The Hundred Countries

The oldest notice of the Wa in any record is a single sentence. It was written in China under the Han and stands in the Han shu, the history of the Han, in its treatise on geography; it is quoted in the Han yuan, a compendium compiled in the seventh century. In the sea off Lelang, it says, there are Wa people, divided into more than a hundred countries, who present themselves at the seasons. That is all. There is no name in it, no ruler, no year, and no direction except the sea off a commandery. It does establish three things at the start of this book: that there were people the Chinese called Wa — the name is the one the Chinese records use for the island peoples they describe, and those records preserve no collective name used by the communities themselves; that a Chinese clerk had already sorted them into more than a hundred countries; and that they came, at intervals, to be seen.

Lelang is the hinge of that sentence and of every sentence after it. It was a Chinese commandery, an administrative district on the Korean peninsula, established after the Han conquest of Chosŏn. Later a second commandery, Daifang, was carved out of the southern part of the same territory. Across a strait from the peninsula lie the islands: Kyushu, the western island, nearest to it, and beyond Kyushu the main island, with the Kinai in its centre, far to the east. Every dealing between the Wa countries and a Chinese court in the centuries this book covers passes through one or the other commandery. The Han yuan that quotes the oldest notice survives, as it happens, in a single manuscript found at a shrine in Kyushu and published in facsimile in 1922, and the book will meet it again. The Wa did not deal with the Chinese court directly. They went to the commandery first, and the commandery sent them on, or did not, and wrote down what it saw. A history of the Wa in this period is a history of what commandery officials counted, forwarded and filed.

It has to be, because the Wa of these centuries left no writing of their own that survives. There was no unified Japan in the third century, and no Japanese chronicle until the eighth, nearly five hundred years after the events of this book. Nothing in this chapter was written by anyone who lived in one of the hundred countries. The words are Chinese, the measures are Chinese, the reasons for taking notice are Chinese, and the people described are seen from the far side of a sea, through interpreters, by men whose business was tribute.

The dynasties need setting in a row once, because the records are named after them, and the time of the events is not the time of the writing. The events first. The Han ruled China for centuries either side of the beginning of the common era, and the Later Han is the second half of that span, the dynasty under which the embassies of 57 and 107 arrived and the disorder of the later second century took place. When the Han fell, early in the third century, China was divided among three rival powers, of which Wei, in the north, is the one within whose order the commanderies lay — held, until 238, by a family under Wei’s titles, as the third chapter tells. Jin followed Wei. The writing came afterwards, and in a different order. The history of Wei, the San guo zhi, was compiled in the third century and is the earliest of the histories this book depends on. The history of the Later Han, the Hou Han shu, was compiled after it, though it covers the earlier centuries; the history of Jin, the Jin shu, later again. The fullest account of Wa under the Han is in the Hou Han shu, and it opens with position. Wa lies in the great sea to the south-east of Han — the name here standing for the Chinese realm and not for the Han peoples of the Korean peninsula, who share the romanised name and nothing else and whom the third chapter’s road passes through — on mountainous islands, and there are more than a hundred countries. Since a Han emperor destroyed Chosŏn, some thirty of them have had envoys and interpreters reaching the Han court. Each of them calls its ruler king, and the kingship is hereditary. The great king of Wa dwells at a place the history names as Yamatai, and from the frontier of the Lelang commandery to that country is twelve thousand li — a li being a Chinese measure of distance whose value in this period is itself disputed; figures of this kind in ancient records are not exact modern measures, and they are not converted here as if they were. Yamatai is the name a Chinese record gives to the seat of Wa’s ruler. It is the name on which the disputes of this book’s second half turn, and until those disputes begin the book calls the place simply the seat.

Each clause of that carries a Chinese habit of mind, and the habits need naming. Country, in these records, does not mean a state of the modern kind, with borders, a capital and an administration. The unit is a community with a chief. A hundred of them is what a commandery clerk could count or was told; thirty in contact is how many had sent someone as far as the commandery gate, with an interpreter. Neither figure is a census, and neither says anything about the size of the communities behind it. King is a Chinese word applied to a chief whose office passed to an heir; it does not tell the reader what the chief of one of the hundred countries did. And the twelve thousand li from the frontier to the seat of the great king is a figure that has never been made to fit one map. Where that seat stood is a question this book holds open until its second half. What the numbers show is a coast that had been sorted, by outsiders, into a hundred pieces, and that thirty of the pieces had made themselves known.

