Iju ̄in Y., with S. Kawai
were many late- Kofun cases in which brothers and sisters were buried in the same graves, and
therefore that spouse- based kinship ties had not yet been established.^15 Through a close analysis
of primary texts, historians also criticized the idea that husband and wife were buried together,
and this argument was, in turn, used by archaeologists to support their claim that spouse- based
principles had been established in the Kofun period. According to this text- based analysis, marital
ties were fluid (so the husband and wife were usually initially buried in separate graves), but their
children later reburied the parents in the same grave, making it merely appear as if the husband
and wife had been interred together.^16
Recent scholarship contends that kinship relations in classical Japan were bilateral.^17 The case
of Mononobe no Yuge no Moriya, a member of an influential family in the sixth century, sup-
ports this view. Moriya, whose mother was from the Yuge clan, was said to have been the head
of both the Mononobe and Yuge clans.^18 A number of petitions reproduced in the late eighth-
century chronicle Shoku Nihongi, moreover, show some local power holders who had been using
their mothers’ clan names prior to the adoption of Chinese law asking to “return” to their fathers’
clan names, providing further evidence that classical Japan was a bilateral society.
Female leaders during the Kofun era
As previously mentioned, different sources suggest that women exercised leadership in political
and economic spheres. For example, the early eighth- century compilations Kojiki and Nihon
shoki, as well as ancient provincial gazeteers (fudoki), include stories about female leaders, such as
a female deity who brought victory to a certain village in a water right dispute and a female
chieftain who resisted the control of the Yamato state. These records, transcribed from oral tradi-
tions that emerged during preliterate times, were important historical sources showing signi-
ficant accomplishments of Yayoi and Kofun female chieftains.^19
In addition to such mythical figures in oral traditions, records about historical female figures
also attest to women’s economic influence. Princess Nukatabe (later Sovereign Suiko) possessed
a personal worker group, “Nukata- be,” named after her princess title. As seen in her case,
royals—both men and women—possessed subordinate worker groups (nashiro and koshiro) with
whom they managed royal households, including residential buildings and storehouses. Women
of local power- holding families also oversaw groups specialized in weaving (ori- be) who served
the “great king” (ōkimi).
Between the sixth and eighth centuries, half of the great kings and “heavenly sovereigns”
(tennō, most commonly rendered in English as “emperor”) were women. But when the Meiji
government established the Former Imperial House Law that prevented women from ascending
the throne, historians also developed an “interim ruler” theory to support this government
policy. Although this earlier scholarship argued that women ruled only when an appropriate suc-
cessor (i.e., a male) was absent, and therefore their roles were limited to the safe transfer of the
throne to another male heir, Western historians either modified or rejected this argument out-
right, contending that most female sovereigns were neither passive figureheads nor intermediar-
ies between male successors, but they were active and capable political leaders.^20 In contrast,
Japanese scholarship continued to support the “interim ruler” theory until Araki Toshio began
questioning this explanation at the close of the twentieth century.^21 Since then, scholars of clas-
sical Japanese history have engaged in heated debates over the historical significance of female
sovereigns.^22 For example, Yoshie Akiko argues that in order to fully understand the identity and
roles of a female rulers, it is important to pay close attention to the bilateral social structure of the
era, rather than limiting our discussions only to royal succession issues.^23 Yet another school of
thought argues that earlier Japanese rulership was “gender complementary,” and that a tradition