse forces and cause trouble. In fact, the lack of any action by Yamato in this matter is interesting. Why weren’t they rushing to help their ally, Baekje? Why weren’t they ensuring the trade ports remain open? Were they actually supporting Ohiha in some way? Unfortunately, I’m not sure what to tell you, as this doesn’t really appear in the other Chronicles that I’ve seen.
And that’s where the reign of Woke ends, in 487. The Nihon Shoki says that he reigned for a mere three years—the Kojiki generously gives him eight, but it seems less reliable in such matters, generally speaking. I guess it is possible, once again, that there were co-rulers—perhaps Ohoke and Woke were ruling together. Whatever the truth, it is still obscured by the past.
Woke passed away without any direct descendants to take the throne, and so it would go to his older brother, Ohoke, who would come to be known as Ninken Tennou. Expect to hear his story in the next episode.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. It is always great to hear from people and ideas for the show.
And 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

Episode 66: A Challenger Appears!

June 16, 2022 Joshua Badgley

Entrance to Kitahanauchi Ōtsuka Kofun, a round-keyhole tomb mound said to be the resting place of Iitoyo, a possibly non-heteronormative woman who may be an uncredited sovereign of ancient Yamato. Photo is public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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This episode dives into just what happened to help solve the looming succession crisis due to Shiraga Ōkimi’s lack of offspring to designate as heirs. Note that there are definitely spoilers for the episode, below. You’ve been warned.

Dramatis Personae

Oke and Woke

For those who have been somewhat confused by the names I apologize, but this episode isn’t going to get any better—and it is possibly worse. Much of the narrative focuses on these two brothers, and I’ve seen their names transcribed in a number of ways, all very similar. Students of modern Japanese may note that “Wo” is really just pronounced “O” these days, and only used as a particle marker, but here I’ve chosen, along with others, to keep the archaic “Wo” instead of the modern “O” as a marker to help distinguish between the two.

The Kojiki has these as as 冨祁 (Oke) and袁祁 (Woke), and the Nihon Shoki has 億計 (Ohoke) and 弘計 (Woke) [Romanized transcription via Aston, though he claims to take it from his reading of the Kojiki]. In the Kujiki, Bentley tells us that it is 雄計 (Woke) for the younger brother, and transcribes the elder brother as “Oke” (Or, more appropriately, Okye and Wokye).

If Aston’s transcription is correct, then I can see this as Opoke (Big/Elder Ke) and Woke (Small/Younger Ke), though that still doesn’t tell us a lot, though we have seen that dichotomy elsewhere in the Chronicles. The fact that they don’t use 大 and 小, though, does make me wonder. Other explanations suggest that “Oke - Oke” is called out during a particular dance, and that this may be why their names are as they are. And so I guess as I spell it out we’ll content ourselves with Oke and Woke, with Oke being the elder, and Woke being the younger brother.

I am also still wondering about the names “Kume no Shimako” and “Kume no Wakako” that also seem to be applied to them. I considered using those, but honestly, it is not how you are going to encounter them elsewhere, and I think we have generally just given up with trying to make it “make sense” beyond what it is.

Iitoyo

Aka Ihitoyo, she is an interesting figure. She is either the sister or aunt to Oke and Woke, and some footnotes make her their maternal aunt, vice their paternal aunt. Either way, she is something of an interesting figure in that she appears to be a female ruler, even if just briefly. Some have suggested that she originates in the “Toyo” that followed Himiko in the Wei records, but I think that is a bit of a stretch. We definitely seem to be getting into more well-sourced history, here, even if things are still distorted by time and bias.

Speaking of bias, I’ll admit that what I read into the story of her decision to eschew sex certainly is colored by my own bias. On the one hand, I want to be careful reading too much into things and we should always be cautious about trying to assign someone else an identity. On the other hand, I think representation is important, and it is helpful to see beyond the heteronormative social structures that are built up around what society tells us a man and woman should do and be.

In fact, western views of gender roles and gender norms don’t exactly fit Japanese society through much of its history. This isn’t to say that they didn’t have cultural norms, just that we will see time and again where those constructed cultural norms may not be what we, ourselves, expect.

