OMG Japan Before the Emperors

What Up, Nerds?


It's goddamn history time. This here post is a prequel to the last one. Wanna find out where pre-imperial Japan came from? Wanna know more about what it looked like? Keep reading.






From some of the earliest days, Japan was inhabited by some folks closely related to today's Ainu people, who used to live all over north Japan, although today they're only really in Hokkaido. They were also pretty closely related to some folks in eastern Siberia, And coincidentally are also the same group of people that migrated across the Bering Strait and became the majority of American Indians.


These proto-Ainu folks were hunter gatherers. They'd eat a lot of nuts and they'd fish and hunt deer. They were not really nomads--they didn't keep herds and they didn't need to. Their lives were just too nice to bother with that hard work. They were so nice that they had the free time to do some things like invent pottery styles that would spread across the entire old world. This awesome and free and easy state of affairs was dominant until about 300 BC. Yep, 300 BC. That, my friends, is all of the recent. An entire cycle of world civilization had risen, lived it's life, and fallen by 1000 BC. 300 BC is historically not too far off from just last week. 


When 300 BC rolled around there wasn't some big event that changed things. It is just about the time when a new culture became more-or-less dominant. This culture is much closer to what you might think of as Japanese. Lots of historians have described it as a migration into the westernmost Japanese islands by a Korean culture that displaced the Ainu. But that isn't accurate. This new more "Japanese" culture arose in both Korea and in southwest Japan.


If you go back more then ten thousand years you'll see significantly lower sea levels, and consequentially the Japanese and Korean shores were much much closer to each other. The Japanese and Korean peoples archaeologically emerged at the same time and they were the exact same people. This shows in the record of the appearance of certain types of pottery. And it shows up in the fact that despite past confusion about the subject, the language that is most related to Japanese is Korean. These Japano-Korean people can be traced genetically, and shown to arise on the shores of the sea between Japan and Korea and subsequently to move east from there. 

See? They were pretty dang close together indeed.
(Pic from Wiki)

Well for a long time these people kept in good contact in both the Japanese and Korean halves of their territory. When rice agriculture started to seep into Korea from further west in mainland Asia, rice agriculture also started to appear in Japan too. Metalwork also came to these Japano-Koreans in a similar manner.


And at about 300 BC these more "Japanese" people became the dominant group in Japan. Their productivity exploded as they finally finished transitioning from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. They started to produce complex goods and their society grew a divide between rich and poor.


At about 50 AD Chinese Imperial records start to attest to the emergence of a state in Japan. Based on Kyushu Island, the state of Wa is the earliest known country to emerge in the archipelago. It was described as being largely fractured into many small and scattered tribes. What's more, it wasn't organized into a system of taxation and relied on the occasional extraction of tribute. And then the whole country wasn't even independent, it paid tribute to a much greater Chinese state.


Another important state that emerged a few hundred years later in Japan was called Yamataikoku. The Chinese first described it as a kingdom in Wa, which is somewhat confusing until you realize the Chinese had come to call all the whole archipelago "Wa" after that first state they had dealt with. Yamataikoku had relations with China and was attested to have been ruled by a Queen named Himiko. This country probably existed on a different part of Kyushu, although the later Imperial Yamato rulers and tradition would assert that it was actually in the Yamato valley in central Japan. 


Over time the rulers of the state in Yamato started to expand their power. In a series of diplomatic, religious, and military conflicts they forced other countries to pay them occasional tribute. And they fought with an eye to establishing superiority over all of Kyushu and west Honshu. By the 300's AD they were in contact with China, and by the 500's they had established a lip-service superiority over all the other south Japanese states. Of course, they were constantly having to fight wars to retain their nominal superiority.


Another way that Yamato created a kind of superiority was by assembling the Shinto religion. As they warred with and gradually got the upper hand on each rivaling county they would merge the pantheons of the two countries. Although they were always willing to add another god into the pantheon, the Yamato rulers established their traditional god as the chief god. As the Yamato chieftains started to claim descendancy from their god, their chief position on earth became legitimated by their god's chief status in heaven.

Like a motherf*ckin' boss!
(Pic from Wiki)

The chiefs of Yamato not only controlled the other tribes, they may have controlled some of their very old relatives in Korea, in the Gaya Confederacy. It is more likely that Yamato and Gaya just still had very close tribal relations, but there were definitely common ties between the two. And of course the overarching common tie across the region was subservience to the Chinese Emperor, and paying him tribute.


