Copyright 2009 by OKAMOTO INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Preferred Citation:Yutaka Okamoto, International History Series, East Asia- First of the Special Series on Japanese History (May 2009)
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LET US MOVE BEYOND THE LIMITATIONS OF
THE WORLD OF THE NATION-STATE HISTORY
From a National History to a Regional History
-- A New Paradigm for the Resolution of the so-called History Issues --
Yutaka Okamoto
OIARI Tokyo, Japan
LET US MOVE BEYOND THE LIMITATIONS OF
THE WORLD OF THE NATION-STATE HISTORY
From a National History to a Regional History
-- A New Paradigm for the Resolution of the so-called History Issues --
Yutaka Okamoto
OIARI Tokyo, Japan
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER ONE
DEFINING THE FRAMEWORK OF THE SO-CALLED "HISTORY ISSUE"
(I) THE TRUE NATURE OF THE ISSUE
(II) PERSEREVING THE PRESSURES OF THE CHINESE EMPIRES AND THE WESTERN IMPERIAL POWERS
(III) SEEKING A SCAPE GOAT IN ASIA FOR EMOTIONAL BALANCE
(IV) WHERE TO REPOSITION JAPAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY ASIA
CHAPTER TWO
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NORTHERN TRIBAL STATES AND THE CHINESE MODDLE KINGDOMS
CHAPTER THREE
RISE OF BUKE SHAKAI (Samurai Society) AND THE MONGOL INVASIONS
CHAPTER IV
THE WAKE OF MY PERSONAL RESEACH OF THE PAST
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY REVIEW OF THE NORTHERN TRIBES' CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON JAPAN AND NORTHEAST ASIA'S MOMDERN HISTORY
CHAPTER SIX
SUMMARY REVIEW OF THE NORTHERN TRIBES' CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON JAPAN AND NORTHEAST ASIA'S MOMDERN HISTORY
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
FOREWARD
It seems as if the so-called “history issues” confronting Japan, Korea and China have long been being trivialized in Japan if not in the others. Take the case of the Nanking Massacre as an example. More often than not, the past international discussions seem to have centered on and around the argument as to which country’s quantitative claims and supporting evidences, especially of the death tolls of the Chinese civilians, are more justifiable than those claimed by others. This was from the beginning destined to drive all participants into a blind alley.
CHAPTER ONE
DEFINING THE FRAMEWORK OF THE SO-CALLED "HISTORY ISSUES"
(I) THE TRUE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM
It is true that, in order to cope with this problem, a new governmental consultation committee between China and Japan was organized years ago with an aim to jointly review East Asia’s history by creating discussion groups among the three countries' representatives in recent years. But, in most cases, their discussions have addressed the period mainly
from after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 through the end of World War II, during which time Japan embarked upon its own Imperialist expansion drives in East and Southeast Asias in competition with the major Western Imperialist powers.
The intent of these study groups was to critically re-examine the tragic nature and the damaging consequences wrought upon Japan’s neighbors, centering on the colonization of Korea and the extensive acts of war waged against China. As of August 2010, however, their collaborative efforts have not yet yielded any tangible results toward a conclusive resolution of the problems on hand.
Well known among these groups, for example, is the “Three-Nation Joint Committee on History Text Books” which published a trial text called “History for the Future: Modern History of East Asia’s Three Nations.”(July 2, 2006 edition, Kobunsha, Tokyo). However, in my opinion, this book did not produce a truly meaningful result by moving beyond just writing in three “National sections” the facts and interpretations mutually agreed upon in broad terms as a result of the joint examination of the historical events of this period.
In this writer’s opinion, the roots of the “history issues” of East Asia go far back into this region’s ancient past, and a mere joint reflection of the events that took place in the recent Imperialist Era is destined to fall far too short of producing a true resolution of what is really at issue.
For, East Asia’s history harkens all the way back to the ancient times during which the early Chinese Empires and tribal kingdoms rose and fell in everlasting conflicts along China’s northern and northeastern frontier regions, involving the northern tribes which share their ethnic and cultural roots with today's Japanese people. In this sense, it can be said that the so-called “history issues” touch the ethnic and cultural subconscious of all these nations awakening their distant memories of the continental heritage.
