It is hardly surprising, then, that the history of Sino-Japanese relations begins cordially, turns sour and ends with a break. The mariners who set out from Japan towards Korea and China, across often difficult seas, were Japanese and Korean; once again the Chinese took a passive role, and embassies from China to Japan were a rarity.4 As Sir George Sansom pointed out, ‘the phenomenon of Japan’s isolation is a comparatively late feature in her history.’5 On the other hand, there is little to say about Japan’s links to the Asian mainland before the first millennium AD. Japanese raids across the sea afflicted Korea in the first century BC and are recorded in the official Korean chronicles: ‘Year 8 [50 BC], the Wae [Japanese] came with troops intending to invade our coastal region but, hearing of the Founder Ancestor’s divine virtue, they withdrew.’6 There was some contact with the Han Chinese at the start of the millennium, with embassies reaching China and Korea in the first century, but Japan was not of enormous interest to the Chinese: it was seen as a land of warring kinglets (which it would become again in later centuries); its inhabitants ‘are much given to strong drink’, but many of them live till they are a hundred, and robbery and theft are rare – certain things have changed little in Japan.
One important feature of early Japan was its great ethnic variety, with native peoples in north and south (Hokkaido and Kyushu islands) refusing to submit to central authority. Only in the late seventh century did the rulers of much, though not all, of central and southern Japan begin to use the name Nihon, or Nippon, ‘Land of the Rising Sun’, from which the Western term ‘Japan’ is derived; and even then the ancestors of the Ainu, now few in number, dominated the cold expanses of Hokkaido. Korean culture had an enormous impact on early Japan, and there were close, and not always friendly, ties between the rulers of Japan and those of Silla, one of the Korean kingdoms that lay close to Kyushu island. The small island of Okinoshima, close to Fukoaka in northern Kyushu, was a cult centre visited by fishermen and other sailors, for the produce of the sea has always mattered a great deal in the Japanese diet (the sea was also a good source of fine pearls); since very early times Japanese men (but not women) have gone there to pray for the safety of those at sea. Archaeological finds from the island include artefacts from Korea and even the Middle East, as well as many jade symbols in the shape of an apostrophe, whose exact function is unclear. The great shrine at Munakata was dedicated to the sea gods and now attracts travellers of all sorts, including those who wish their cars to be blessed by the Shintō deities.7 And then, beyond Okinoshima and halfway to Korea, the island of Tsushima was regarded as the outer boundary of the Japanese Empire.8 Tsushima provided a base from which Japanese sea raiders repeatedly attacked the coast of Korea during the fourth century.9
It goes without saying that the entire population of Japan had arrived from elsewhere at some time, even though the Japanese themselves long believed that their emperors were descended from the sun goddess Amiterasu, and noble families claimed descent from lesser gods.10 A series of peoples moved into various corners of the archipelago over several millennia. Migration from Korea was easiest, across a relatively narrow stretch of water, and a wave of refugees arrived from Korea in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, a time of turbulence in their homeland; they were welcomed by the Japanese court, for they brought skills that were lacking in Japan itself, until then a largely rural society with a subsistence economy. The immigrants taught the art of silk cultivation; they were experienced weavers; they were metalworkers; they also brought the art of writing, though at this stage this was Chinese writing, which was ill-suited to the polysyllabic language that had taken root in Japan.11 Korean culture was itself heavily influenced by that of China, so Korea was really a filter through which a more advanced civilization moulded the culture of Japan. By the ninth century AD, though, increasingly regular direct contact with China itself reduced Japanese dependence on Korea as an intermediary. Japan’s maritime horizons took many centuries to expand, as this chapter will show.
Cultural dependence on Korea was not matched by political dependence; indeed, later tradition insisted that the three Korean kingdoms of Silla, Koguryō and Paekche began to pay tribute to Japan in the sixth century, as did some of the islands to the south of Kyushu. These tales grew in the telling, and claims that early Japanese emperors ruled the territory of Mimana, on the strait between Korea and Japan, from the third to the seventh century, were used by early Japanese chroniclers to support the right of their emperor to tax the inhabitants of southern Korea.12 This points to a fundamental paradox in Japanese history: on the one hand, the island identity of the Japanese reinforced the idea that Japan was an empire set apart by the gods from the rest of humanity; and, on the other hand, the Japanese sought to draw the nearest parts of mainland Asia under their influence. This sense that Japan too was an empire was heavily compromised by an awareness that China was the seat of a more ancient, powerful and sophisticated civilization that the Japanese tried hard to emulate. This love–hate relationship has endured over many centuries of Japanese history.
