State Formation in Japan

Emergence of a 4th-Century Ruling Elite

Gina Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415596282
• eBook ISBN: 9781134384686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

This volume brings together for the first time a significant body of Professor Barnes' scholarly writing on Japanese early state formation, brought together so that successive topics form a coherent overview of the problems and solutions of ancient Japan. The writings are, in some cases, the only studies of these topics available in English and they differ from the majority of other articles on the subject in being anthropological rather than cultural or historical in nature.

Chapter One
Orientation

Investigation into any instance of state formation is tied to specific times and places, and is grounded in certain kinds of data. This chapter outlines the where, when, and what of the Japanese case study. The ‘where’ focuses on the Yellow Sea between the China Mainland and the Korean Peninsula, and a short introduction to turn-of-the-millennium interaction in this area (ca. 100 BC–AD 200) provides background to the actual period of state formation: the Kofun period (AD 250–710). Characterized as a Mounded Tomb Culture, the material remains of the Kofun period provide half of the ‘what’ in the second section. Their important transformations through time delineate the ‘when’ – the archaeological periodization schemes for the period. The third section identifies documentary sources that inform on the protohistoric period of Japan, providing the other half of ‘what’. Methods of evaluating texts and coordinating archaeological and textual sources of data are basic to the ensuing chapters, giving this work its protohistoric character.

The historical context

The Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere

The overarching context of Japanese state formation is Japan’s position in what we might call the Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere (Barnes 1990b, 1993, 1999: ch. 13), named after the Yellow Sea and its connecting shorelines belonging to modern China, Korea and Japan (Figure 1.1). This interaction sphere is not a concrete entity with firm boundaries in time and space; rather, it is a conceptual field that allows a narrowing of time-space systematics in order to monitor interaction that seems to have some geographical coherence and historical trajectory over time. Its existence is empirically based, as there is no theory that would necessarily demand

Figure 1.1 Focus on the Yellow Sea: Pen/Insular East Asia in the commandery period, 108 BC–AD 280 (overlapping with the Korean Samhan period AD 0–300 and Middle to Late Yayoi period ca. AD 0–250)

coherent interaction around a body of water. It thus represents a sub-region of greater East Asia as defined by Lewis and Wigen (1997).

The concept of an interaction sphere that integrates the three East Asian countries is a powerful antidote to the popular view of Japan as an isolated nation of autochthonous origins. Amino (1990) has challenged the ‘insularity theory’ (shimaguni-ron), ‘which presumes that while the seas within the territory of present-day Japan provided paths of communication and transport that united the people of the archipelago, the seas surrounding … it cut them off from other peoples, [as] fundamentally flawed’ (

bayashi 1991b: 18). Instead, he sees the surrounding seas as connecting the Japanese Islands to other regions and providing them with developmental stimuli. Interaction within this sphere began in the Early Jomon period (3rd millennium BC), with sea-faring visits distributing Sobata-type pottery and Mt Aso obsidian to the southern peninsular coast (Sample 1974; Imamura 1996:213); such interaction has continued to the present-day. The historical snapshot shown in Figure 1.1 is relevant to the period of interaction between the 1st century BC and 3rd century AD, which forms the focus of Chapter 3.

Although this interaction sphere can be seen to provide an integrated view of activities across modern nation-state boundaries, it is also clear from the historical and material records that there are at least two separate developmental trajectories within East Asia: that of Mainland China itself, which developed quite early, and the peninsular and insular regions, which developed later, together, and under the influence of Mainland China. Thus, the developmental histories of the Korean Peninsula and Japanese Islands are more similar to each other than either is to Mainland China, which is why I have grouped the former into a single region, the Pen/Insulae, to contrast against China (Barnes 1993, 1999). This is in opposition to the tendency for world historians to view the Korean Peninsula as a passive conduit for the flow of civilization from China on into Japan. Moreover, Korea is often lumped together with China, while Japan is viewed as an offshoot of China worthy of ‘civilization’ status in its own right (Melko 1995: table 1.1). According to Melko’s analysis, research by Toynbee leading to these conclusions was based on the historical situation in East Asia after AD 500; but even in investigations that monitored Japan from AD 400 or 100 BC (by Kroeber and Quigley, respectively, as mentioned by Melko), the close relationships between the peoples of the Korean Peninsula and Japanese Islands at these times (Hanihara 1991) went unacknowledged.