The people who first settled on the Japanese archipelago were a complex mix of tribes coming from all directions, the southern Pacific islands, Himalayan foothills and South China to the south and the northeastern regions of China and today’s Russian Far East to the north. But the widely accepted version of Japan's history places its primary emphasis on the highly developed wet rice culture of the “southern origin” consolidated under the elite ruling class who migrated from the continent to Japan via the Korean peninsula and established the Nara/Kyoto Imperial regime in ancient times.
In the outside world, however, Japan is more often depicted as "Samurai country" in association with its feudal martial tradition. But the fact of life is that there are little documentary evidence in Japan of the origin and rise of the Samurai society. Since most of the early settlers who came from the north to the eastern and northern regions of Japan, known as the true birth place of Samuai culture, did not have their own writing systems like their distant cousins of the New Continent, leaving little, if any, records on how they arrived in Japan and what really happened to them during the latter half of the first Christian millennium.
(II) PERSEREVING THE PRESSURES OF THE CHINESE EMPIRES AND THE WESTERN IMPERIAL POWERS
If we are to seriously cope with the “history issues," we, the Japanese, ought to embark upon our own extensive re-examination of the history of the East Asian region as a whole, of which Japan is an integral part situated at its northeastern edge as a tributary state of the Sui and Tang Empires during the Asuka/Nara periods. For us Japanese, this is, in the deeper sense of the word, an issue of our national subconscious nurtured in the depths of our distant memories intermixed with admiration and at once inferiority complex toward the ancient Chinese civilization.
As a peripheral kingdom within the Chinese system of tributary states, Japan began sending envoys to China during the Asuka Period in the early 7th century. Thence began Japan's long journey toward establishing an equal nation-to-nation relationship with China and the rest of East Asia. It is of interest to note the diplomatic posture of the founders of the “Mizuhono Kuni (Land of Rich Rice Ears)” of the Asuka and Nara periods who tried to maintain a posture as an equal to the advanced Chinese civilization.
This is most eloquently expressed by a message sent by Prince Shotoku of Asuka Japan to Emperor Wen Di, the founder of Sui Empire and the first re-unifier of China. It began with the famous passage: “The emperor of the land of the rising sun hereby sends his message to the emperor of the setting sun. Are you doing well?”
But, this was nothing but an expression in reverse of their deep sense of inferiority and at once a competitive desire to establish an equal relationship with China, and if possible at all, to claim a superior position in its relation with the neighboring tributary states in Northeast Asia.
Nearly a millennium and a half later, faced with a hostile contact with the Western Imperial states in the mid-19th century, Japan opted to disband the feudal Tokugawa regime and successfully launched a radical modernization and Westernization reform which came to be called the Meiji Restoration.
The diplomatic posture of the Meiji Japan toward the West was a modern-day copy of Prince Shotoku's stand toward Sui China of the 6th century. However, the lingering question is why Japan alone, among the East Asian countries, has, evolving from the position of a China’s minor tributary state, in the end succeeded in establishing a uniquely Japanese Samurai state capable of escaping the fate of its continental brothers of succumbing to the all-embracing temptation of a superior civilization.
Meiji Japan’s self awareness of fatal backwardness to the Imperial West gave rise to the so-called Imperial View of History (皇国史観) built upon the concept of the land of the rising sun governed by the Nara/Kyoto Imperial political center. Instead of China, modern Japan was anxious to join the ranks of the Western Imperialist states as an equal while once again beginning to looking down on the fellow Asian neighbors.
(III) SEEKING A SCAPE GOAT IN ASIA FOR EMOTIONAL BALANCE
In the meantime, Meiji Japan took on a stiff and oppressive diplomatic posture against its Asian neighbors, especially Korea and China, by means of which it sought to achieve an emotional balance positioning it as a middle-level power between the advanced West and the backward East Asia. This was nothing but a modern revival of Price Shotoku’s diplomacy model, if only greatly expanded in scope as it was evidenced by the unfair 21-Article Agreement Japan tried to impose upon China.
Japan’s inferiority complex which continued to run in the nations’ subconscious as an undercurrent deep beneath the ground surfaced once again after World War II in the form of the above-mentioned “history text book dispute.” In the postwar Japan, the history text books used in the public school system became the source of constant dispute within Japan between the progressive political and intellectual forces, typically represented by organizations such as Nikkyoso (Japan National Federation of Teachers Unions) on the one side, and the conservative political groups in and around the Liberal Democratic Party and the conservative wings of the national bureaucracy.