Korean contact with Japan was quite intense during the seventh century AD. The Japanese even took sides in an armed struggle between the two kingdoms in southern Korea, Silla and Paekche. The Tang dynasty in China was wooed by Silla, and Paekche turned to Japan for help; in 663, a naval battle between the Chinese and Japanese off the coast of Korea, known as the Battle of Hakusuki, proved the decisive superiority of the Chinese fleet over that of Japan, and henceforth Japanese aggression in these waters was limited to pirate raids.13 The rulers of Silla succeeded in suppressing Paekche and became a significant regional power in their own right. At first, they failed to realize that the Tang emperor intended to absorb Silla once he had helped finish off the other Korean kingdoms. However, between 668 and 700 twenty-three embassies arrived in Japan from Silla, which was now trying to keep its distance from the rulers of China, and saw the Japanese as useful allies. These diplomatic exchanges were an important conduit along which mainland cultural influences reached the island empire. Handsome gifts of Korean, Chinese and east Asian luxury goods could be understood as tribute (though that was not the idea in the king of Silla’s mind); on one occasion, in 697, Emperor Monmu even invited the Korean emissaries to his New Year audience, alongside the ‘barbarian’ peoples of northern Japan, and presumably the envoys from Silla were not quite sure whether to be flattered or embarrassed by what was obviously an attempt to flaunt Japanese imperial authority. And when, in 752, the Sillan prince T’aeryŏm turned up with seven ships and 700 men, the Japanese records insisted that his precise purpose was to bring tribute to the empire of Japan, for he is said to have said:
‘The king of Silla addresses the court of the empress who rules gloriously over Japan. The country of Silla has from long times past continuously plied the waters with ships coming to serve your state … There is nowhere under Heaven that is not part of the royal domain, and no one on even the furthest shores of the realm who is not a royal subject. T’aeryŏm is overcome with happiness to have been blessed with the opportunity to come to serve you during your divine reign. I respectfully present some small items coming from my own land.’14
Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, there is no mention of this voyage, or other embassies to Japan, in the Korean annals of the Silla kingdom, which are quite detailed. They only mention T’aeryŏm as a leader of a rebellion against the king, in 768, which ended with the execution of the prince and ‘their three generations: paternal, maternal, and wife’s relatives’, clearly a traditional method for dealing with opponents of the regime that is still loyally maintained by the Kim dynasty in North Korea.15 However, the Korean annals do mention Japan very occasionally: ‘the country of Wa changed its name to Japan. They say they took this name because they are near to where the sun rises’, which is indeed the meaning of Nihon.16 And the Koreans noted embassies from Japan, even though they actually consisted of protocol officers sent to accompany Sillan embassies to the Japanese emperor back
to their homeland. Nonetheless, the Sillans did not feel it was beneath their dignity to admit that they were sending embassies to the Tang court in China.
