I was now an author, the biographer of several figures in Japanese history—Prince Saionji and Admiral Tōgō, the teenage rebel Ama-kusa Shirō and the pirate king Coxinga. My speciality had always been the snatching of weird and wonderful stories, and their popularization for a general audience. What could be more weird and wonderful than the story of an entire nation, from its mythical beginnings to its near future?
The toughest decision facing the author of a book like this is what to leave out. Tim Hannigan’s trail-blazing A Brief History of Indonesia has set the tone and attitude for this series, and I have followed his template as closely as possible. Like him, I must face the impossibility of a story that spans millions of years, with a cast of thousands, somehow hitting the high points without dumbing down or talking up. Many before me have tried to tell the story of Japan in such a manner. Many have been defeated by the discipline of history itself—the ready temptation to cavil and kvetch about any definitive statement. How feudal was the feudal period? How closed was the Sakoku era?
Whom to mention? Whom to discard? Which of the 125 emperors is worth including? Which of the dozens of shōguns? And should I put an “s” on the end of shōgun? Who will make the cut from Japan’s writers and artists, philosophers and samurai? When others have written entire books about the subjects of single pages—even single lines—the task is daunting.
I thought back to the person I was before I arrived in Japan, before I even started learning Japanese; what would he want to know? What stories would he have first wanted to hear; what would have first fired him up to learn more about this incredible, endlessly surprising country? And should things be set out so that it isn’t a confusing jumble of multisyllabic names?
Unlike, say, China, where history can be broken up into discrete dynasties, there is only one dynasty in Japan, and it claims to have ruled the nation since the dawn of history. Some quibble with this, and it is likely that scholars in the near future may start to reimagine the single imperial line as several linked pockets of relation and influence, such as Herman Ooms’s recent suggestion that eighth-century Japan was ruled by a “Tenmu dynasty.” In the meantime, historians and educators are obliged to find another way of breaking up Japanese history; they usually plump for some sort of system that notes who was really in charge. You won’t be far into this book before you realize what a wild-goose chase this is, since power in Japan is all too often a matter of shifting consensus and implied needs. Samurai would go to war over what the wishes of their chosen candidate for emperor would be if they were successful in putting him on the throne; shōgunal regents agreed what their infant charge would probably want, if only he could speak.
In this book, I have concentrated on specific moments of transformation—the settlement of Japan itself and the arrival of a new wave of emigrants from the Asian continent. Later chapters deal with several crucial periods of foreign contact and the aftermath of each: the arrival of Chinese culture and Buddhism, and then the period in which Japan forged on without such foreign contacts; the arrival of early Christian missionaries, and the brutal 200-year seclusion that followed their expulsion; the arrival of colonial powers in the nineteenth century, with the revolutionary changes they introduced to Japanese society, followed by Japan’s troubled, martial entry into the modern world; and finally, the immense and far-reaching impact of the US Occupation from 1945 to 1952, which left Japan changed once more. On each occasion, Japan is flooded by foreign culture and ideas, seems at first to ape them, but then adapts and transforms them into something original. (I almost used the word “unique” there, but the “myth of Japanese uniqueness,” nihonjinron, is itself a controversial topic.)
Meanwhile, the historian of Japan has to contend with a counterintuitive and unexpected development in recent years. The older Japanese history is, the more new discoveries there seem to have been. The general reader might be forgiven for thinking that Japan’s ancient history is fixed and immobile, but so much has happened in the field in the last generation that the distant past often seems vibrant and alive. In part, this is because of the incredible effect that late twentieth-century Japan’s surging economy had on the building trade. New towns sprang up in places like Tōkyō’s Tama Hills suburb, leading to a number of accidental archaeological finds, as well as races against time to gather information before it was smothered by a car park or shopping mall. The expense of such rescue archaeology in Japan multiplied tenfold between 1970 and 1977, and tenfold again by 1992. It reached a plateau thereafter as Japan’s ballooning economy deflated once more, but the effects on archaeology reverberated for another decade as scholars pored over their new data. For years afterward, Japanese archaeology saw incredible finds and game-changing new theories, challenging much of the previous wisdom and leaving many earlier history books outdated and irrelevant.
Politics remains a powerful influence on Japanese history. When it comes to ancient times, the big problem comes from the reality gap between a national mythology that claims the emperors are all descended from the Sun Goddess and archaeology that suggests that they are descended from Korean aristocrats. Although the prominent nobleman Tokugawa Mitsukuni did dig up an old tomb in 1692, he swiftly put back whatever it was he found. All deliberate excavation of tombs was declared illegal in Japan in 1874, and although conditions thawed in the twentieth century, the Imperial Household has long been obstructive regarding the excavation of grave mounds that are likely to contain the ancestors of the current emperor.
In 1976, amid a popular publishing boom obsessed with Japan’s prehistoric past, archaeologists were forbidden once more from opening imperial graves. Some of these sites undoubtedly were robbed long ago, but there is no telling what historical riches await in some of the great tombs that lie unexamined in Japan. The first chapter of this book, “Prehistoric and Mythical Japan,” is hence separated from the second by a wall of legends, because there is still no means of accurately examining the period before 700 CE. Imagine, for a moment, how different our understanding of China would be without the materials unearthed since 1970 in Chinese grave sites: we would know nothing of the First Emperor’s Terracotta Army, nothing of the legal statues of the Qin, or the unexpurgated Daode Jing, nothing of the military textbooks of Sun Bin. Apologists might just as readily praise the Japanese for remaining so in touch with their roots, and so respectful of their traditions, that they do not authorize the ransacking of old tombs. But at the moment, Japan’s imperial graves remain closed to archaeology, and that drastically reduces the chances of ever uncovering a Japanese manuscript that predates the 700s.
I find it particularly frustrating because, for me, the most interesting element of early Japanese history lies in its early connections with Korean states such as Kara and Baekje. Korean exiles provided entire branches and houses of what would become the Japanese nobility, regarded as close enough relatives that their native ranks would transfer across to Japan. Contacts with Japan are frequently mentioned in the Korean Baekje Annals, until 428 CE, when all mention of the country is dropped for the next two centuries—an omission that has yet to be satisfactorily explained. But more recent history, particularly the early twentieth century, has so politicized the discussion of Korean–Japanese contacts that academics are put off by its toxicity.
In 2008, a handpicked group of scholars was allowed to enter the giant Gosashi grave mound, rumoured to be the resting place of the legendary empress Jingū, for a grand total of 150 minutes. The investigators were not allowed to touch anything, and were swiftly shooed out again. A stiffly worded fax to National Geographic reminded the scientific community that in Japan, such sites were not part of a forgotten ancient culture, but directly