Throughout much of the post-war years, however, these contending forces struck a convenient compromise in public schools so that the final semester runs out before the history class reaches the most sensitive period of Japan's modern history, i.e., the post-Meiji modern period, especially the Showa period after the World Depression so as to avoid open polemics and unavoidable political embarrassment. Practically speaking, this resulted in a situation where generations of the postwar Japanese youths have been seldom taught the modern-era history of their own country at school. Thus, teachers could avoid the uncomfortable class-room hours while the Ministry of Education did not have to face embarrassing political disputes.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, which produced a serious disgrace for the historians of the Marxist persuasion in Japan. The advocates of the idea that the post-war Japan indeed became a “member of the Western nations” sharing the same values and institutions came to hold the sway in public opinion as the United States became the only super power of the world while it also energized a new group of conservative nationalists in Japan.
I am afraid most of us in Japan today still remain mentally, if not in everyday life, isolated from the continental part of East Asia. And, while this was a self-imposed state of psychological isolation, studying the history of Northeastern Asia, particularly in the coastal regions of the Russian Far East, had remained extremely difficult due to the domination of the region first by the hostile Czarist Russia and then by the Soviet Union ever since the beginning of the 20th century all the way up to the end of the Cold War.
Due to this unfortunate situation, there has been a serious lack of historical knowledge of the ancient tribal cultures and their development in Northeast Asia and their subsequent southward movement by sea toward the central and northern coastal regions of the Japanese archipelago. The resulting knowledge imbalance build into the modern Japanese view of its own history has never been fully rectified due mainly to the continuous lack of available data and evidence.
(IV) WHERE TO REPOSITION JAPAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY ASIA
The standard Japanese history taught in public schools has often been criticized as overly nationalistic by Japan’s neighbors. While it is in a sense an inevitable result of this imbalance of available historical data and not necessarily because of the influence of stilted political ideologies, it still matters as long as the “Imperial View of History” is taken by Japan’s neighbors as a possible cause for Japan's reversion to overseas power projection in Asia.
This paper is not written with a political motivation. It merely intends to make a proposal for a serious joint historical research project among the nations of East Asia aiming at the integration of Northeast Asia as a peaceful and productive sub-region of East Asia.
CHAPTER TWO
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NORTHERN TRIBAL STATES AND THE CHINESE MODDLE KINGDOMS
It is often said by the Japanese historians that Japan was able to fend off the excessive influence and often damaging impact of the ancient Chinese kingdoms because of the fact that it was an insular state separated by sea from the continental Asia.
Admittedly, on the continental side were such ancient tribal kingdoms as Puyo, Koguryeo, Baekje, Silla and Balhae which rose and fell in relatively short successions in and around the northeastern region of Today's China and the Korean peninsula during the several centuries before and after the Christian era.
They were fundamentally Tungusic speakers who originally lived as hunters in the forests of the maritime region of Today's Russian Far East and came out to the flat plains of Manchuria for better life as dry field grain farmers. There were others, also northern tribes of diverse ethnic backgrounds, who crossed the Great Wall and invaded the northern region of China to establish the relatively short-lived "barbarian" empires such as Northern Wei of Xianbei(鮮卑の北魏：386-534), Liao of Qidan(契丹の遼：916-1125), and Jinn of Jurchen(女真の金：1115-1234)(check the attached maps).
These northern tribal kingdoms often had to govern with a dual government system, one for their own ethnic population and another for the Han Chinese who lived under their rule. Such a dual system inevitably led to the sinonization of the tribal kingdom's ruling aristocracies given the irresistible allure of the superior civilization of the Middle Kingdom. This in turn resulted in the ostracization of the lower-echelon tribal leadership and disintegration of their own ethnic identity. While the northern tribal kingdoms did make a significant contribution in enriching the diversity of the Chinese civilization, there is no denying the fact that all of the tribal kingdoms eventually fell apart melting into the ever-greater China.
There have been those northern tribes who managed to build large Chinese dynasties such as Yuan Empire by the Mongols and Qing Empire by the Manchus. The former, which once had the strength of sending formidable invasion troops in hundreds of thousands across the sea to Japan, lasted only less than 100 years from 279 to 368 AD, while the latter, the longest lasting "barbaric dynasty," sustained itself for nearly 300 years until it was replaced by the Republic of China in 1912.