Most curious is the embassy from Japan that arrived in Korea in 753. This was surely another visit by protocol officers accompanying Prince T’aeryŏm back home, but the Sillans were upset at something – perhaps the long delays in receiving T’aeryŏm at the Japanese court. The Korean annals state: ‘Year 12 [753], autumn, eighth month. An envoy arrived from Japan. As he was arrogant with no propriety, the king did not receive him, so he returned home.’ Relations were better in the ninth century when, we are told, the Japanese presented the king of Silla with large amounts of gold, having ‘concluded an agreement for the exchange of envoys and friendly ties’ some years earlier, in 803.17 Everything really depended on whether the Japanese were friendly to other Korean kingdoms, and whether the Sillans were keen to make friends with Tang China. Relations with Japan were based on the principle ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
The ‘small items’ conveyed by ambassadors were not in reality quite so small. Descriptions of Korean embassies mention rather curious gifts: in 599, Korean envoys presented a camel, a donkey, goats and a white pheasant from the kingdom of Paekche; the Paekche embassy of 602 had a more lasting effect, since this time a monk named Kwallûk brought exciting books that dealt with exorcism, astronomy and the calendar; besides, Kwallûk remained in Japan and trained three Japanese followers in his esoteric knowledge; he was followed by other Buddhist monks from the different Korean kingdoms who displayed an impressive range of knowledge – not just how to manufacture ink, paper and colouring materials, but even how to build a watermill. Embassies from Silla brought gold, silver, copper and iron, as well as bronze statuettes of the Buddha. The northern Korean kingdom of Parhae, which stretched beyond the present borders of North Korea towards present-day Vladivostok, sent tiger-skins and other rare pelts to Japan, so that when Japanese painters portrayed tigers and leopards they were not totally dependent on Chinese artistic models. In 659 an envoy from Koguryō was seen in the market trying to exchange a bearskin for silk floss, which for some reason the Japanese thought was highly amusing. That, perhaps, was on his private account, since gifts to the Koreans in return for tribute lavishly demonstrated the growing wealth of the Japanese emperor: dozens of bolts of silk in any number of forms and colours; hemp cloth, furs, axes and knives.18
Some, perhaps most, of the trade with Korea took place outside the narrow confines of official embassies, and one ‘register of products purchased from the Koreans’, of 752, lists products from all over east Asia, not just from Korea itself: gold, frankincense, camphor, aloe wood, musk, rhubarb, ginseng, liquorice, honey, cinnamon, lapis lazuli, dyestuffs, mirrors, folding screens, candelabra, bowls and basins. A special feature of these imports is that Japanese nobles were allowed to petition the court for permission to buy goods brought by the envoys who accompanied T’aeryŏm. The petitions they submitted were later used to line folding screens that have been preserved in the remarkable eighth-century imperial treasury at the Shōsō-in, still kept at the Tōdaiji temple in Nara. Their letters reveal a less stuffy world than the highly formalized rituals of Japanese diplomacy might suggest, for the official visits masked a more mundane reality: people traded on the side, with the blessing of the imperial court.19 Their goods also helped shape Japanese civilization – one has only to think of the white lead used in the face-paint of court ladies in the era of The Tale of Genji.
This relationship between Japan and Korea, of necessity conducted by sea, did not, then, take the form of a continuous flow of shipping back and forth across the strait between Japan and Korea. Embassies could be made to wait months, even years, before being rudely told to go away. Permanent diplomatic representatives based in foreign capitals simply did not exist.20 Nor was diplomacy the only way Korea and Japan came into contact. All these accounts of embassies underestimate the scale of piracy and open warfare in the seas between the two lands. Although not much can be said about the ships that fought in these waters, Wa (later known as Japan), Silla and other states in the region could mobilize navies when they wanted to do so. Japanese raids on Korea had a long history, and Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, was seen as a defensive barrier against Korean aggression; in the seventh and eighth centuries, thousands of recruits known as sakimori were based in Kyushu and on Tsushima to defend imperial territory against invaders. The Japanese were worried that Kyushu was so easily accessible from the continent: ‘various foreign countries come there to pay tribute, their ships and rudders face to face with ours. For this reason we drill horses and sharpen our weapons in order to display our might and prepare for emergencies.’ An eighth-century poet described the agony of leaving home and family (‘his mother of the drooping breasts’ and ‘his wife like the young grass’), for:
A great ship is set with myriad true oars
In the royal bay of Naniwa
Where men cut reeds,
On the morning calm
They row out in cadence,
On the evening tide
Pull the oars till they bend.
‘May you who set off rowing
To the boatman’s chant,
Thread your way between the waves
And safely reach your port.