The Jin shu gives the same coast from a later vantage. Its Wa live on mountainous islands in the great sea south-east of Daifang — Daifang now, not Lelang, the gateway having moved south with the new commandery. The land is mostly mountain and forest, with little good farmland, and the people eat what the sea gives them. Formerly, it says, there were more than a hundred small countries adjoining one another; by the time of Wei, thirty were in communication. The households number seventy thousand — the same figure the Wei history will give, in the third chapter, for the queen’s seat alone, so that the two are not one count. Men of every rank tattoo their faces and bodies. They say of themselves that they are descended from Taibo, and that in high antiquity their envoys to China all called themselves grandees.

Two things in that notice are the Wa speaking, or the record’s report of the Wa speaking. The descent from Taibo is what they said of themselves, as a Chinese historian heard it and wrote it down; the history reports the claim and does not examine it. The title of grandee is likewise a self-description. The history says their envoys all called themselves so, and the notice of the year 57, below, has an envoy doing exactly that. The tattooing is what the Chinese record reports of the people of the hundred countries, and reports more than once. Everything else in the passage is measurement: households, distance, direction, count.

The farmland sentence is the one place in these notices where the record touches the ground. Modern accounts of the age — Tanabe Shōzō’s of 1968 is one — describe rice cultivation as something that arrived on the islands rather than grew up there, and describe the villages built around it: fields, tools, and storehouses with floors raised above the wet ground. The Jin history records none of it. It records mountain, forest, scarce fields and fish. Where the two pictures meet is in scarcity. Good land was limited on the coast the histories describe, and the sea was not a boundary but a supply.

The first date is a seal. In the second year of Jianwu Zhongyuan, the year 57 in the common reckoning, the Later Han history records that the country of Nu in Wa brought tribute. Its envoy called himself a grandee. The history adds that Nu is the furthest south of the countries of Wa, and that the Emperor Guangwu granted it a seal and a ribbon. That is the notice entire: a country, an envoy’s title, a bearing, and a gift.

Seventeen centuries later, in the spring of 1784, a farmer repairing a broken irrigation channel in his field, on an island off the coast of what is now Fukuoka, in the middle of a famine, found a gold seal. The fullest account of the circumstances survives in a hanging scroll kept on that island. Tōma Seita, in a book of 1950, took the circumstances of the find and asked what they show about Wa under the Han and the Wei. His answer is a scholar’s answer and is given as his. What this chapter has is the record and the object. The Later Han history says that a seal was granted to Nu in 57. A gold seal came out of a field on an island off the coast of Fukuoka in 1784. This book does not say that the one is the other, and it does not say that the seal proves the embassy of 57 took place as the history describes it. It says that a sentence written in China and a thing dug out of a ditch in a famine year have been set side by side for more than two centuries, and that the setting side by side is where the study of these centuries begins.

Fifty years after the seal, the record gives a number. In the first year of Yongchu, the year 107, the king of Wa, Suishō, and others presented a hundred and sixty people as tribute and asked for an audience. Suishō is the first personal name of a ruler of Wa in these notices, and it is a Chinese rendering of a name heard through interpreters, so that its form in the mouth of the man who bore it is not known. What the hundred and sixty people were — captives, servants, men and women sent as a gift — the history does not say. It says a hundred and sixty, and it says that the king asked to be seen. It is the first time the record has the Wa asking for something rather than bringing it. Whether he was seen, it does not record.

The two notices, 57 and 107, are all the record holds for the first century of dated contact. Between them it is empty, and the emptiness is not a gap in a fuller story that has been lost. It is the story. A country in the south sent a man who called himself a grandee and received a seal. A king sent a hundred and sixty people and asked for an audience. The commandery forwarded both, the court noted both, and a historian later copied both into the history of the dynasty. That is the register in which Wa exists for the Han: two entries in half a century, each recording a thing brought and a thing given.

What the ground has yielded from the same centuries is a different kind of record, and the two must be kept apart. Archaeologists working on the middle and late Yayoi period have excavated settlements ringed by ditches. Yayoi is the name modern archaeology gives to the centuries of rice-growing and metal on the islands before the great mounded tombs, whose age is called Kofun; where the one ends and the other begins is a question the eighth chapter meets. One such enclosure, in the account Wang Jinlin gave in 1986, measured about eight hundred and eighty metres by thirty-six, and iron slag was recovered from inside it. In the Kinai region, further to the east, the same account describes settlements of the same period sited high on hillsides and slopes, away from the fields.