CHAPTER THREE
RISE OF BUKE SHAKAI (Samurai Society) AND THE MONGOL INVASIONS
Japan, contrary to the experience of the continental trivial kingdoms, managed to survive through all these centuries upholding the cultural heritage of its own, especially after the birth of the strong Buke Shakai (Samurai society) in early 12th century as a result of fusion between their own dry farming and horse husbandry culture of the north with the wet-rice farming culture coming from the south.
To explain the reason for this uninterrupted continuity, as already said, Japan's geographical advantage of insularity is often used. But today, we must seriously question if this is, while valid in itself, a sufficient explanation for the exceptional self-sustainability of Japan's governance system in comparison with the history of other trivial kingdoms of Northeast Asia.
To examine this, let us now turn to the episode of the great Mongol invasions during the late 13th century to re-evaluate the validity of this "insularity" hypothesis. In 1274, the Great Yuan sent an invasion army of some 40,000, and then in 1281, a large fleet consisting of nearly 4000 vessels with 140,000 invasion troops, part of which was recruited from southern China and the rest from the Korean peninsula pressured by the powerful Yuan.
Japan, though a small island kingdom, miraculously managed to repel the invasion armies on both occasions to the dismay of the Yuan emperor. But, when one looks into this unusual historical episode, it reveals a much more important clue to understand the true reason for defender's success other than the miraculous destruction of the invading Mongol fleet by the "Divine Wind (Kamikaze!!)," which were nothing but seasonal tropical typhoons.
For, the "Divine Wind" would not have made any difference at all if the majority of the invading troops, especially given their size, had successfully built a secure shore-based foothold with access to local communities in northern Kyushu Island. But, the truth was that the counter attacks by the fierce defending Samurai troops gathered from all over Japan under the central command of the Kamakura Bakufu were so intense that the Mongol invaders opted to retreat back to the safety of their own fleet anchored offshore after each sunset fearful of night attacks. And, this was the true reason why the "Divine Wind" not only wrecked the fleet but also decimated the invasion troops.
If there were no organized defense plan participated by the elite Samurai legions from across the country to keep the Mongol invaders off the shores in the evenings, we would almost certainly have had a totally different outcome. For, the aristocratic Imperial Government in Kyoto could do little more than organizing grand religious rites praying for the Gods' help. And, the end result would have been, once the invasion troops became firmly established on the beach, the Yuan troops would have swept across much of western Japan in no time, and toppled the ruling Kyoto Imperial regime.
If these were the consequences, then it would have gone down the history as just another episode of the demise of a northern tribal kingdom. In this sense, the real "Divine Wind" was not the typhoon itself, but the existence of the robust martial culture of the Samurai society under the unified command of the Kamakura Bakufu government.
CHAPTER IV
NORTHERN TRIBES AS THE FOUNDERS OF JAPAN'S SAMURAI SOCIETY
At this point, let me briefly discuss my second working hypothesis presented in this paper. It is built on the assumption that the principal ethno-cultural roots of the Samurai society that arose in the eastern provinces of Japan during the 10th and 11th centuries were the descendants of the continental Tungusic tribes who brought the dry field farming and horse ranching culture to eastern Japan during the first several centuries of the Christian era. And, as such, the culture of the Samurai society of eastern Japan was a separate and independent political and cultural entity entirely different from the mainstream culture built around the Yamato Imperial Court of western Japan, which was built under a predominant Chinese influence while it was also rooted in the northern tribal culture which came to Japan via the Korean peninsula.
The ancestors of the Samurai class of eastern Japan, however, migrated directly from the Asian continent riding on the Liman cold current washing the shores of the Maritime Province of today's Russian Far East and then the eastern shorelines of the Korean peninsula, and switching onto the Tsushima warm current running northward. These currents took them in a relatively short time, even by drifting, somewhere along the shores of the northern half of the Japanese Mainland. Incidentally, as we shall discuss later, these are the people whose descendants first came to be called "Emishi (northern barbarians)," the rebellious northern tribes to be conquered and pacified by the Kyoto regime.
Their descendents, however, became well entrenched in the eastern regions of Japan built on an extensive dry field farming economy, raising horses for farm use, transportation and armed self-defense. But the fact remains that there is an extreme paucity of documented evidence about their continental origin, seafaring migration, settlement and the subsequent endogenous development in Japan because of the nature of the Altaic languages which lacked a writing system of its own. Consequently, no serious history students have devoted their life in this area of research, effectively keeping this subject in the academic black box.