Locations

This entire episode, including the murder of Ichinobe, all takes place in an area from about modern Kobe in the west to the area around Lake Biwa, and, of course, down to the Nara Basin. Prominently mentioned are Ōmi (aka Afumi), Yamashiro, Tanba, Harima, and Settsu—as well as areas indicating Kawachi and Yamato. This is probably reflective of the area of more direct Yamato control at the time, including the strongholds of the families that made up the Yamato court.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan, my name is Joshua and this is Episode 66: A Challenger Appears!
In this episode we’ll deal with murder and revenge, against both the living and the dead. We’ll also briefly discuss someone who may have been the first LGBTQ+ ruler of Yamato—or at least she is in my head canon; I’ll leave you to make your own judgments there. But of course, first off, we have to deal with where we left off last episode.
A brief recap: At this point, Yamato seemed to be in pretty good shape. Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuryaku Tenno, who we’ve spent several episodes talking about, had done well by Yamato, at least on the archipelago. He had expanded power by consolidating various industries into familial Be structures that reported to a head in the Yamato court. And sure, there were political differences with Kibi, but that state and others were copying Yamato’s kingly round-keyhole style tombs, at least, so clearly Yamato influence had spread. Even if they didn’t have direct control, they seem to have been at least primus inter pares—first among equals.
However, the royal family was not exactly in a great place. Even before coming to the throne, Wakatake had pruned the branches, killing his own brothers and his cousin in order to rule. And towards the end of his reign, he had no children with his queen, but he did have Prince Shiraga, his son with Kara Hime, who he made Crown Prince. He did have two other sons by Kibi no Waka Hime, but one of them, Prince Hoshikawa, tried to usurp the throne. Soon he and all of Waka Hime’s other children were wiped out, leaving only Shiraga, known to us as Seinei Tennou.
And now, here was Shiraga, childless, without any heir to succeed him. We talked about his brief and pretty uneventful rule last episode. It looked like the royal line was going to die out with him, leaving the throne of Yamato empty, and no doubt setting off a period of violent fighting for the throne.
And yet, we still have the royal line: the Imperial Household is still a thing, even to this day, and they claim an unbroken line of descent all the way back to the Heavenly Descendant. While some may question just how unbroken that line really is, the Chronicles, at least, support this claim, so what happened at this turning point in the succession? Was there a miracle birth? Did Shiraga finally find a woman and settle down?
Well, according to the Chronicles, what happened was thanks to a man by the name of Wodate of the Kume Be of Iyo, the lord of the land of Harima. In 481, he arrived at the court, fresh from a trip to the district of Akashi, and he had quite the story to tell.
You see, Wodate had been sent out to collect taxes in preparation for the Daijosai, the Feast of First Fruits. This is similar to the Ninamesai, which celebrates the first fruits of the harvest every year, except that the Daijosai was celebrated at the start of a new reign—in this case, the reign of Shiraga no Ohokimi.
When Wodate arrived in Akashi, the local lord was named Hosome, the chief of Oshinomi Be and the Obito, or head, of the granaries of Shijimi. Hosome welcomed Wodate and invited him to a house-warming feast in honor of his newly built muro—a large pit-house that seems to have been designated for communal gatherings of some kind. A fire was lit, probably in the center of the muro, and it was tended by two boys whose job it was to keep it lit.
Hosome and his guests feasted and reveled deep into the night. At one point, after all of the guests had taken turns dancing, Wodate came to notice the two boys keeping the fire. They were somewhat precocious, being extremely courteous, and Wodate offered to play music while they got up and danced.
At first the two boys—brothers, it turns out—deferred to one another, each offering the other the honor of going first. This went on so long that Wodate had to interrupt them and tell them to just go already.
First up was the older brother. He danced to the sound of the Wodate’s music, and when he was finished, his younger brother stood up.
At first he sang a song toasting the health of the new muro, and Hosome, the master of the house.
After that, he sang another song, accompanied with music, which impressed Wodate who asked for more.
