By the end of the eighth century the Koreans of Silla had made clear their rejection of any idea that their official trade with Japan consisted of tribute payments to a greater power. The area that remained in regular official contact with Japan was the kingdom of Parhae, in the north of Korea, spilling over into what are now the borderlands of China and Russia, and surviving until it was overthrown by marauders from the interior in 926. The inhabitants of Parhae were of varied origins, some related to the Mongols, some more closely related to the Koreans. They were useful allies when, as happened early in the eighth century, the rulers of Silla decided to link their fortunes to Tang China rather than Japan; but they had less to offer in gifts: furs rather than silk, and none of the spices that Silla had obtained from further south and west. Trade with Parhae was not exactly encouraged, at least at the Japanese court: in the ninth century a mission from Parhae was only allowed to visit every six years, an interval which was soon increased to every twelve years, because the Parhaeans were bringing more than the court really wanted. The king of Parhae was unhappy with this arrangement and continued to send embassies even when they were unwelcome, whereupon the Japanese authorities sent them back with their goods, which, in 877, included two exceptionally beautiful sake cups made out of tortoiseshell and carved in the ‘South Seas’ that some at court would have been delighted to keep in Japan.26
The relationship between Korea and Japan soured, but not before the peninsula had implanted some fundamental features of mainland Asian culture in the islands, notably Buddhist beliefs. With the fall of Parhae, however, Japan lost interest in attempting to assert its influence on the mainland. Memories of the links with Korea persisted, and a Korean embassy appears in the very first pages of the great tenth-century Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji; there, a wise Korean physiognomist skilled in Chinese poetry recognizes the great talent of the young boy who will one day become the hero Genji.27 As will be seen, in the long term the cooling of ties with Korea fostered a new type of relationship across the sea, based on everyday trade rather than formal diplomatic exchanges, but in the meantime the weakening of ties between Japan and its closest neighbours left the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea open to pirates capable of operating their own fleets and of preying on such merchant shipping as existed.
Early Japanese rulers appealed to the Chinese for help against local rivals; and often these appeals were directed at Chinese governors of parts of Korea that had fallen under Han control.28 But increasingly they turned to the Chinese imperial court. This was with certain reservations: the journey there was regarded as very risky – every embassy but one experienced serious danger at sea or on land; and they were uneasy about Chinese claims to superiority, since the Japanese preferred to think of themselves as the civilized subjects of a sovereign empire comparable in status, if not in size, to Tang China.29 The sea was an important part of a world view that was, nonetheless, firmly centred on the Japanese islands. Most eloquent of all are the dramatic scenes of ships amid the storm-tossed waves that appear in medieval Japanese paintings.30 In the eighth century the embassies sent to China were already elaborate affairs, with whole teams of participants: a principal ambassador with two or three deputies; scribes and interpreters; craftsmen such as carpenters and metalworkers; a specialist in divination – always useful if one wanted to turn up at court on an auspicious day. A hundred people would constitute a rather small embassy; in this period four ships each capable of carrying 150 people might not be unusual (twelve embassies are known in the years between 630 and 837). To guard against illness a vast pharmacopoeia was carried on board, including pills made of rhinoceros horn, plum kernels and juniper, more often of Chinese than of Japanese origin.31
The route started in the bay of Ōsaka, through Japan’s Inland Sea, and along the Korean coast, though a direct route to the mouth of the Yangtze (close to the trading city of Yangzhou) became common as navigators gained greater experience; moreover, sailing past Korea was risky when local rulers, such as the king of Silla, were hostile. From Yangzhou, part of each delegation would head much further inland to the imperial capital at Changan, so their journey was by no means over when they reached Yangzhou. However, Yangzhou was a collection point for goods that came overland or along the coast from Canton (Guangzhou), so there they could choose from the luxury goods of the Indian Ocean route and from those that arrived along the Silk Road. They still had to face the horrors of the return journey. On one occasion, in 778, the high seas washed a Chinese envoy coming to Japan with gifts off the deck of his ship, along with twenty-five members of his entourage and one of the Japanese ambassadors who was on his way home. The same ship broke in two but each part stayed afloat, and the exhausted survivors made land on Kyushu.32