On the other hand, it is also true that there are a number of indirect evidences strongly pointing to the validity of this working hypothesis both on the continental and the archipelago sides. More or less the same thing can be said about the obscure origin and the early history of the development of the Samurai society in Japan. For, it was not until they came in direct and close contact, often through armed confrontations, with the literate culture of the Kyoto Imperial Court that they began learning to write about themselves.
CHAPTER V
THE WAKE OF MY PERSONAL RESEACH OF THE PAST
I, as a young university student during the 1950s, became fascinated upon learning about the romantic, even if archaeological, account of the long-distance migration of the proto-Asian tribes to the New Continent by walking across the Bering Sea land bridge.
Subsequently, I myself moved to North America in 1959 and spent more than quarter of a century conducting my own personal research of the history of the North American Indians and Eskimos while holding a variety of jobs to support my family life.
Upon return to Japan in 1983, I began back-tracing their ancient eastward migration route by visiting the Russian Far East, mainly the Khavarovsk and Maritime provinces, getting acquainted with the so-called "native communities" in the forested areas where the coniferous northern Taiga forest meets with the deciduous Mongolian oak belt. This study is still going on to the present day.
The above working hypothesis, which I call "Liman current migration hypothesis," was the result of many years of my lonely study, lonely because I was in dispute with the orthodoxy of the established academia, But, my effort in North America finally culminated in the examination of the continental roots of the Samurai culture of Eastern Japan.
It is my hope that I will be able to spend the remaining years of my life for this study so that I can discharge my humble responsibility to document as much as possible the ancient history and the subsequent fortunes and misfortunes of the Altaic speakers who migrated from the northeastern region of the Eurasian Continent, first to the New Continent around the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean, and later continued to populate the northeastern shores of the Japanese archipelago.
Now, therefore, we turn to these indirect, but persuasive evidences on both sides of the Sea of Japan, or Dong Hae (East Sea) as it is called in Korea.
[I] Supporting Evidences: Continental Side
1) The Liman Cold Current and the Tsushima Warm Current
The Liman current runs counterclockwise (see the attached chart), consisting of the Maritime Province cold current and the North Korea cold current, running along the eastern shore of the peninsula to join the Tsushima warm current running northward along the shore of Japan's Main Land northward from Noto peninsula projecting into the Sea of Japan.
Small-sized boats can embark upon this route from the shores of the Maritime Province and the adjacent segment of the northern shorelines of the peninsula, and drift down until the Ullung and Takeshima (Dok) islands come into sight, and then ride on the Tsushima current northward. They were destined, weather permitting, to arrive somewhere on the shore of northern Japan (the Koshi region as it was then called) above Noto peninsula.
Much of the peaceful migrations of this sort by a variety of tribes of mainly Tungusic origin is most likely to have taken place between the 3rd century BC and the 7th century AD, during which China's northeastern region, particularly the great plains south of the Hinggan Ling (大興安嶺) mountain ranges remained in incessant wars and ethnic turmoil, especially from after the fall of the Later Han (25-220) and the Three Kingdoms period (221-265). From then on, centuries of continuous power struggles followed involving northern tribes and much of northern China, giving rise to a number of competing small kingdoms and their usurpers. The "Barbarian" kingdom of Northern Wei (北魏386-550) stood as a prominent example among them until the rise in the 7th century of the unified Sui and Tang dynasties.
The Tungusic migration to Japan via the Liman current in those centuries in the form of incessant wave of small groups escaping from their war-torn homeland must have been aided by the Wai and Bak (穢・貊) tribes who were skilled mariners inhabiting along the shores of this region. The argument why this period deserves a special re-evaluation is supported by the recent archaeological studies made mainly in Japan which provide us a number of mid-6th century evidences that the horse ranching and dry field farming culture of unmistakably northeastern (steppe) continental origin was already well entrenched in the eastern provinces of Japan.
Another collaborative evidence is the documented record of the established sea voyage routes, used not only between the Bo Hai kingdom (698-926) and Japan but also used by Japan as the alternate passage route to and from China's Tang Empire (see the attached chart). The green lines in the map indicate the actually used voyage routes from Japan to Bo Hai, and the red lines those from Bo Hai to Japan. It can be reasonably assumed, therefore, that these routes were also used in the preceding centuries by the Wai and Bak (穢・貊) seafarers who helped the Tsungusic tribes migrating to the Japanese archipelago.