And so the younger brother danced something that the Nihon Shoki calls a “Tatsutsu dance”, which meant that he stood up and sat down during the dance. During this he sang:
Of Yamato
The Rustling Reed Plain
The Reed Plain
The younger Prince am I.
And if you didn’t just catch that, yes, this young fire tender was basically making a claim that he was a Prince of Yamato.
Well, now, this was quite the turn. Wodate was astonished—floored, I dare say—and yet also intrigued. He asked him to go on and give another song.
Without even hesitating, the younger brother obliged:
The sacred cedar
Of Furu in Isonokami--
Its stem is severed,
Its branches are stripped off.
Of him who in the Palace of Ichinobe
Governed all under Heaven,
The myriad Heavens,
The myriad lands--
Of Oshiha no Mikoto
The august children are we.
There was no mistaking it this time. This young servant was claiming that he and his brother were, in fact, the children of Ichinobe no Oshiha no Mikoto, and thus they were princes of royal blood, and potential heirs to the throne.
Now to dig into this a bit we are going to have to go back in time somewhat—back to just before Wakatake came to power, which we covered in episode 57. At that time, Wakatake’s older brother, Anaho, had been sovereign, known to us today as Ankou Tennou. He was killed by his own stepson who blamed Anaho for killing the boy’s father and then taking his mother as his wife. This kicked off a chain of events, during which Wakatake, claiming to seek justice, killed his other brothers as well as the young boy and those who harbored him. But that wasn’t enough, because Wakatake was guilty of that same crime of which Brutus accused Caesar, at least according to the bard—he was ambitious. And if he wanted to attain the highest position in the land it wasn’t just his brothers he had to contend with. No, there was one more obstacle in his way: Ichiniohe no Oshiha.
Ichinobe—probably Itinobe, at the time—was the son of Izaho Wake, aka Richuu Tennou, Anaho and Wakatake’s uncle – so, he was their cousin, basically. Izaho Wake, Ichinobe’s father, was the first successor to his father, Ohosazaki no Mikoto, aka Nintoku Tenno, so the senior of the three brotherly sovereigns. When Izaho passed away, his son, Ichinobe, was still a young boy, and so the throne passed to Izaho’s brother, Midzuha Wake, also known to us as Hanzei Tenno. But even Midzuha’s reign was short, only four years or so, and he had no sons of his own and Ichinobe was still a young boy, so the throne passed again, this time to the younger brother, Woasatsuma, aka Ingyo Tenno. Unlike his brothers, he had quite a few children, and a reign of forty years or more—at least according to the Nihon Shoki, at least. And so he passed the throne onto his son, Anaho.
Anaho had no children of his own by the time he died, but he did have a cousin, along with his many brothers. If the Nihon Shoki is to be believed, he had chosen this cousin, Ichinobe, as his successor. After all, Ichinobe, while of the same generation, was the son of the senior of the three previous sovereigns, so this would seem to make some logical sense. Thus, theoretically, Ichinobe should have succeeded Anaho—and it is quite possible that he did. In fact, in the Kojiki’s telling of the story of the two brothers, the younger brother—who is named Woke, by the way—makes the express claim that Ichinobe did, in fact, rule the country at some point. In the Chronicles, however, it is made clear that Ichinobe hadn’t quite ascended by the time that Wakatake, with the help of a man named Karabukuro, invited Ichinobe out on a hunt. There, on the moors of Karano, Wakatake shot and killed Ichinobe, burying him and his servant in an unmarked grave, without even a tomb mound to mark his resting place.
Now as it happens, word of Ichinobe’s death had made it back to his household before Wakatake had returned. Immediately, the household became worried—especially Ichinobe’s two sons. After all, if Wakatake came back and found them, he might decide to completely finish the job. And so they took off, fearing for their lives.
These two sons were Ohoke, the elder brother, and Woke, the younger brother—and don’t worry, I’ll do my best to keep them straight in the narrative. In truth, at the time, they were probably known more as Opoke and Woke, which was at least a little more clear—which I assume was meant as something like “Ke the Elder”, that’s Ohoke, and “Ke the Younger”, that’s Woke. There are two other names—Wakako and Shimako—but to be honest I see them referred to as Ohoke and Woke so much I think we’ll stick with that.
These two brothers were accompanied by their attendant, Kusakabe no Muraji no Omi—where Omi was a name, not a kabane—as well as Omi’s son, Ada Hiko. According to the Kojiki, as they fled together they came to Karihawi in Yamashiro. There they paused to eat when a man with a tattoo on his face came by and seized their food. He was Ikahi, the boar-keeper, of Yamashiro.
