Makimuku and the Search for Yamatai Koku

This collage uses two copyrighted images. The people who granted me permission to use them (and other images in this post) did so with the understanding that the permission was for use only here. If you wish to publish them in any manner, printed or digital, please contact me and I will refer you to the appropriate persons. Building image ©ＮＨＫ／Tanisuta supervised:Ryuji Kuroda. Boat image © Archeological Institute of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture

(The area covered in this presentation is now well covered in Google Street View. This is especially true of the Yoshi No ga Ri site in Kyushu, where many of the reconstructed buildings can be seen. It also offers the only times I've ever seen two reflections of the street view camera in one shot.)

Japanese written history begins in the early 8th century with the compilation of the Kojiki (711-2) and the Nihon Shoki (720), Japan's two oldest surviving books. Both contain considerable mythological material, but (especially in the latter sections) verifiable historical information. The documents from which these two historical chronicles were based are now lost to us, but probably most of them were written no more than a century or a century and a half before, when the Japanese people first began to use written language. Accounts of Japan were written, however, at a much earlier time. One of these, a passage in the chronicles of the Wei Dynasty, describes in some detail a report made by a diplomatic mission to Japan in the late 3rd century. (The Chinese materials were apparently known by the compilers of the 8th century Japanese histories, but they seem to have chosen to suppress them, quite possibly out of consideration for the ruling family at the time. The scant detail that they did include was reported in the account of the Empress Consort Jingū, a mistaken identification that persisted into modern times, when post war scholars were free to research and publish as they saw fit, without fear of reprisal.

In addition to information I was able to locate on line and which I received from the Sakurai City Cultural Assets Center, I studied two books in English. The more valuable one is Himiko and Japan's Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai, by the distinguished scholar and art historian J. Edward Kidder, Jr. Although this book was published in 2007, before the recent dramatic discoveries at Makimuku, it is an invaluable source of background information. It not only contains a new translation of the Wei Chronicles, but also a detailed retrospective of Japanese archeology and a fascinating analysis of the Japanese mythological materials, from which he infers details of the development of the nascent Japanese state. I also bought a newly (2009) published book, Japan in Five Ancient Chinese Chronicles: Wo, the Land of Yamatai, and Queen Himiko, by Massimo Soumaré. The excerpt from Wei Chronicles in this book is only 21 pages, half of which is the Chinese text, but it, with the extensive notes, makes up over half of a 300-page-plus book. The notes describe various interpretations, likely clerical errors, and obscure references, and when I was finished reading them, I felt I no longer knew as much as I once thought I had about the subject. I would have liked to have included the complete text of the brief Wei document, but have been unable to located an out-of-copyright translation or even one online which I could link to, and so I have summarized the portions of the account which seemed relevant to this post, but omitted details which did not. It contains:

• A detailed description of the route traveled. This can be followed with some certainty from Korea to the offshore islands of Japan, but it is ambiguous thereafter and not useful in locating exactly where in Japan the mission visited. (If one follows the route described, one ends up in the middle of the ocean, far to the south of Japan. If one attends to direction but not distance, it is possible to reach any of the possible sites in Kyushu. If one ignore direction, then the travel directions could reach the Yamato heartland, or for that matter almost anywhere in Honshu. Hence, of course, the long-standing controversy over the location.)
• A description of a land of many small kingdoms (some 100 at the time of the earlier Han Chronicles, but at the time of the Wei visit many of these had been united under the hegemony of a kingdom called Yamatai. "Koku" is a Japanese word meaning country or nation, and is always attached to Yamatai in Japanese references.)
• A description of this kingdom. It is ruled by a powerful shaman queen named Himiko, who after the failed rule of a male king restored order to the kingdom. She is unmarried, lives in a closely guarded compound with 1000 female servants. She communicates with only one man, her younger brother, who conveys her commands to the outside world. She has troops stationed throughout her kingdom to maintain order, and sends missions to other countries, including the Wei Court. After Himiko's death, she is buried in a great mound, said to have been 100 (145 meters) paces in diameter. One hundred female slaves are buried with her. Following her death, a man becomes king, but chaos reigns, until he is replaced by a young female relative of Himiko's, and harmony is restored.
• Many descriptions of the people of Yamatai Koku. All the men and boys have tattoos on their faces and bodies, and these vary in size and location, depending on social rank and area of residence. These tattoos are not only ornamental, but also serve as protective charms. They are skilled at swimming and taking sea urchins and fish. They are not lascivious. The men wear large cloths tied to one another with little stitching, and the hair tied to the sides and wrapped in cotton cloth. The women wear simple tunic-like garments, with their hair in a bun. They grow rice and hemp, raise silkworms, and weave hemp, cotton, and silk cloth. There are no cattle, horses, tigers, panthers, sheep or magpies. Their weapons are pikes, shields, and bows short on the bottom and long on top, with bamboo arrows tipped with iron or bone. Because of the mild climate, they eat vegetables throughout the year. Everyone goes barefoot. They drink from cups made of bamboo but eat with their hands. They live in houses with separate spaces for members of an extended family. They paint their bodies red with vermilion and cinnabar, in a manner similar to the Chinese custom. The dead are buried in piles of dirt, with loud laments by family members, and others dancing, singing, and drinking liquor. After the 10-day mourning period, family members purify themselves with a ritual bath. They burn animal bones to read the omens before important events. They love drinking alcohol. They make no distinction in rank when sitting, and show respect to a superior family member not by bowing, but merely by pressing their palms together. The people live to great age, some reaching as much as 100 years. Important men have 4 or 5 wives, with lesser men having 2 or 3. The women are "neither luxurious or jealous." There is no theft and few litigations. As punishment for lesser crimes, wives and children are taken away; for greater crimes, all family members are killed. Social rank is well-defined and closely maintained. When a person of low rank meets a high-ranked person on the road, he walks backwards off the road. Low ranking people answer by knelling, with palms and head on the ground, replying "ai," a custom the envoys noted was similar to Chinese practice. There are store houses for goods collected as taxes, and markets are established throughout the country for the exchange of goods.

If you live outside Japan, and are not interested in Japanese anime or video games, it's likely you have never heard of Yamatai Koku and Queen Himiko, but in Japan these matters are well known. In a recent survey of elementary school children, Himiko scored an astonishing 90% in name recognition.

But the location of Yamatai remains a question. It is, in fact, by far the greatest controversy in Japanese prehistory. Some scholars, historians, and archeologist maintain that it was located in Kyushu, the south most of Japan's four large islands. Others think it was in the Nara Basin, the well established place of origin of the imperial family and the Japanese state as we know it today. In the 1980's the discovery of the remains of a large and sophisticated settlement of a suitable date in Kyushu, called Yoshino ga Ri, swung the thinking heavily toward that Southern site, especially in the popular press and the public imagination. In recent years, discoveries in the Makimuku area of the City of Sakurai in Nara have produced mounting evidence in favor of the northern location. The controversy is far from over, and there continues to be vocal supporters of both areas.

From the title of this post, one can see my view on the matter. I can't pretend to be neutral, but I have tried to remain open to the possibility that my opinion, borrowed from numerous better informed people, is incorrect. The Makimuku site is almost certainly the birthplace of the Yamato state, the polity that would become Japan. The site differs in many respects from excavated villages that date from the same period. Excavations have found fewer farming tools and other evidence of agriculture, but more traces of public works than appear in other Yayoi period sites. Large amounts of pottery have been found there from far flung regions, although a similar variety of types are not found in the areas from which they came. One writer has suggested that the location of Yamatai Koku, barring the unlikely discovery of incontrovertible evidence, like Himiko's gold seal, will never be known with complete certainty. But many factors suggest that Makimuku is not only the birthplace of the Japanese nation but also the site of Yamatai Koku. The fact that the building discovered in 2009 is significantly larger than any found at Yoshino ga Ri or any other site from the period is a strong indication, and the presence of many kofun (including one large enough to be the tomb of Himiko) which by improved techniques have been dated to the period of the visit by the Wei Chinese mission seems to greatly strengthen Makimuku's claim to have been Himiko's home.