The Bo Hai missions had this route named "Japan way" connecting the continent with such strategic points as Noto peninsula, Kaga, Echizen and Sado, or the entire region once called the "Koshi-no-kuni (越の国)" in the eastern part of Japan. The westerly-northern wind from the continent in the late fall and the winter months, and the easterly-southern wind of the summer months were obviously used for the diplomatic and trade traffic by the Bo Hai kingdom.
But once again, to our regret, the available body of documented evidence of movement by sea between Japan and the continent in those centuries is limited largely to those of the governmental documents of the Nara and Heian periods, which contained nothing to speak of about the migration and settlement by the northern tribes as it is the case with the so-called American Indians of the New Continent.
2) The Effect of the Centuries of Extended Cold Climate
The effect of this cold spell lasting for several centuries is clearly evident in Japan. For instance, the northern limit of wet-rice farming receded southward in Japan as low in altitude as the present-day Niigata prefecture in those centuries. If the condition of the coastal areas of northern Japan washed by the Tsushima warm current was this bad, its negative effect on farming in the Maritime Province and the coastal areas of the southeastern part of today's China (Manchuria) washed by the Liman cold current must have been much worse. And, this would certainly have prompted the Tungusic tribes of these regions to move southward into the warmer climate zone, and the easiest happened to be the Japanese archipelago.
3) The Advance of Navigation Technology
It is known today that fairly large ocean-going vessels with sails were already in use in the early Christian centuries in this region as proven by the engraved designs on the excavated ancient earthenware (see the attached picture). However, it is not clear whether vessels of this type were actually used for the migration via the Liman current to Japan. But, the Wai and Bak (穢・貊) tribes who inhabited the seaside belt along the Maritime Province and North Korea in those days were seasoned seafarers with much more sophisticated navigation knowhow than their Korean and Japanese counterparts, and are actually known to have often reached the shores of northern Japan.
4) The Variety of the Migrating Ethnic Groups
They are likely to be among such ethnic groups as (Goguryeo,高句麗:1 cen BC-7cen AD),(粛慎：周代、春秋戦国時代を経て後に漢民族化),(?婁：1-4 cen.後漢から五胡十六国時代),(勿吉：439から589までの南北朝時代),(靺鞨：唐時代に勿吉の名が変わった) and (Po Hai渤海: 698-926) who inhavited in and around today's northeastern region of China ranging from the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) to Tang Dynasty (618-907).
The migrating Tungusic tribes to the eastern provinces of Japan up to the rise of the Po Hai kingdom must have included among them a number of these ethnic groups in diverse stages of cultural and economic development from those who still remained hunters of the forests living in underground dwellings all the way to the relatively advanced groups who had moved out of the forests to cultivate grains and raise horses as a result of the contact with the culture of the horse-ridding nomads from the west and China's bronze culture from the south.
The once powerful Kingdom of Goguryeo, stretching from the northern region of the Korean Peninsula into the southern plains of the Hinggan Ling (大興安嶺) and much of the Maritime Province, was finally defeated by the Tang armies in 668 after series of ferocious wars over centuries, giving rise to the successor tribal kingdom of Po Hai (渤海), most likely causing the war-distressed families belonging to the above mentioned ethnic group flee from home via this sea route.
In this sense, Goguryeo actually played the dual role in history of pressuring these minor ethnic groups out of the region to the Japanese archipelago during the centuries of its territorial expansion on the one hand, and after fatal defeat inflicted by the Tang invasion themselves becoming the last wave of refugee immigrants to Japan on the other.
[II] Supporting Evidences: Japanese Side
1) The Relative Openness of the Wild Eastern Frontier of Ancient Japan
As mentioned above, the extended cold spell mentioned which, starting from the 4th century, lasted for several centuries wrought a devastating impact on the wet-rice farming in northern Japan forcing the front line of rice growing region down to today's Niigata prefecture. Under such circumstances, much of the northeastern region became less populated effectively keeping it a sparsely populated frontier land in comparison to the rich rice-growing western regions. But, this condition must have been a blessing in disguise for the migrating Tungusic tribes because the climate was still good enough for their type of horse ranching and dry field grain farming.
2) Farm Crops of Exclusively Siberian Origin Found Grown in Eastern Japan
In the eastern regions of today's Japan, we still have grains and other various farm crops, the origin of which can be scientifically traced, not to the route from western Japan via Korean peninsula, but directly to eastern Japan from the northern steppes of Siberia. Among them are such important crops like barley and other miscellaneous grains, green vegetables, and edible roots. This is one of the most persuasive, if still indirect, evidence in favor of the working hypothesis of the Liman current migration route.