Hungry and without provisions, Ohoke and Woke and their crew made their way across the land, finding what food they could. The Nihon Shoki claims they traveled to Yosa district, in the province of Tamba.
Here, as they were essentially in their own version of witness protection program, their attendant, Omi, took on a new name, Tatoku. But the threat of being found out continued to weigh on him. The Nihon Shoki tells us that he ran away to a cave on Mt. Shijimi, where he strangled himself, so as to remove the possible threat. The two brothers, who didn’t know where Omi had gone off to, went searching for him. They called themselves the Tamba no Waraha, or the Boys of Tamba, and eventually they wound up in Akashi, working as servants for Hosome – you know, the guy who built the fancy new muro and held a party, at the beginning of this story. Meanwhile, Ada Hiko, Omi’s son, continued to serve and support them in their exile.
The Harima Fudoki, compiled from stories about the places in Harima, has a slightly different take on all of this. In the section on Shijimi, in the district of Minagi, it has several stories that connect the area to the princes Ohoke and Woke’s grandfather, Izaho Wake, but it also tells the story of how they came there, to Shijimi, in their youth. This was after the murder of their father, whom the Fudoki goes so far as to name as “Sumera Mikoto”, a title seemingly reserved for an actual sovereign, lending a little more credence to the idea that Ichinobe was more than just the Crown Prince.
Their attendant, Omi, secured shelter for the boys in a stone cave near the village of Shijimi, where Omi let go of their horses and burned all of their belongings, so that they would have nothing that might alert people as to their status. After doing all of that, he strangled himself, as in the Nihon Shoki, although the Harima Fudoki claims he did so because of the grave offense he was committing in hiding the boys from the sovereign, Ohohatsuse Wakatake, and the Yamato court.
The young boys went from place to place, changing where they stayed, until they finally sought refuge with Itomi, the village chief of Shijimi, offering to be his servants. Here it would appear that Itomi and Hosome are one and the same person, or at least play the same role as the lord of Shijimi.
From there the story of their discovery is very similar to what is told in the Nihon Shoki. During the dedication of a new muro for their lord, the two princes-in-hiding are set the task of making sure that the fire stayed lit. As the night dragged on, they were called on to sing and dance, and each deferred to the other until finally the younger brother, Woke, sang a song that revealed their status as sons of the rightful sovereign, Ichinobe. In the Harima account, Wodate, of the Yamabe no Muraji, was simply a guest of Itomi, the head of Shijimi village, but when he heard their song he spoke up. He offered to take the princes back to their mother, who is named here as princess Tashiraga, possibly another name for their mother in the Nihon Shoki, Princess Haye-Hime.
In any case, it is still Wodate who revealed the existence of the young princes, Ohoke and Woke, to the Yamato court, which quite conveniently solved the current succession crisis that was keeping Shiraga (and everybody else) awake at night. After all, if Shiraga passed away before an heir could be found, who knows what kind of violence could have erupted with the throne up for grabs. As Wodate sent word back to the court, he also sprang for a temporary palace for the two boys, made, we are told, of brushwood—likely an indication of how hastily it was put together, probably similar to those temporary palaces made for visiting sovereigns when they traveled. This must have been quite the surprise to the people of Akashi, who had known these two merely as servants of Hosome—the lost boys of Tamba.
When news of the two princes reached Shiraga, he was over the moon. He exclaimed how he suddenly had two children, where he had previously had none. He had them brought to the court. At Settsu they were met by the Omi and the Muraji, who escorted them the rest of the way to the court, where they were welcomed back.
According to the Nihon Shoki, the older brother, Ohoke, was designated as Crown Prince and successor to Shiraga, and the younger brother, Woke, was restored in status to a royal prince. Presumably they were also reunited with their family—their mother whom the Harima Fudoki claimed was still pining for them, as well as their sister, Ihitoyo, whom I assume had remained—she is mentioned consistently in the various Chronicles, although not always exactly the same. For instance, the Nihon Shoki and the Sendai Kuji Hongi claim she was their sister while the Kojiki has a slightly different narrative, claiming she was their aunt. In either case, she isn’t mentioned as part of their exile, which merely references the two young boys and their attendants.