This KMZ file is in two parts. Part One is brief. It contains a single placemark on Yoshino ga Ri, and the remaining placemarks are of significant locations in the Makimuku area. It is largely in English, partly because a Japanese reader will be more familiar with the material, but largely because of my inability to write in that language. Part Two may be downloaded from any of the placemarks in Part One. The two languages are presented in separate sections, separately accessed by clicking either the top or bottom button in each Part One placemark. It's most important content is a map produced the City of Sakurai and its explanatory text, which describe various archeological studies done in the area. The Japanese texts are scanned from the map, and the English texts are my own labored translations. My knowledge of the Japanese language is not great, and I welcome feedback regarding any errors I have made in writing in it or translating from it, although it was never my purpose to follow closely the grammar, syntax, and sentence structure of the original at the expense of being understood in English. To that end I have omitted some details, notably references to the complex system used for dating artifacts of the period. While my translations may be flawed, I offer them as the only (and therefore the best) available.

I think GEC members with no particular interest in Japanese history may be interested in some of the techniques I have explored in presenting the map. Part Two also contains a series of ground overlays, a collection of videos, and a folder of assorted supplemental materials.

I wish to thank Mr. Toshiji Itō (伊藤敏司) of NHK Nara for permission to use the renderings of the buildings; Mr. Masao Yukawa (湯川真朗) for permission to hotlink to his photos; the Kashihara Archeological Institute for permission to use copyrighted images; Mr. Teruhiko Hashimoto (橋本輝彦) and the staff of the Sakurai City Cultural Assets Center for numerous kindnesses, (particularly the person who took much more time than I thought it ever would to write phonetic transcriptions of all of the place names on the map); Mr. Toshiyuki Yoneda (米田敏幸) for his many years of tutelage in Japanese history and archeology, and who conducted me for the first time to many of the sites placemarked in this file; and my wife Ayako who did the first proofread of scanned Japanese texts, and tolerated many ill formed questions and my bad temper when divergent ideas floating over the page refused to coalesce into a coherent English sentence.

Part 2 of this file is the core presentation. I have so far no way to remove the unrevised version attached below, but I am following the new allowed procedure of posting links to relevant content available in a Dropbox account. Part 1 was created as a way of keeping the dozens of placemark out of the old Google Earth Community Layer, but still creating some potential downloads from users who were browsing it. Except for the placemark on Yoshi no Gari, there is not a great deal of interest in most of the content, although the text and illustrations are not repeated in Part 2. I thought at the time I created it, that it was a successful solution to the problem of peppering the GE imagery with the little blue "i's" that this complex file would have generated. The links to downloading either the English or the Japanese version of the file are to the old GEC forums, and there is no point in revising them.

Part 1

Part 2 English

Part 2 Japanese

An article printed Friday in The Wall Street Journal: Japan reports that researchers have found that the basil pollen discovered in an excavation in the Makimuku area of Sakurai City, came from China or the Korean Peninsula.  This confirming that the 3rd century settlement was engaged in international trade, and adds further support for the thesis (by no means universally accepted) that the Makimuku site was the location Yamatai Koku, the realm of Queen Himiko, spoken of in the Wei Chinese Chronicles.

My translation of location 9 of the map which forms the core of this post reads:

In the 61st excavation study, in the remains of a "V" shaped drainage ditch dated at the latter half of the 3rd century, pollen grains were discovered, which proved to be the oldest known example in the country. Dyer's safflower has many uses, including herbal medicines and crimson dyes and pigments. The volume of this pollen found at the Makimuku Historic Site suggests that the function of the ditch was to drain waste materials from some sort of dyeing facility. Dyer's safflower is not native to Japan. From its presence here, it may be inferred that the rulers at Makimuku employed groups of experts possessed of knowledge of the latest continental technology.

The Japanese word for pollen is kafun (flower powder) and for hay fever is kafunshoo (flower powder illness), which always amuses me, because it sounds so much like a sneeze. Perhaps I wouldn't laugh so much, if I suffered from it as much as some of my friends do.