3) The Excavated Site of a 6th-Century Farming Community with a Unique Rotated Horse Ranching System
The recently excavated archaeological site in the Komochimura village in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, uncovered under a thick layer of volcanic ash, a nearly complete farming site of the mid-6th century. It prove beyond any doubt that in this part of eastern Japan, different from the western regions and the Ainu communities of the north, there already was a well developed dry field farming culture growing a wide range of crops including millet, barnyard grass and buckwheat closely integrated with rotated horse raising practice.
And, it was from within this culture that armed horse-riding bands (しゅう馬の党) emerged as the forerunners of the "Eastern Worriers on Horse Back (関東騎馬武者)" who became the dominant social class during the 10th century laying the foundation for the emergence of their own government of Kamakura Bakufu (鎌倉幕府) in direct competition with the Kyoto regime.
In the case of the Komochimura village site, there was a fenced-around farming field with countless horse footprints designed to keep horses inside feeding on the leftover grain stands after harvest by cutting off the ears by hand. This strongly pointed to the existence of a well-organized village-wide farming and horse ranching plan rotating horses from one crop season, and one location, to another. The site also uncovered a well-designed plan of a farmhouse above the ground with a livestock shed and a kitchen garden.
It should be emphatically noted that all this runs counter to the image of the lifestyle of the Emishi (蝦夷), the northern barbarians, who were hunted down and conquered by the expedition armies dispatched by the Imperial Court during the Nara and early Heian periods (710-850s). Most of the history textbooks now in use by public schools in Japan still continue to depict the Emishi people as uncivilized tribal people. Obviously, there indeed were some dwellers of underground caves while the Ainu people maintained their own hunting and collecting culture who alone are likely to be the true endogenous inhabitants of the archipelago. But, the above dry farming culture using horses was a distinctively different cultural group.
4) A 5th-Century Burial Site with Horse Immolation Discovered in Eastern Japan
In addition to this, another excavation in Inadani, a highland valley community in Nagano prefecture, also northwest of Tokyo, uncovered an elaborate burial site of the mid-5th century with horse immolation similar to those found in the Kingdom of Baekje of Korea. This is now interpreted as an indication that there already existed extensive horse ranching operations in order to meet the demand for horses in this region, and therefore, the possibility of the widely practiced dry field farming across the plains of the eastern Japan.
While there is no conclusive evidence that all the Tungusic migrants did bring horses with them on their voyages to Japan, those who came to settle in these regions with the knowhow of dry field farming must have found and quickly obtained horses in Japan. There is a collaborating episode in North America, where the so-called the native Indians with no knowledge of horses stole them from the invading Spanish and quickly became formidable horse-riding worriers.
5) Not Ainu but Tungusic Dialects in Use in Ancient Eastern Japan
Nihon Shoki, 7th-century classical Japanese history book, contains a number of accounts of the northern expeditions dispatched by the Nara Imperial Court to the eastern and northern provinces to conquer the Emishi. It contains passages such as: “In March, 659,........we offered an elaborate dinner to entertain the Emishi leaders of Mutsu and Koshi provinces. It further adds: "During the banquet, ........we entertained the Emishi leaders from Mutsu and Koshi provinces on the Kahara (river brook) to the east........During this month, Commander Abe No Hirafu was dispatched with an expedition fleet of 180 vessels to attack the rebellious Emishi." "After the battle, Commander gathered 241 Emishi with 31 captives from Agita (Akita) and Nushiro (Noshiro), 112 Emishi and 4 captives from Tsugaru, and 20 Emish from Ifurisahe to a grand banquet and presented them with a mountain of gifts."
included were a good-sized boat and five-colored silk tapestry offered to the local god........we finally arrived at Shishiriko, whereupon two Emishi leaders from Tohiu, Ikashima and Uhano, stepped forward and said: "We recommend that Shiriheshi should be used for your command headquarters." Accepting the advice of Ikashima and others, before going back to Nara, a provincial office was opened in Shiririheshi, and the Emishi leaders were appointed to the offices of the 2nd grade local representative, 1st grade provincial representative, and the chief regional representative of both Mutsu and Koshi regions." "Thus, Commander Abe No Hirafu returned home from the northland expedition against the Emishi of Mishihase region with 49 captives as offering to the Nara Imperial Court."