Of course, the sovereign’s own joy was short-lived, as was his reign. Some three years after the discovery of Ichinobe’s lost heirs, Shiraga himself passed away.
And as tragic a moment as that was, at least there shouldn’t be any question about the transition. After all, Shiraga had nominated the elder prince, Ohoke, as his successor. So that should be pretty cut and dried.
Right?
Right?
Yeah, it still wasn’t that easy. Not that there was anyone challenging them, necessarily, but rather it had to do with their nature. Just like during the dinner at Hosome’s banquet, the two brothers couldn’t stop deferring to each other, much as Ohosazaki and Wakairatsuko did after the death of Homuda Wake—see Episode 49 for details. The elder brother, the Crown Prince Ohoke, actually relinquished his right to rule. He claimed that if it were not for his younger brother, Prince Woke, Wodate never would have known it was them. He was the one that had suggested that they reveal themselves, and then he actually did it—through poetry and song, nonetheless.
Since neither of them would take the throne, a third person stepped in: their sister, Ihitoyo. Well, again, the Kojiki says she was their aunt—and even claims that she stepped in before the two were rediscovered, and that she was on the throne until they could be brought back and then she handed over the reigns of power to them.
In both cases, Ihitoyo is described as basically being a sovereign in all but name—perhaps because she ruled for less than a year—according to the Nihon Shoki, at least—something she seems to have had in common with Prince Ichinobe, though in her case she does seem to have at least been recognized for her time on the throne, even if she doesn’t merit an entry in the “official” list of sovereigns
There is one other interesting note about Ihitoyo in the Chronicles. It was actually one of those episodes that Aston found a little too salacious to just put out there in the open in plain English, and so he wrote his version of it in Latin. We also have the same story in Sendai Kuji Hongi—the Kujiki—where Bentley does not treat it as quite a scandal. For my part, I’ll let you decide.
So Ihitoyo was dwelling in the Tsunozashi palace when she first had intercourse—it is unclear if it was with her spouse or if she was unmarried at the time, and whether it was with one person, or more than one. However, apparently she was unimpressed by this socially expected act, and made up her mind that since she had known the ways of a woman she no longer needed to have sex with a man ever again.
Now, that’s it. It is just one small part of the story and they could easily have left it out. Perhaps they were using it to justify why she didn’t have any offspring of her own, or perhaps it was something like Elizabeth being a virgin queen—giving up female things to take on a male role in society. Or perhaps it was meant as some kind of slander, or even to explain why she didn’t have offspring of her own to pass the throne on to. Personally I like to think that maybe heteronormative relationship dynamics just weren’t her thing, and after trying it out, as was culturally expected of her, she decided that was it, and she didn’t need to do that anymore.
If that is the case, does that mean that, at least for a short time, Yamato was possibly being run by a queer female ruler? I like to think so. At the very least, though, it begs the question: Why wasn’t she on Wakatake’s hitlist, like so many other people were?
It is possible that she wasn’t as much of a threat—the Kojiki suggests that she was a maternal aunt, not an elder sister, which brings up even further questions, though she was still a direct descendant of a previous sovereign, it seems.
Now, even if she was clearly considered a possible candidate for the throne, I suspect that there was enough patriarchal sentiment that, even if there wasn’t necessarily a clear precedent between siblings and nephews, there was probably a preference for male heirs—a far cry from the time of Queen Himiko.
Regrettably, her time on the throne was limited. According to the Nihon Shoki, she took the throne in the first month, but then died in the 11th month—of what we don’t know, but she was buried at Haniguchi hillin Katsuraki. This is currently identified by the Imperial Household Agency as Kitahanauchi Ohotsuka kofun, a kingly, round-keyhole shaped mausoleum, about 90 meters in length.
