Yamato Takeru, said to have flourished in the first century CE, was a prince of the proto-Japanese who killed his own brother and was banished by his father to the borderlands, where he vanquished various enemies. His aunt, the chief priestess at Ise Shrine, gave him the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven that was once ripped from the tail of a dead serpent by the god Susano’o. Trapped in burning grassland by a treacherous local warlord, Yamato Takeru used the sword to slash his way out of the fire, thereby giving it the name by which it would be known thereafter: Grass Cutter (Kusanagi).
But while Yamato Takeru was legendary, his time saw communications from real residents of Japan with the elites that then claimed to rule China. In 238 CE, emissaries arrived in China from Himiko (“Princess of the Sun”), the queen of Yamatai, a kingdom likely to have been on the Kansai plain west of Japan’s Central Alps. They are probably responsible for much of what ancient chroniclers have to say about their homeland, which is described as a mountainous territory to the “southeast of Korea”—the Korea Strait being the shortest and most obvious means of reaching it.
Much ink has been spilled over Himiko, who may have been a witch-queen “deft in the way of the gods,” or possibly a sun-priestess and figurehead. Himiko may not even have been a name, but a title, a contraction of the Japanese for “majestic woman,” himemikoto. It may even have been a corruption of a term in Japanese that refers to a sister–brother pair ruling as a princess and prince: hime-hiko. Whoever she was, her interest in communicating with an unseen Son of Heaven more than a thousand miles away betrays a respect for and awareness of China that may have derived from contacts with the edges of the Chinese realm.
Despite all the descriptions of Queen Himiko in Chinese accounts, there is no mention of her in the chronicles commissioned by the rulers of Japan in the early eighth century. Had she already been forgotten, or was she hidden in the ancient accounts under another name? Perhaps she was Heaven Shining (Amaterasu), the capricious Sun Goddess who dominates early Japanese legend. Perhaps she was Divine Merit (Jingū), the ancient warrior-queen who was said to have been possessed by the Sun Goddess, and who supposedly led a successful war against Korea. Perhaps she was one of several shamanic seers mentioned in the kingly list as helpmeets to male rulers.
To the authors of the Chronicle of Wei, a third-century Chinese annal, Himiko was the queen of what was probably the largest of some thirty kingdoms in the archipelago, with a population of 70,000 families. Although there has long been disagreement about the precise location of her domain, the fact that the vast bulk of the Kofun-era tomb mounds are in the Ōsaka–Nara area suggests that she lived there, somewhere in the watershed of the Yamato river. The ancient place-names of the area evoke a Tolkienesque time of simplicity: the Gateway to the Mountains (Yamato) river pierces the hills that divide the plain from north to south at a place called the Great Pass (Ōsaka). To the north is the Good Flat Ground (Nara). At the edges: Mountain Back (Yamashiro), the Splendid Land (Iga) and the Sacred Streams (Ise). The many rivers of the area flow down toward the Riversides (Kawachi), where they meet the sea at the Wavecrest (Naniwa) and the Clear Coves (Suminoe).
The Chinese chroniclers mention a veritable Scrabble-bag of twenty other forgotten kingdoms in Japan, with names like Shima and Ihaki, Kokata and Kanasana. These names seem to have been meaningless to the Chinese, assembled from characters that approximated the sounds in a language that was foreign to them—unless, that is, their informants really were referring to kingdoms with names such as Devil-Slave (Kina), Naked (Luo), and Black Teeth (Heichi). Nor is there anything but the vaguest of schematics suggesting where these countries were. The discrepancy between the Chinese league (li) and a far shorter Korean variant has left all distances impossibly confused, but a little triangulation of distances, geography and archaeology suggests that Himiko’s realm was somewhere near the Kansai plain, the site of today’s Ōsaka and Kyōto. Her biggest rivals in the kingdom of Kuna to her south, in what is now Wakayama, are described as fine swimmers and divers, habitually barefoot, with bodies and faces heavily tattooed to ward off sharks and dragons.
Her envoys reached China confident that sorcery would keep them safe. They would travel with a “bearer of mourning,” a designated guardian tasked with remaining chaste, unwashed, and ungroomed as a charm against their safe return. He would be richly rewarded if they came back unharmed; executed on presumption of failed duties if they did not.
Amid the sparse prose of the Chronicle of Wei there are several comments that would echo through the ages. The people of Himiko’s realm, it said, were notably long-lived, often reaching 100 years old. When high-ranking persons walked on the road, commoners were expected to back away into the roadside bushes. Their archers held their bows “below the middle,” evoking images of the distinctive top-heavy Japanese bow. And when her people expressed assent, wrote the Chinese chroniclers, they said “Hai”—as they still do today.
The ruler of the Chinese coasts was pleased to receive emissaries from such a faraway place, and sent a typically condescending thank-you note, in which he appointed Himiko as queen (even though she already was one), and sent her multiple bolts of wool and silk—including some crimson brocades decorated with dragons—a hundred bronze mirrors, and two long swords.
The bearer of mourning plainly did his job, because the ambassadors made it home, returning with another letter from Himiko sometime later that thanked the Chinese for their gifts. The Chinese were asked to arbitrate in a dispute between Yamatai and Kuna, although it is unclear whether a letter from a distant, unseen potentate would have any effect on a local dispute.
Himiko then died.
Classical Chinese is so terse that proximity can imply causality—the text may be intended to suggest that she died because of the dispute, meaning that the emperor’s decree was useless and led to her execution in a coup. Or she may have just died before the message arrived, being notably old by this point. Either way, she was replaced by a teenage girl, confusingly recorded as “a priestess of Himiko”; the Chinese chronicles dispassionately report that a hundred women were sacrificed at Himiko’s funeral.
Over the next few centuries, later Chinese chroniclers would occasionally write about the land across the sea, but it is unclear to what degree they were merely embellishing the assertions made in the Chronicle of Wei. The Book of the Later Han returned to the topic of Himiko, long after her death, to describe her as a shaman-queen with a thousand female attendants and a single male squire who “served her food and drink and communicated her words.” This text also openly assumed that the Japanese aristocracy were descended from the Chinese First Emperor’s legendary expedition—an account that was plainly believed by at least some contemporaries. Further confusion has been caused by the compilers of the Nihongi, who seemed determined to make their narrative fit those few moments of the historical record that could be confirmed through comparison with Chinese chronicles. Excited by tales of the witch-queen Himiko, these compilers appear to have taken the accounts of Empress Jingū, for example, and shoved them in several chapters earlier than they really should have been mentioned, so that a female ruler of Japan would appear in the same period in which such a figure was reported by the Chinese.
Archaeology offers further evidence of the life and culture of these Yamatai peoples. Excavations all over Japan, not merely in the south, point to a culture of foragers initially living close to the coasts and rivers, where their seasonal diet relied heavily on marine produce in the winter months. The seafood, however, would suddenly decline. The late Jōmon period saw a drastic fall in the number of indigenous inhabitants, caused not by war but by a drop in temperature that restricted access to the two main foodstuffs that sustained them in the winter—shellfish and nuts. Northern Honshū, in particular, seemed to have suffered an apocalyptic decline in population from which it took centuries to recover. The population elsewhere rose again thanks to an increased focus on the cultivation of grains, particularly a new arrival from the mainland—rice.
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