Within the Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere, there are relations between the Pen/Insulae and the Chinese dynastic courts that can be characterized as hierarchical and that fall into the category of ‘core-periphery’ in World-Systems theory. But these concepts are not sufficient to understand the trajectory of Pen/Insular political development. We also need to examine the relations between political peers within the Pen/Insulae. Thus, we are looking not only at core-periphery relations between the Chinese court and its ‘barbarian’ (yi)¹ hinterland – both in civilizationist terms (Wilkinson 1991, 1993) and as historically recognized by China, styling itself the ‘Central Kingdom’ (zhongguo)² as opposed to the barbarian fringe – but also at peer relations between the secondary cores that developed at the edge of empire. These concepts will be examined more fully in Chapters 2 and 3.

Protohistoric development

We begin our investigation with the adoption of bronze casting technology from the Korean Peninsula in the Middle Yayoi period (200 BC–AD 0); during the Late Yayoi (AD 0–200), rice agriculturalists of western Japan were divided into two spheres of bronze use: the Western Seto bronze weaponry sphere and the Eastern Seto bronze bell sphere (Figure 1.2). Such bronze cultures were a result of socio-economic exchange relationships with and technological transfer of metal-working from chiefly societies on the Korean Peninsula. By the 1st century BC social status differentiation in burials was evident in Western Seto, signalling incipient hierarchization and

Figure 1.2 Bronze distributions in western Japan during the Late Yayoi period (AD 50–200) shown at the beginning of the 2nd century AD (after Terasawa 2000:223). The Inland Sea (Seto Naikai in Japanese) is indicated by wave legend Western Seto: (A) broad-bladed halberds and socketed spearheads Eastern Seto: (B) bells of Kinki style and (C) bells of San’en style

the formation of chiefly societies in the islands as well. The Han invasion of the northern Korean Peninsula in 108 BC [SFK, pp. 17–20]³ marked the effective truncation of indigenous development among Bronze Age chiefdoms on the Peninsula, but the incorporation of emerging polities in Western Seto into the tributary networks of the Later Han Dynasty (AD 25–220) and its successor, the Wei Dynasty (AD 221–265), accelerated their development.

The Chinese dynastic histories (Appendix One) refer to socio-political units in these regions as guo (K. guk; J. kuni, koku)⁴ – a term often understood by both Korean [SFK, pp. 1–8] and Japanese scholars as ‘state’ but which probably indicated politically centralized and socially hierarchical societies without adminstrative infrastructure. This term is discussed further later, but by way of introduction, I will use the words ‘country’ or ‘polity’ rather than ‘state’ as the translation for guo. In contrast, Tsunoda and Goodrich (1951) often render it as ‘community’ or omit its mention altogether; in quoting their translations later, I will indicate wh...

Table of contents

• Durham East Asia Series
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Chapter One Orientation
• Chapter Two Theoretical Approaches
• Chapter Three Edge of Empire: Yayoi Interaction with the Continent (1st Century BC to Mid-3rd Century AD)
• Chapter Four From Yamatai to Yamato1 (3rd Century)
• Chapter Five Hashihaka and Mounded Burials (3rd Century)
• Chapter Six Early Kofun Polities (Mid-3rd to Mid-4th Centuries)
• Chapter Seven Prestige Goods and Class Identity (Mid-3rd to Mid-4th Centuries)
• Chapter Eight The Miwa Court and Cult (Late 3rd to Mid-4th Centuries)
• Epilogue
• Appendix One The Chinese Court Chronicles
• Appendix Two The Japanese Court Chronicles
• Appendix Three Tables of Early Kofun Tombs and Contents
• Glossary, Character List and Index of East Asian Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Main Index
• Classified Placename Index