Though never an official sovereign in the Chronicles, she is remembered by some as Ihitoyo Tennou from at least the 12th century, and while generally not listed in any of the official regnal lists, various historians have added her in to their own. Mizuno Yu even went so far at one point to suggest that this entire period was actually her reign, and that all these stories of Ohoke and Woke were just to cover it up. Much as with Ichinobe, there are a lot of questions, and no clear answers.
Now, with Iitoyo’s untimely death, the court needed an actual answer from the two princes.At long last the elder brother, Ohoke, prevailed upon his younger brother, Woke, to take the throne, which he did, becoming the sovereign known as Kenzou Tennou.
Now sovereign, Woke took care of the required business of setting up his court, but then got straight into his first priority—getting justice for his father. First and foremost, that meant finding his unmarked grave—no easy task given all the time that had passed. He sent out word throughout the realm looking for anyone who might have information on his whereabouts.
From this missive, a woman named Okime came forward. She was an old woman, but she remembered the incident and she claimed to know where Ichinobe’s body had been buried. And so she took the two brothers, Prince Ohoke and the sovereign, Woke, out to the moor of Kaya—or Kayano—and sure enough they found an unmarked grave, and it had two bodies in it. After all, it wasn’t just Ichinobe who had been killed, but his servant, Nakachiko, as well. They were able to tell the skulls apart—the Kojiki claims that Ichinobe had “multiple teeth” like a sakikusa—a lily with three-pronged branches. Some of have suggested this may be a reference to some kind of tooth deformation, though we haven’t really found much evidence for that practice since the start of the Yayoi period, as far as I’m aware. Still, there were apparently enough distinguishing marks to prove that it was Ichinobe and his servant, though beyond the skulls it was impossible to sort out the rest of the remains.
And so they built twin tombs on a mountain east of the Kaya plain, burying remains in each of them, so that they were both honored. A tomb claiming to be Ichinobe’s can be found in Higashi-omi, east of Lake Biwa, in modern Shiga prefecture. It is one of two circular kofun that are said to date to the 5th century. To the east of that—still within Higashi-omi, there is another kofun that claims to be Ichinobe’s final resting place. It is Kuma-no-mori in the modern Myohoji district of Higashi-omi. While there appears to be only the one tomb, it is a kingly rounded-keyhole tomb, lending some credence to the idea that it would have been more fit for a royal prince—and possible sovereign.
I would note that neither of these are exactly on a “mountain” east of Kayano, but they are both in the general vicinity. Furthermore, there is a later note that the remains were dug up once more and eventually moved closer to Yamato, where the tomb could be more properly attended to, so it is possible that neither one is truly Ichinobe’s “last” resting place.
Wherever the tombs were built—or the remains moved to—Woke was pleased to see his father properly recognized at last, and for leading them to the spot he rewarded Okime. In fact, he had a house built for her near his palace, and he even put up a rope between her door and his so that she could use it to help walk to the palace. He even installed a bell that she could ring so that he would know she was coming. He supposedly had her visit quite frequently, but eventually, her age caught up to her, and even with the rope, Okime could no longer make the journey. She asked to be allowed to return to her home in Afumi, where she could spend the rest of her days in the place that she had lived for so long. The sovereign agreed, and sent her off with a small fortune to take with her.
Now, with Ichinobe’s remains properly buried, you might think that was it, but Woke still felt unsettled. There were a few more debts he felt he needed to take care of. For one, he had Karabukuro, Wakatake’s attendant during the whole father-murder thing, taken into custody, with the intent to put him to death. For his complicity in this act, Woke wished to put Karabukuro to death. But when Karabukuro no Sukune approached, he bowed his head, and appeared to show remorse for the part he had played, and this touched the sovereign’s heart, so that he decided he would not have him put to death. Instead, Karabukuro’s name was erased from the rolls. He was given the charge to oversee Ichinobe’s tomb, and was consequently placed under the charge of the Yamabe no Muraji.