With such experiences on record, Japanese travellers regarded sea travel with awe, and made sure that they prayed to the gods of the sea before setting out, celebrating with feasts if and when they managed to return. A litany that used to be recited at an event known as the Ceremony of National Purification conjures up a vivid image of Japanese seafaring: ‘as a huge ship moored in a great harbour, casting off its stern moorings, casting off its bow moorings, drives forth into the vast ocean … so shall all offences be swept utterly away.’ In a prayer to the sun goddess the Shintō priest described the lands bestowed on the emperor ‘by the blue sea-plain, as far as the prows of ships can go without letting dry their oars and poles’.33
The dividends for Japan were enormous. The coming and going of monks ensured that Japanese Buddhism was firmly rooted in Chinese and Indian Mahayana Buddhism; the Lotus Sutra, a very lengthy lecture by the Buddha on the theme of eternal bliss, was a particular favourite in China, and consequently became one in Japan as well.34 Cultural influences across the sea were not confined to Buddhism. Something was learned from Confucianism about hierarchy and filial respect, though public examinations for government service did not quite follow the Confucian model: opportunities to be trained for office were confined to the sons of the well born rather than being open to all talents. The Chinese model extended to town-planning as well: the handsome new capital at Nara was constructed around a grid, like the major Chinese cities. At the start of the eighth century the imperial court began to issue silver and then copper coins, in imitation of Chinese practice, but silk was used as the medium of exchange in high-level dealings with Japan’s neighbours.35
The influence of China on the fine arts was incalculable, even if Japanese artists developed their own sensitive eye. The texts that Buddhist monks studied were in Chinese, and the creation of a workable Japanese script took time; when it did come into being, it made use of a great many Chinese characters, while also using syllabic signs better suited to the phonetics of Japanese. Until then, Chinese was the language of administration, and Chinese books on astronomy, divination, medicine, mathematics, music, history, religion and poetry were eagerly devoured by civil servants, monks and scholars in Japan; a ‘catalogue of books currently in Japan’ of 891 knew of 1,759 Chinese works.36 At the same time, traditional cults, the ‘way of the gods’ or Shintō, ensured that native traditions remained alive. Still, the cultural flow was nearly all one way: in later centuries, as will be seen, there were a few Japanese articles that attracted the attention of Chinese buyers, especially high-quality paper, which was made according to a different formula in Japan. But Japanese admiration for Chinese culture was not matched by Chinese admiration for Japanese culture. The Japanese could not escape from being classed as barbarians by those they sought to emulate; one effective way of dealing with this was to treat others (such as the Koreans, rather ungratefully) as barbarians in relation to themselves.
The evidence from the embassies to China is as good a way as any of measuring the steady growth in Chinese influence, and the build-up of trade as well as official exchange across the Japan Sea and the Yellow Sea. Yet here, as with Korea, the tributary relationship did not last; after 838 no more embassies were sent to Tang China. In any case, the
se embassies had been sent at very long intervals. Twenty-seven years separate the embassy sent by Emperor Kammu to the Tang court in 804 from its immediate predecessor, and thirty-four years passed before the next embassy was sent to China, one that is very well documented and that will be examined shortly. During the rest of the ninth century, the Japanese showed no interest in sending an embassy to the Tang emperor, and by the time they did decide to send one, in 894, the Tang empire was beginning to disintegrate. In the event, that embassy was cancelled when Sugawara no Michizane, the notable who had been chosen as ambassador, advised the Council of State to think again:
Last year in the third month, the merchant Wang No brought a letter from the monk Chūkan, who is in China. It described in detail how the Great Tang is in a state of decline, and reported that the emperor is not at court [because of the rebellion] and foreign missions have ceased to come … Investigating records from the past, we have observed that some of the men sent to China have lost their lives at sea and others have been killed by pirates … This is a matter of national importance and not merely of personal concern.37
Maybe that final sentence should not be taken too seriously; the ambassador evidently did not want to risk his life. He was perhaps the greatest Japanese expert on Chinese culture, and a skilled poet who enjoyed exchanging verses with the ambassador of Parhae.38 Yet his reluctance to lead an official delegation masks the reality of day-to-day contact across the sea. In another letter Michizane reported that ‘many merchants have told us of conditions in China’, so there were more people crossing to China than the Wang No he mentioned in his appeal to the Council of State. Private traders were coming and going with ever greater frequency and, to judge from Wang No’s name, many or most or even all were Chinese. As a result, at the end of the ninth century the character of Chinese trade with Japan was changing decisively. The cancellation of the embassy in 894 was not a sign of isolationism, but rather the opposite: these very formal exchanges of goods by extremely large embassies were not cost-effective. Japan was becoming more and more integrated into the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ that stretched south beyond Taiwan and joined the South China Sea to the seas around Japan itself.