In the 500's AD the chiefs of Yamato supported the introduction of Buddhism in their and in all the other subservient Japanese countries. After this, they started implementing reforms that gradually moved towards consolidating all the separate countries into one. This consolidation was never really effective until the reign of the first Emperor, Tenmu. But Tenmu would manage to break the power of the clans and to unify all of south Japan into the Japanese Empire.


Of course since you already read the previous post you already know all about that.

OMG Who Founded Japan?

What Up, Nerds?


Yeah, that's what I thought. Same here. Because disaster done struck OMG Hussites Part 2, so that will take a while more in production.

In the mean time you know what's cool? The early history of modern Japan and the Yamato state. Awww yeeee.

Early Japanese history is cool.

According to the official imperial chronology, the country we now know as Japan was founded more than half a millenia before the time of Jesus. It was just a few years after King Hezekiah died in ancient Judea. Supposedly the first Emperor Jinmu made the pilgrimage to and moved his court to the Yamato valley near modern Kyoto.


They were supposed to have come from the westernmost of the big Japanese islands: Kyushu. Jinmu was said to have lead the expedition as an armed migration with his brothers and his followers. He subjugated all the peoples he met on the way.


Oh, also Jinmu was directly descended from a god. That too.


Yep.


So that's all total bullshit. Jinmu was almost certainly just made up. 






What really happened:


1200 years later, at around 680 AD, the leader of the Yamato State was a fellow named Tenmu. Now Tenmu was a little bit of tough. He was a younger brother who was never supposed to have had the throne, and indeed he had been sent off to be a monk. But when his King/older-brother died he saw his chance. He moved like lightning, and seized the country in 672 AD. To get a sense of how goddamn recently this was, Islam had already been around for a half century by then.


Like you might expect from someone with that kind of initiative, he was officially reported to have rigorously reorganized the Empire into a more powerful state. What he really did was more impressive.


Because he was essentially the real founder of the Japanese Empire.


Before Tenmu there had been a whole series of bickering clan-states spread across the western half of the Japanese archipelago. There was a no real unity in them. Over the course of several centuries the patriarchal heads of the clan in the Yamato valley warred and politicked, and they gained a kind of lip-service sovereignty as the most powerful state in the area.


But these Yamato chiefs weren't emperors, and they didn't claim to be. They started claiming this wider lip-service sovereignty under a chief named Suijin in the 200's or 300's AD. But until the time of Tenmu they only controlled a very small part of Japan directly.

Very small. Just what's in red.
(Pic from Wiki)

As Yamato clan-chief, Tenmu did something revolutionary after he seized the throne. He invented a new title: Emperor of Japan. And then he enforced his new empire. He moved his armies and manipulated public opinion and he shattered support for all the rival clans. He conquered and unified and then built forts throughout his new empire.

Tenmu's unified Japanese Empire was not what all of you might think of as Japan. From Yamato it extended westwards along Honshu (the big island) and also included Kyushu (the small island to the southwest). What's more he might not have been related to the past chiefs of the Yamato like Suijin, but he thought he'd be better off if he said they were all from the same line.


Tenmu wanted to create the idea of an all-Japanese imperial lineage so he compiled the various stories and legends about those old chiefs and the legendary first chief. In this compilation he called them all Emperors and said everyone from the mythical "Jinmu" to Suijin were members of a direct male lineage. He wrote it down in the book Nihon Shoki. 


So Tenmu styled Jinmu to be his legendary predecessor, who somehow legitimized Tenmu's conquest of his Empire. Jinmu's supposed subjugation of the peoples along his migration route helped him spin the fight as more of a reconquest, and thus it became much more palatable to the Japanese people. Tenmu would go on continuing centralizing his Empire and would father several more future Emperors.


Funny enough his imperial line eventually sputtered out, and the throne reverted to someone else who came from his invented "imperial" line of succession. To be fair, those later Emperors probably were at least related to Tenmu, though not necessarily. And that dynasty continued on for more then a thousand years. It presided over a state that became the Japanese Empire that America fought to the death in WWII. And that line of Emperors still reigns to this day.