Speaking of the Yamabe no Muraji, here we see that it wasn’t all about retribution with Woke no Ohokimi. For Wodate, who had found the two brothers and helped bring them back to Yamato, was granted his heart’s desire. He was given charge of the Mountain Office—likely something akin to the Ohoyamamori, with jurisdication over the mountains and forests. This also placed him over the Yama Be no Muraji—the Be of the Mountains, which was likely tasked with overseeing the care of the forests for purposes of hunting and suchlike.
Of course, it wasn’t all rewards—there were still more people that Woke had grudges against, and, in another act of retribution, the sovereign sent out people looking for the tattooed bandit, Ikahi the boar-keeper, who had stolen the brother’s food when they were on the run. He was apparently still alive, and so probably an old man, but that didn’t matter to Woke’s sense of justice. According to the Kojiki, he had him executed by the bed of the Asuka River, and then they severed the tendons of all of his relatives. This kind of punishment—and reward—of an entire family for the act of one is something we’ve seen before, and goes along with the general system of kabane rankings, where it was more the family’s rank, not just an individual’s, that was affected by the actions of its members.
All of this done, something still did not sit right with Woke. Had Ohohatsuse Wakatake, aka Yuryaku Tenno, still been living then Woke would have likely had him put to death as well. And let’s face it, we’ve spent quite a few episodes talking about how Wakatake, while advancing Yamato’s interests, was an all-around jerk over and above being the murderer of Woke’s dad. But since Wakatake had died, that option for revenge was taken from Woke, and yet still he felt the need to do something. Since he couldn’t kill Wakatake, he decided the next best thing would be to destroy his memory. And so Woke ordered that men be assembled to dig up and destroy Wakatake’s tomb.
When Woke’s older brother, Prince Ohoke, heard what the sovereign wanted to do, he stepped in. At first, he tried to dissuade his brother, but, seeing that his younger brother was committed to this course of action, Prince Ohoke requested that he be put in charge of the destruction.
And so he went out there with the workers that had been gathered to the tomb of Wakatake, but when he got there he didn’t level the tomb. Rather, he went up to the side of the tomb, and he dug a hole in the side. After making this small hole he returned to his brother and told him that the tomb was “dug up” and that it had thus been demolished. But when Woke, the sovereign, asked his older brother how he had accomplished this feat, Ohoke told him how he had dug up a small amount of earth on the side.
The sovereign was likely dumbfounded at this point. I mean, technically I guess, yes, he did “dig up” the tomb, but how exactly was it demolished.
At this point Prince Ohoke laid out his case. He noted that yes, their desire for revenge was justified, no doubt about that. On the other hand, whatever beef they had with him, Wakatake was still an uncle and, on top of that, he had been sovereign of Yamato. To now fully demolish his tomb would set quite the precedent—one that the current sovereign of Yamato may want to consider the ramifications of. How would future generations judge them? And yet, by digging a hole and disrupting the shape of the kofun, even just a little bit, they had nonetheless placed a mark of shame upon their uncle. Ohoke suggested that, given everything else, this was a just punishment, and that Wakatake’s dishonour would be known for generations to come.
And, if you think about how the Chroniclers treated Wakatake’s reign, I can’t say that Prince Ohoke was so far off. His younger brother, the sovereign, agreed with his reasoning, and decided to leave it at that.
And with that last bit of revenge, Woke seems to have been satisfied. Next episode we can focus more on the other deeds and happenings during this period.
Before we go there, however, a quick discussion of a few things that I discussed. Obviously, it is impossible to fully sort fact from fiction in these stories, and much of it has no doubt been romanticized in the telling, fitting into the cultural narrative that the Chroniclers were espousing. Even though the general dating of events seems to be getting more reliable, there is plenty of reason to doubt much of this narrative.
Of course, my first question tends to be about the reign of Ihitoyo, and if it was truly as short as it was. There seems so little mention of her time on the throne, and yet there seems to be general agreement that she did sit and rule, even if she isn’t counted in the royal line. No doubt later historians would count her merely a regent, but I wonder if that doesn’t do her a disservice.