Wang Jinlin, summarising in that account a position held in Japanese archaeology, read those hilltop sites as defensive or signalling positions, and took them, with the moats, as evidence of conflict and of social division. In the same account iron is worked and valued, and access to it is uneven between regions — which is to say that some communities on the coast were supplied with the metal and some were not. That reading is a scholar’s, and it stands here as his. The ditch, the slag and the hillside houses are what was found. The war and the division of society are what was inferred from them.

The record, for its part, reports a war outright. In the years the Later Han history places between two of its emperors’ reigns — the later second century — Wa was in great disorder, attacking one another year after year, with no ruler for a long time. The histories do not date the disorder alike: two of them place it in the reigns of those two emperors, Huan and Ling, and three others in a named era within the second of those reigns; the later second century covers both. The third-century history of Wei tells it from the other end. The country had had a man as king for seventy or eighty years, it says, and then Wa was in disorder, attacking one another for years.

These two accounts, set side by side, are the whole of the evidence for the war, and they do not say quite the same thing. The Later Han history gives the war a time and a duration: the later second century, year after year, a long time without a ruler. The Wei history gives it a before: seventy or eighty years of a single male kingship, and then the disorder. Neither says what the fighting was about. Neither names a side. Neither gives a battle, a place, a number killed, or a reason why it ended. Attacking one another is the whole description, and the one another is the hundred countries, or the thirty, or some of them; the histories do not say which.

Modern scholars have joined the disorder of the histories to the ditches, the hillside sites and the uneven iron of the excavations, and read the two as one set of events seen from two sides. The joining is theirs. No record makes it, and no excavated site has been shown to be one of the hundred countries or one of the thirty. What can be said is that the ground shows ditches and hillside sites that Wang Jinlin’s summary reads as fortification, and that the Chinese histories, from across the sea, record a coast at war. The two are consistent. Consistency is not identity, and this book keeps the trench and the sentence in separate hands.

Then the record does something it has not done before. It names a woman.

The Later Han history, which had given a country in the south, a king with a Chinese-rendered name, and a war without a cause, says that there was one woman named Himiko, and that she was of years and unmarried. The Wei history, which had given the seventy or eighty years of the male king and the years of attacking one another, says that they then set up one woman together as king.

The weight is in the word together. The countries that had been attacking one another set her up jointly. There is no ceremony in the text and none can be supplied. There is no account of who proposed her, who agreed, who refused, or what she had done before that made her the one. There is no age beyond of years, no origin, no family, no description. The Wa themselves left nothing that survives, and the historian who wrote the sentence was writing from across the sea, from what the commandery had sent. The record gives the war, and then it gives this: after years of fighting, the countries set up one woman together. It does not say why.

Behind the Tale

The direct record in this chapter is the Han geographical notice, as the Han shu carries it and the Han yuan quotes it — the Han yuan’s manuscript and its readings were reported in a study of 1932 — and three histories: the Hou Han shu, the San guo zhi and the Jin shu. The titles are given in romanisation, as the sources carry them, and the book’s descriptive phrases — the Later Han history, the Wei history, the Jin history — serve thereafter. Every number, title, bearing and year given as the record’s comes from one of those texts.

Later interpretation is everything about the ground: the ditches, the hilltop settlements, the iron and the division of society are modern archaeology, and their reading as evidence of organised conflict is a position summarised by Wang Jinlin in 1986. The material on rice, villages and storehouses is from Tanabe Shōzō’s work of 1968; the scholarship on the gold seal of 1784 is Tōma Seita’s study of 1950. One dating is carried here and not in the chapter: the record does not date the setting-up of a woman, and one modern archaeologist has put it at about 204, arguing from the relationship with the Liaodong regime rather than from the Chinese chronology. Throughout this book, statements of general background — here the dynastic sequence, the measures, the two senses of the name Han, the placing of the islands, and the standing of Wa as the Chinese records’ name — carry no source of their own.

Where the sources differ: the Later Han history dates the war to the later second century, the Wei history only relative to the male kingship that preceded it; and the Later Han and Jin histories place Wa relative to Lelang and to Daifang respectively, reflecting the creation of the later commandery between the two accounts.

What this retelling chose: to put the Han notice at the head as the oldest surviving mention, and to keep the seal of 1784 beside the notice of 57 without equating them. The Han emperor who destroyed Chosŏn is left unnamed, since he is not otherwise part of the story.