Silk dominated the list of goods sent from the Japanese court to China, while large quantities of silver also featured, and the distinctive silky paper the Japanese manufactured also impressed the Chinese, though for the moment it was more an object of curiosity than a common article of exchange. The diplomatic team would also bring to China large quantities of silk that each member had been awarded by the emperor of Japan, and would use this to finance the voyage, selling goods in the ports and cities the envoys visited. Chinese gifts, not just to the emperor of Nihon but to the envoys, included suits of armour and books – one Japanese visitor to China, who stayed there for eighteen years at the start of the eighth century, brought home a handbook of court ceremonial, which must have had quite an impact in his homeland.39 But the best evidence for the impact of China and east Asia upon eighth-century Japan comes from the extraordinary collection of artefacts still preserved at the Tōdaiji temple in the new capital of Japan, Nara, which are placed on exhibition once a year. This collection was formed in 756, when the widow of Emperor Shōmu presented his treasures to the Great Buddha. Further gifts in the next few decades brought the number of items in the collection to more than 10,000. Influences from the West can be traced both in designs imitated from Persian, Indian and Chinese models (for instance, in painted screens that recall Tang iconography), and in actual objects brought across the seas (such as lapis lazuli belt ornaments from Afghanistan). Musical instruments from the eighth century, including flutes and lutes, Chinese board games, writing cases, brushes and inkstones, furniture and caskets, armour, glass, ceramics and magnificent court robes testify either to the quality of the gifts received and objects bought through trade, or to the manner in which Japanese artists copied faithfully the models they saw – over time modifying them in a distinctively Japanese way.40 The more the Japanese studied Chinese art and customs, the more they were inclined to stress their own special identity. Physical separation from China meant that these powerful influences operated at a court level; movement back and forth by sea, across difficult waters, constrained contact but also sustained a regular flow of goods from the high culture the emperors in Nara secretly envied, and never dared to despise.
III
The Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin (793–864) became an important religious leader, and was later known to the Japanese as Jikaku Daishi, ‘Great Teacher of Compassion and Understanding’. The diary of his pilgrimage, which took place between 836 and 847, offers a unique record of the delicate relationship between China and Japan in the early Middle Ages, and has much to say about the journey across the treacherous waters between the two empires. Only one medieval manuscript survives, finished in wobbly characters in 1291, and copied by a Buddhist monk named Ken’in when he was seventy-two years old and was ‘rubbing my old eyes’, which was his way of apologizing for the errors of transcription in the text he transmitted. These errors were magnified because he was not copying his native Japanese, but a text written in Chinese, which remained the literary language of the intellectual elite at Nara.41 Ennin was already forty-one years old when the imperial court appointed members of the diplomatic team it was sending to China, which was to be led by Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu, a member of the great Fujiwara clan. It was to set out in four ships under the direction of ‘Ship’s Loading Masters’; the title suggests that they were responsible for the cargo of tribute. Two of the loading masters were of Korean descent and one claimed to be descended from a past Chinese emperor, no less. However, there were also skilled navigators who captained the ships while they were at sea, as well as scribes and Korean interpreters, whose task was less to translate from Japanese into Korean than from Japanese into Chinese.42 It was a motley band of envoys that included a ‘Provisional Professor’ from the government university, who was also a skilled painter and waited upon the ambassador himself. Several archers who travelled in the convoy were of good birth, one of them serving in the imperial bodyguard, though there were also many artisans, including carpenters, porters and simple sailors who were clearly of more modest origin. Altogether there were 651 people on board the four ships, which, judging from the size of the earlier Korean embassies to Japan, was the expected size of an embassy designed to create a good impression. Alongside the diplomats and their support staff, another important component of this great party consisted of the monks and laymen who were travelling to China to deepen their knowledge of Buddhist beliefs and practices and of Chinese art and letters. The monks represented various sects of Buddhism that existed in Japan, for one feature of Japanese Buddhism was the relative ease with which the different strands of Buddhism, the ‘greater’ (Mahayana) and ‘lesser’ (Hinayana), co-existed side by side, one stressing the role of Buddhism in society at large and the other concentrating more on inner perfection.43
