May your reign
Last for a thousand upon eight thousand years
Until mere pebbles
Grow into mighty rocks
Thick with moss.
A thousand years later, it was adopted as the lyrics to the Japanese national anthem, which takes its name from the opening line: Kimigayo. Every day, Japanese schoolchildren, sportsmen, and politicians rise to their feet and sing lyrics invested with an ancient, atavistic power. Emperor Jinmu’s three-legged crow still flutters on the flag of the Japanese Football Association—an extra limb presumably being a great advantage in soccer.
CHAPTER 2
THROUGH THE KEYHOLE:
THE PEOPLE OF WA
Not even Japan’s two most ancient chronicles can agree what happened to the fourteenth emperor, Chūai. The simplest account, in the Nihongi, is that he was overseeing a war against a rebellious tribe, the Bear People in Kyūshū, when he was struck by an arrow and died. The Kojiki, however, has a far more supernatural tale to tell.
Near the edge of his island domain, it said, Chūai was partway through his campaign against the Bear People, resting in one of his subsidiary palaces, plucking idly at a musical instrument, when one of his wives—known to posterity as Jingū—began speaking with a voice that was not her own. She spoke of a land to the west, rich in gold and silver, and told him that it belonged to him.
Chūai was plainly irritated by her comments, and stopped playing. He had stood on the cliffs and faced the west, he told her, and there was nothing there. But instead of taking the hint and staying silent, Jingū uttered a deathly curse.
“You will no longer rule All Under Heaven,” she spat. “Now, turn in your final direction.”
His chief minister blanched visibly, and stammered that the emperor should continue to play his instrument. Angrily, Chūai went back to his music, but only plucked at the strings occasionally. The notes grew further apart…then discordant…then suddenly ceased.
Courtiers took up lamps and approached him only to find that he was dead.
The chief minister asked for divine inspiration, but the answers he received the following day from his oracles matched Jingū’s odd words. The next emperor, he was told, was still in Jingū’s womb—this was the will of the Sun Goddess, and of three other previously unheard-of deities.
It is not all that clear from the Kojiki where these words came from. Possibly they came from Jingū herself, who continued to utter strange phrases, calling on her people to assemble a fleet and to calm the waters by scattering chopsticks and toy boats on the sea. She led her fleet away and returned some time later, proclaiming that she had subdued the lands across the sea. Some stories said that the King of Silla had joyfully proclaimed her as his ruler. Others claimed that she had dragged him to the seashore and hacked off his kneecaps to make him fall before her, spearing him in the sand and burying his corpse in an unmarked grave.
She returned to her homeland to give birth.
Then, and only then, she put Chūai’s body on a funeral barge and sailed back up the Inland Sea to the Yamato heartland. News of Chūai’s demise had been suppressed until that moment.
Her stepsons plotted to overthrow her. One climbed a tree to scout the distance, but his perch was uprooted by a giant boar, which ate him.
His younger brother laid in wait for the funeral barge, but as he prepared to attack, the boat disgorged a company of armed soldiers. The two forces fought to a standstill, at which point the leader of Jingū’s forces told his enemies that there was no point in fighting, for Jingū was already dead.
To show his sincerity, he took his knife and cut his bowstring.
The stepson’s forces responded in kind only to discover that the man’s act had been a ruse. Jingū was still alive; her men had hidden spare strings in their topknots, which they swiftly used to turn their bows back into deadly weapons.
Something fishy was certainly going on. Chūai had left for Kyūshū alive, but had come back dead. Jingū had returned from an unknown land, claiming to have carried Chūai’s heir in her womb for three years, still communing with the voices in her head. She had turned on her stepsons, and now proclaimed that her supernaturally conceived son was the new emperor.
“The days,” said the Nihongi, “were dark like night.” The bad omen terrified the people, but was eventually dispelled when it was discovered that two priests had been buried in the same grave. When their bodies were separated, the sun reappeared.
Down at the water’s edge, the bay was full of beached dolphins.
Some called it a feast sent from the gods, but the dolphins’ bodies were already rotting, and their blood stank.
The prince was still a child, but Jingū agreed to serve as his regent until he was of sufficient age. She ruled for sixty-nine years before dying, at which point the aged Emperor Ōjin finally succeeded his odd mother. He died when he was 110 years old.
The era from around 300 BCE to 250 CE, Japan’s “iron age,” is known to modern archaeologists as the Yayoi period, named for the Tōkyō district where its most famous remains were uncovered in 1884. Its origins, however, lie across the sea in Korea, from which several hundred thousand new migrants would cross the straits in search of a safe home. Asides in the earliest surviving chronicles of the Japanese suggest that these travelers first made their home in Kyūshū, but advanced over several generations along the Inland Sea until they found the best of possible locations, at the “Gateway to the Mountains” (Yamato) near what is now Nara.
These new arrivals hailed from a world that, if it was not openly Chinese, at least aspired to emulate Chinese civilization. They brought with them knowledge of the Chinese writing system, which was used inexpertly and inaccurately in early attempts to transcribe the words and concepts of the Japanese islands. They also brought new technology and materials—most notably metals and the potter’s wheel—as well as a culture steeped in patriarchal Confucianism. Whereas the archaeological record and ancient legends speak of chieftesses and warrior-women, in what may have even been a society where women either held the reins of power or shared it with the men in complementary roles, the newcomers swiftly marginalized the womenfolk. Denied many of their former occupations, women in powerful positions were soon found only in relation to shrines and ceremonies, a position which would be further undermined in subsequent centuries by the advent of Buddhism. In the world of the newcomers, dominated by a Confucian tradition wary of female influence, women were usually seen merely as wives, mothers, and daughters to be wed, appeased, or traded. There were occasional throwbacks, like the ax-wielding Empress Jingū, but even her power base seemed shakily founded on her husband’s importance, or perhaps her family’s desire to keep hold on power until her son was old enough to wield it. It is in her time that we last hear of female shamans that, in the words of J. Edward Kidder, are “oracular and battle-tested.”
The earliest written record of Japan’s ancient myths dates from the Kojiki, completed in 712 CE, by which time they had plenty of chances to be half-forgotten, re-interpreted and embellished. Although certain elements are liable to form a relatively accurate list of kings and queens or a gazetteer of notable events, others may have been added simply