Similarly, I’ve been asking the question of Ichinobe, and we saw how some of the accounts grant him titles that would imply he was also a fully ranked sovereign, even though the Chronicles don’t exactly give him that due in any official capacity. Personally, I tend to view his reign has quite probable at this point.
Now, whether Ohoke and Woke were actually his sons—that is certainly up for debate. Theoretically they had servants with them and people who could vouch for their status, but still, Wakatake’s reign is counted as roughly 23 years, and it was roughly 25 years from the death of Ichinobe to the princes’ discovery by Wodate. Were they truly the sons of Ichinobe, or was this a convenient excuse to keep the royal line intact?
One clue here may be in the names. It seems that the other names given for Ohoke and Woke are Kume no Shimako and Kume no Wakako. Interestingly, Wodate is apparently of the Kume Be, which would seem to make him plausible a servant of Kume. Now this appears in some places to refer to simply men of the military, but there is also the village of Kume, and it is often referred to as a family name. Of course, the royal line is never given a family name—that is a tactic that will later be used when there are a few too many princes of royal blood floating around. Got a few spare princes? Remove them from the succession by giving them surnames, adding them to created clans like the Minamoto and the Taira. So why would these princes be “Shimako” or “Wakako” of Kume? That seems slightly suspicious to me. Is it possible that they were not of royal blood at all, but that somehow the Kume family had managed to take over after Wakatake’s line ran out.
It is, as I said, hard to really know. While there is, I would say, a growing body of archaeological evidence as we move forward, I’m not aware of any actual contemporary text that calls out anything too specific. It isn’t like there is a sword out there inscribed with “From the reign of Woke no Ohokimi, who was absolutely the son of Ichinobe no Ohokimi and by no means was he simply from a powerful family.”
As far as the tombs go, based on Kishimoto’s classification, it would seem that one line of tombs appears to end with Oka-misanzai, which he identifies with Wakatakeru, and though he identifies three tombs—Minegazuka, Shiragayama, and Bokeyama—as being in the same mold as what he terms the main line—a tradition going back to Hashihaka Kofun itself—there isn’t a clear line of succession after Maenoyama—which he attributes to Shiraga—down to Bokeyama, which he attributes to Oke. In fact, things seem generally muddied between the brothers here, Ohoke, and Woke, and their descendant, known to us either Buretsu or Muretsu Tennou, but as we shall see, this episode wasn’t the last time the royal line would have to work its way back up the family tree to find an heir to keep things going.
But that is for a future episode. For now, we have Woke in place, and the royal line would appear to be secured. With his filial duties out of the way, Woke is now ready to take on the job of sovereign, and rule Yamato. The chronicles say that his time on the lam, and working as a servant, gave him a unique perspective on the plights of the people, and so they attribute to him a certain amount of benevolence in his approach to issues of the people. How that plays out, I’ll let you judge as we continue with his reign, next episode.
Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us 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 on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode.
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And 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

Location, Location, Location

Dramatis Personae

Ōtomo no Kanamura

Tashiraga Ōiratsume

Ohodo

Prince Ushi, aka Prince Hikonushi-bito and Hifuri Hime, aka Furu Hime

Prince Oi

Prince Ōhodo (or Oho-hodo)

Waka Nuke (or Noke) Futamata and Momoshiko Mawaka Naka tsu Hime, aka Momoshiki Irobe

Ohodo’s lineage and the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror

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References

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Who’s Who

Wohatsuse Wakasazaki

Heguri no Matori

Ōtomo no Muruya

Ōtomo no Kanamura

Kudara no Otara (aka Itarang of Baekje)

Donseong of Baekje

Muryeong of Baekje

Early Castles

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Who’s Who

Wohatsuse Wakasazaki

Heguri no Matori

Shibi no Omi

Kage Hime

Ōtomo no Kanamura

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Ancient “Capitals”

Akitame’s family situation

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Chikatsu Asuka (近津飛鳥)

Banzai (万歳) — not bonsai

Kyokusui no En (曲水宴)

Takami Musubi

Ki no Ohiha

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Dramatis Personae

Oke and Woke

Iitoyo

Locations

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