Chapter 8 Japan 301Chinese and Early Japanese Sources
During these centuries the Chinese were diligently writing about all matter
of practical things, as we saw in the previous chapter, with special interest in the
various barbarians on their borders. Among the eastern barbarians were the Wa
people who occupied mountainous islands to the southeast of their Chinese
commandery at Taifeng (now Incheon in Korea). The Chinese got a closer look
at Japan after the breakup of the Han dynasty when the Wei dynasty exchanged
emissaries with the islands to the east; but shortly after, China broke down into
several centuries of disorder and the record goes dead. They knew about many
“countries” in the islands, and in the book We i z h i, composed in 297 C.E., we
get a fascinating account of the largest of these, a place called Yamatai ruled by
Queen Himiko. Her name meant “sun-shaman” or “shamaness of the sun” (hi
= sun; miko = shaman), and she occupied herself with magic and sorcery,
remained unmarried, and was served by a thousand female attendants. The
only male allowed to come near her was her brother, who served her food and
drink and assisted her in ruling the country. Her palace was surrounded by
lookout towers and stockades manned by armed guards.
Queen Himiko was involved in disputes with rival rulers, and in this con-
text she sent a delegation to Taifeng to request an audience at the court of
Luoyang, the Wei capital. In 239, the Wei Emperor Ming received her delega-
tion and issued an edict in which he acknowledged her as a vassal state,
bestowing on her the title of “Queen of Wa friendly to Wei” (see box 8.1). As
signs of their sovereign–vassal relationship, they exchanged gifts of slaves, silk,
swords, jade, gold, and bronze mirrors. A few years later Himiko used this rela-
tionship to request Chinese support in a dispute, whereupon China sent an offi-
cer to mediate, who stayed on for years. Himiko died in 248 and was buried in
a mounded tomb, accompanied in death by a hundred slaves. A man suc-
ceeded her but could not maintain order, and so was replaced by a 13-year-old
girl, a shamaness like Himiko, whose legitimacy was acknowledged by the Wei
court with further exchange of gifts. After that, the Chinese record ends.
Queen Himiko lived in the protohistorical period defined by Japanese
scholars as Yayoi (250 B.C.E.–250 C.E.) and just before the Kofun, or the “Old
Tombs” period (250–552). This was the crucial period of state formation, docu-
mented archaeologically and in Chinese texts, though there are no contempo-
rary Japanese accounts. There are, however, two extraordinarily important
Japanese chronicles written 170 years after the end of the period, the Kojiki
(712 C.E.) and the Nihon Shoki (720 C.E.), which describe events of this era in
important detail, with a great deal of mythology about the origins of the cos-
mos, the gods, and the Japanese islands. Mysteriously, there is not a hint of
Queen Himiko. Could the Nihon Shoki, a huge work in 28 books, which
describes the reigns of each “emperor” from Jimmu in 660 B.C.E. to the sixth
century, have forgotten a powerful queen with ties to China who lived a mere
500 years earlier? Or was something else going on? We will return to this ques-
tion later.