May you keep your spirit true
As ordered by our sovereign lord,
And when your time of sailing round
From cape to cape is done,
May you come safely home,’
Thus his wife must pray,
Setting a jar beside the bed,
Folding back her white hemp sleeves,
Spreading out her seed-black hair –
Long days she waits with yearning.21
II
Prince T’aeryŏm’s visit to Japan took many months. These long, exhausting and not very comfortable trips across the sea were frequent enough for the Japanese court to set up a reception centre for foreign visitors in Hakata Bay, within the precincts of the large modern city of Fukoaka (earlier known as Hakata). No one knows what route T’aeryŏm followed towards Nara (Heijō-kyō), the imperial capital, but the fact that he stayed at Naniwa, on the site of modern Ōsaka, while returning to Hakata strongly suggests he travelled mainly by sea. En route to Nara, ‘the guests must not be allowed to converse with people. Nor should officials of the provinces and districts they pass through be allowed to look at the guests and vice-versa.’22 His problem was not so much getting to Nara as getting out of Hakata, where he and his entourage were penned in the foreigners’ compound under the strictest supervision.
This compound, whose site lies underneath an old baseball stadium, was excavated in 1987–8, exposing structures from the late seventh to ninth centuries, as well as massive quantities of Chinese ceramics, the latest of which date from the eleventh century. It was known as the Kōrokan, and in the eighth century, the ‘Nara period’ of Japanese history, a channel to the sea probably reached as far as the building, before sedimentation spread Fukoaka well beyond the early medieval shoreline. The Kōrokan contained two quadrangles of the same size (seventy-four metres by fifty-six metres). Presumably the VIPs stayed under cover while the great majority of the party bedded down in the large courtyards, or even outside the gates and on board the ships that had brought them to Hakata Bay. Analysis of latrines discovered within the compound revealed that one latrine was used by people who followed a diet not far distant from the traditional Japanese diet of fish and vegetables, while two upper-class latrines showed high consumption of pork, including wild boar. Even more pungent evidence was provided by small wooden slats that had been attached to food shipments and that indicated what was in each cargo and where it came from (they survived because they were used to wipe one’s behind before being thrown away). Here was proof that fish, rice and venison were carried to the Kōrokan from northern and central Kyushu – the centre of the island, containing the vast caldera of Mount Aso, offered rich
volcanic soil. The sea provided an important part of the diet of the inhabitants of eighth- and ninth-century Kyushu: shellfish such as oysters and abalone, as well as jellyfish, tuna, whale, salmon and, as now, seaweed such as kelp. Occasionally the more distinguished emissaries would be summoned from the lodge and taken to Dazaifu for feasts at which the governor of Kyushu was their host. Isolation was not total.23 Yet the Kōrokan was different from the inns that existed in, say, the medieval Mediterranean, which were situated within ports. Hakata Bay was an empty area at this time; the Kōrokan was not simply a large, enclosed quadrangle but an isolated, distant place; in this sense it was also different from the more famous enclosure at Deshima, the island off Nagasaki where Dutch merchants were permitted to trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The physical isolation of the lodge meant that the Japanese authorities had to supervise the Kōrokan from their administrative centre thirteen kilometres inland, at Dazaifu. This was the command centre for the defence of Kyushu as well. All this points to the deep-seated fear that Kyushu would fall under the sway of foreigners, and that it was a border region in constant need of protection. Prince T’aeryŏm and other ambassadors came with more than 700 followers; and there was an uneasy feeling that several hundred foreigners could just as well be warlike marauders as peaceful envoys. It was vexing for the visitors to have to suffer the long wait as Japanese protocol officers travelled back and forth between Hakata and Nara, bringing news of whether the embassy was actually welcome at the imperial court.24 The fear of contact was also fear of contamination. The Japanese court developed a sense of the distinct purity of the Japanese race, which culminated in the purity of the emperor himself. This was in part an elaboration of the Chinese attitude to other peoples, who were seen as ‘barbarians’, but another source of these ideas was the Shintō conception of pollution, often also associated with the dead. One must distinguish these theories from everyday practice: in time large numbers of Chinese would settle in Hakata and marry Japanese men and women. But in dealing with official delegations the imperial court had, by the eighth or ninth century, become aware of the distance separating the emperor and his great nobles from foreign peoples, especially those of Korea, who were regarded as a political threat as well as a source of pollution.25
The Boundless Sea Page 27
