K. Sasaki
In the preface to Zenpō-kōen-fun no jidai, Kondō mentioned that he was influenced by the work
of Ishimoda Shō (1912–1986) and Hara Hidesaburō (b. 1934). Ishimoda’s seminal work is Nihon
no kodai kokka (1971), although the coverage of the Kofun era in this study is thin. While Ishi-
moda was, like other Japanese historians and archaeologists of the post- World War II era, under
the influence of Marxist historical materialism, he attempted to craft a new framework applicable
to archaic Japan. He dismissed a unilinear evolutionary framework, and emphasized instead the
importance of interactions with China. He argued that, while Japanese society in the late second
and early third century, the era of Yamatai described in the official Chinese history Wei zhi, was
at the tribal level, Himiko, the chieftain of Yamatai acted as the queen of a state- level society.
Ishimoda further contended that different aspects of early Japanese society evolved at different
speeds, and that in the second and third centuries diplomatic aspects developed far more quickly
than internal ones, owing to Chinese influence.
Another important point of Ishimoda’s proposal was that some structure of pre- state society
remained, even after the society had grown into a mature state. He labeled this structure of pre-
state society as shuchōsei. Although the term shuchōsei literally means chiefdom, Ishimoda’s concept
was very different from chiefdoms described in the neo- evolutionary anthropology popular in
the United States in the 1960s. What he meant by shuchōsei was a local, autonomous polity that
may be either stratified or egalitarian, and he argued that each shuchōsei played a major role in
Yamato central control over local regions, even in the eighth century. He also pointed out that
until the middle eighth century, kinship ties, along with affiliations determined by where one
lived, were very important in the political structure.
Yoshida Akira (1926–2013) was heavily influenced by—and friends with—Ishimoda. Yoshida
and Kondō were, moreover, colleagues at Okayama University, and his writings influenced
Kondō’s ideas, too. Like Ishimoda, Yoshida believed that different aspects of a society evolved at
different speeds. Yet Yoshida’s position on the state formation was very different from Ishimoda’s,
because Yoshida firmly considered Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
very important. He argued that the four attributes of the state were inseparable, and he would
not accept such concepts as “tribal state” or “tribal confederacy state.”^7 In other words, he con-
sidered a society to have reached the level of a state only when all the attributes of the state had
appeared. This meant that kinship- based society had to be replaced by land- based society when a
polity reached the state level.
Yoshida divided stratified society into two stages, pre- state and state. He classified this strati-
fied society under Marx’s “Asiatic Mode of Production.” A key point of Yoshida’s argument was
that society was already stratified even before society evolved to the level of a state, and that
social stratification evolved faster than other aspects of the society.^8
Yoshida considered the Early Kofun era polity to have been a pre- state society, and labeled it as
a “tribal confederacy.”^9 Tsude Hiroshi (b. 1943) criticizes Yoshida’s “tribal confederacy” model
because the concept of a tribal confederacy was by Marxist definition an egalitarian society, and this
term cannot therefore be used to describe a society evolving toward statehood.^10 It is important to
note, however, that Yoshida’s model of a tribal confederacy was a stratified society, which should
be distinguished from Hara Hidesaburō’s tribal confederacy model, to which we now turn.
Hara was another historian who influenced archaeologists. Unlike Ishimoda, Hara defines the
state in terms of the political supra- structure, rather than the infrastructure such as an agricultural
community.^11 Like Yoshida, Hara uses the term “tribal confederacy” to describe the Kofun era
society.^12 Their use of the same term notwithstanding, what Hara means by “tribal confederacy”
is less complex a society than under Yoshida’s concept.
Hara also proposed a more abstract model of “quasi- state,”^13 although he does not particularly
apply this model to Kofun- era society and his model is not cited by archaeologists at all. He