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State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-Century Ruling Elite (Durham East Asia Series)

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Barnes (p. 9) states that: "One of the more infamous examples of manipulating the periodization scheme is Egami Namio's conflation of the Middle and Late periods into one single Late period in order to associate horse-riding equipment and the very large early 5th-century keyhole tombs built on the Osaka Plains. This sleight of hand has never been accepted by the Japanese archeological community, and Edwards carefully analyzed the appearance of horse-riding equipment in Yamato tombs to reject this fanciful theory once and for all in English."

In 1983, Walter Edwards, then a Cornell University graduate student, has contended that the changes in the contents of the tombs can be explained in terms of "process" rather than as the product of a discrete "event" of a conquest; the early 5th century Middle period tombs of Ôjin and Nintoku precede the presence of "horserider materials" because their influx into the Japanese Islands occurred "no earlier than the middle of the fifth century;" and therefore "the political power they represent cannot be seen as deriving from it."[1]

Edwards (p. 283) has classified both "equestrian goods and sueki [stoneware]" as "precisely those items which are closely linked with the continent." In the Table (1.1) showing the tripartite division of the Kofun period, Barnes specifies that the Middle Kofun period [400-475] "coincides with the Ôjin line of kings (p. 10)," and then tabulates (pp. 10, 17) to let sue stoneware appear simultaneously together with the horse trappings in her Middle Kofun period. Allowing a little bit of inconsistency between the table and the text, however, Barnes declares that "tombs begin to yield horse trappings" by "the mid-5th century (p. 18)," providing at the same time (p. 22) the "adjusted reign dates" for Ôjin (346-95) and his son Nintoku (395-427).

Allowing a lapse of exactly 20 years after 1983, we may now return to Edwards himself as of 2003, an academically mellowed professor at the Tenri University. Edwards states that: "In the fifth century, the keyhole tombs reached their greatest size in the 425m long mound regarded as the mausoleum of the legendary Emperor Ôjin, and the even longer mound attributed to his son, Nintoku. ... This process began with the appearance of Korean style stoneware [sueki] in the late fourth or early fifth century, followed by continental style weaponry and equestrian goods..."[2] Barnes' (p. 232) reference to Edwards' writings has, unfortunately, not gone beyond the year 2000.

According to Barnes (pp. 9, 103), the assumptions that (1) Himiko's country Yama-tai [Yama-ichi] was one and the same as the later documented Yama-to; (2) Himiko [Pimihu] mentioned in the Dongyi-zhuan can be identified as a personage connected to the Sujin line of sovereigns as portrayed in the Kojiki and Nihongi; and (3) Himiko's tomb can be equated with one of the monumental keyhole tombs in the southeastern Nara Basin "reflect the currently held judgment of most Japanese archeologists. ... If these assumptions are ever found wanting, then the interpretations developed herein will have to be thoroughly rethought (p. 195)."

As of 2005, Edwards calls our attention to the fact that the Imperial Household Agency denies access to "the sites designated as imperial tombs" which "include the largest and most important tombs of the Kofun period" that is "vital to the study of Japan's ancient history," and also to the fact that the "contemporary Japanese archeology" is not "free of political constraints in its investigation of the past," and consequently "many Japanese archeologists' presentations and interpretations of data are influenced by their a priori assumptions of the uniqueness and homogeneity of Japanese culture."[3]

The Japanese archeological community has been ardently pushing back the beginning of Early Tomb period by discovering "new dating evidence" in order to close the "temporal hiatus between mention of Himiko's tomb and the beginning of mounded-tomb construction in Nara (p. 103)." Apparently reflecting the dominant sentiment of the Japanese archeological community, Barnes (p. 9) states that the beginning of Early Kofun period "has already been pushed back from its post-war standard of 300 CE to 250 CE to coincide with Himiko's ostensible death date, and it is likely to be soon pushed back again in recognition of keyhole-shaped mound building in the early 3rd century." The Early Kofun period would then include the entire reign of Jingû (201-69 CE) as recorded in the Nohongi. With a little bit of more efforts by the Japanese archeological community, almost the entire post-war standard of Late Yayoi period (100-300 CE), covering the entire life time of Jingû (170-269 CE) as recorded in the Nihongi, may well be included in the Early Kofun period in the near future.

One may recall the incident of the Mainichi newspaper breaking the news on Sunday morning, November 5, 2000, saying that: "an archeologist, Fujimura Shin'ichi, had been caught on video planting stone artifacts at the Kami-Takamori site." Fujimura's findings had appeared to push back the earliest human habitation of Japan from 30,000 to 600,000 years ago. Books on archaeology and Japanese history came to include descriptions of the Early/Middle Paleolithic period based on Fujimura's discoveries.[4] Keally states: "Fujimura is the one taking all of the blame for planting artifacts on the site, but I feel all of Japanese society, especially academia, and most particularly archaeology, is ultimately responsible. Japanese academia is famous for its closed system. Students cannot pass teachers. Lower ranking teachers and students must agree with the ideas of the higher ranking teachers and the leader, or be expelled from the group. It is this system that has a lot of the responsibility for both Fujimura's acts and for the fact that no one caught it earlier. Fujimura deserves criticism for his actions. But he also deserves our sympathy, for he is ultimately a product of a system."[5] Keally questions whether "the Japanese archaeological community or the Japanese historians community is up to the task." What Keally says may have be taken as a serious warning to the modern Western exegesis that often endorses blindly the claustrophobic narrowness of the Japanese academic tradition.

Wontack Hong, Professor Emeritus, Seoul National University

References

[1] Walter Edwards, "Events and Process in the Founding of Japan: the Horserider Theory in Archeological Perspective," Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 9, No. 2, 1983, pp. 265-295. Since 1988, I have taken various evidences to show why the "evolutionary" thesis of Edwards is inadequate, and also to show that the tombs of Ôjin and Nintoku cannot precede the continental influx (of such grave goods as sue stoneware and horse trappings). See Wontack Hong, Korea and Japan in East Asian History (Seoul: Kudara, 2006), pp. 204-5; and "Yayoi Wave, Kofun Wave and Timing: the Formation of Japanese People and Japanese Language," Korean Studies, U. of Hawaii, Volume 29, 2005, pp. 1-29. (www.HongWontack.pe.kr)

[2] Walter Edwards, "Monuments to an Unbroken Line: The Imperial Tombs and the Emergence of Modern Japanese Nationalism," The Politics of Archeology and Identity in a Global Context, edited by Susan Kane, Boston: Archeological Institute of America, 2003, pp. 13-14.

[3] Walter Edwards, "Japanese Archeology and Cultural Properties Management: Prewar Ideology and Postwar Legacies, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, edited by Jennifer Robertson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 46-47.

[4] Howard French, "Meet a stone age man so original, he's a hoax," The New York Times, December 7, 2000.

[5] Charles T. Keally, "Japanese Scandals - This Time It's Archaeology," on the Ancient East Asia Website, November 17, 2000. (www.ancienteastasia.org/special/japanarchscandal.htm)