This team was put together from 833 onwards, but it took a few years to set off on the voyage. For, in addition to those sailing to China, there was another large team at work on land. The ships were not actually ready; Ship Construction Officers were needed who could supervise their building. The imperial court was also well aware that making a good impression on the Tang emperor would depend on the rank of the people sent into the Chinese ruler’s presence. Therefore in the New Year Honours List several of the envoys were raised to higher ranks in the complex court hierarchy; the ambassador himself now attained Senior Fourth Rank Lower Grade, which was a little more than halfway up the cursus honorum. Previously he had held the rank of Junior Fourth Rank Upper Grade. Solely while he functioned as ambassador he was an acting member of the Senior Second Rank. Progress up the ladder took place at a snail’s pace. There were handsome gifts of silk and other cloths for the leading participants. One reason for this largesse was the simple fact that the journey was thought to be perilous, which, as events would prove, was an
accurate judgement.44 If contrary winds blew, it was quite possible that the ships would be blown on to the shores of Korea, so a further embassy was despatched to the king of Silla, with whom relations had been poor, to guarantee safe passage for the Japanese embassy to China. The Koreans sent back this embassy with a flea in the ambassador’s ear. Silla was full of tension at this time, as rivals contended for the throne and as fighting spread into the palace compound itself. Meanwhile a pirate king named Chang Pogo had established himself as master of the waters off southern Korea, and Ennin mentioned the threat that he might pose to the ships carrying the embassy – more of Chang Pogo shortly.45 It is not surprising, then, that the Koreans had other preoccupations than the renewal of ties with Japan.46 The Sillan court even suggested that the envoy who had arrived at their court, Ki no Misu, was some sort of mischievous impostor, and he was roundly blamed for his failure when he returned to Nara.47
The first part of the voyage, which began in the middle of 836, was easy enough. The four ships set out from Naniwa, not far from Nara, and sailed down the Inland Sea, reaching the coast of Kyushu after four days. Problems began to mount when they set off from Kyushu for the coast of China, on 17 August 836. The weather had been calm, but the typhoon season was imminent. Everything suggests that the Japanese mariners were hopelessly optimistic about their chances of all arriving unscathed on the mainland, and that their expertise was limited to navigation between the islands of their home archipelago across small distances. The four ships were beaten back by the fierce winds; three of them made land on Kyushu once again, but the fourth was smashed to pieces, and a raft carrying sixteen survivors was washed up on Tsushima island, followed by a few other survivors who floated ashore later – a total of twenty-eight survivors. The story they told was horrifying: its rudder broken, their ship had been at the mercy of the high sea, and the captain had ordered his crew and passengers to break the ship to pieces, so that they could escape on rafts; but nearly all these rafts were lost at sea, with over a hundred men. When the emperor heard of these events, he sent orders for the repair of the three remaining ships; Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu assured him that he was still keen to make the passage, even though he and his men felt half-dead after their experiences (this, in true Japanese fashion, was expressed as a humble apology for failure, even though the circumstances had clearly been well beyond Fujiwara’s control). A second attempt to reach China, in 837, fared little better, for the ships were blown back to Kyushu and to islands off Japan; the imperial court had sent offerings to the shrine at Ise of Amiterasu, the sun goddess and notional ancestress of the imperial family, but to no avail.48
The Boundless Sea Page 28