Even though the English translation above is only preliminary pending further examination, the significant fact is that the set of words marked in red ink are in no way Ainu words. On the contrary, the phonetic characteristics strongly suggest that these are the words of Tungusic tribal dialect. Quite interestingly, they come very close to the known Tungusic words like "Sanatsura" which appear in Manyoshu (万葉集：Anthology of ten thousand poems published in 759) in a poem: "Though I give tender care to the millet I saw on the hill of Sanatsura. I wouldn't chase the young horses coming to feed on the crop (Volue 14, #3451), and the word "Arinare" used by the famous lady poet Izumi Shikibu (974-?) in a short love poem referring to Aplok Kang (鴨緑江) river. All these are the telltale signs pointing to their kinship between the dialect used by the Tungusic tribes who migrated to Japan and those of the old Tungusic and Altaic people of the continent.
The very fact that the references made to the Emishi in the Nihonshoki and Kojiki texts used the word "Mishihse (粛慎)," and not "Ezo (Ainu)" or "Mojin (hairly barbarians)" points to the awareness to some degree on the part of the Nara Imperial Court that these Emishi, a tough enemy to defeat, were a different people in their own right.
6) The Rise of Horse-Riding Samurai Worriers and Buke Shakai (Samurai society)
Both Nihonshoki (日本書紀) and Shokunihonngi (続日本紀) contain a number of references to the Emishi rebellions and pacification expeditions between 645 and the early part of the Heian period (794-1185). These records clearly indicate the real objective of these Imperial Expedition Army Commanders shifted from outright armed conquest to political appeasement and pacification starting already in the Nara period.
There even exists a surprising record, if exaggerated, that the Emishi of Dewa (出羽) and Watarishima (渡嶋) sent one thousand horses to Kyoto as their gift to the Imperial Court. This policy shift that began during the Nara period became more obvious as the Emishi groups who developed a culture distinctively their own with a formidable self-defense capability. In these cases, therefore, harmony, alliance and assimilation seemed to be a much better and realistic policy option.
In fact, during the 8th and the 9th centuries, the Court records describe the stiff resistance of the Emishi cavalry: " In order to win the battle over these Emishi, we must equip ourselves not with the conventional bows and arrows, but the more powerful mechanical bows capable of rapid shooting. They are born horse-riding worriers, and we can not kill one Emishi even with ten government soldiers (Court document of 837)." One thing that stands out above all others here is the government's recognition that these Emishi were completely different from those who were fundamentally a hunting and fishing people.
These records also reveal another important fact that the government garrison troops stationed in the remote northeastern outposts were so anxious to obtain good horses from the Emishi that they traded with them offering in exchange iron farming tools made by melting their weapons of war like armor and swords. During the 9th and the 10th centuries, documents exist containing repeated Kyoto Imperial orders banning this trade practice because of the rising fear that it will weaken the garrison's defense capability.
During this period in the eastern provinces, along with the progress of pacification of the so-called Emishi by the Yamato Court, many "Emishi" groups began building a much stronger martial culture of their own well adopted to the local environment by incorporating the wet-rice culture into their dry-farming agriculture. This endogenous development gave rise to a unique political, economic and social system which later came to be known as the society of the "Bando Kibamusha (坂東武者：horse-riding eastern worriers)" destined to become the core element of the unique Buke (Samurai) society of eastern Japan totally independent of the influence of the Kyoto Imperial Court.
This concludes the presentation of the supporting evidences.
As a result of these structural changes, Northeast Asia witnessed Japan's sudden rise to the position of a formidable regional military power as it was eloquently proven by the defeat of the two military invasion attempts by Yuan China during the 13th century. Already during the 11th and the 12th centuries, many Emishi of the northern origin were integrated into the government garrison troops by calling them the "Fushu" (俘囚), and this did contribute to hasten this process.
The Abe family's rebellion in 1051 and that of the Kiyohara family in 1083 were the last landmark battles signaling the end of Kyoto's northern military expeditions. And, reflecting this, references to the "Emishi" suddenly disappeared from the Imperial Court's public documents, leaving behind the endogenous Ainu people in the extreme northern end of the mainland and the Hokkaido island, who from thereupon came to be called "Ezo" instead of Emishi.
CHAPTER SIX
SUMMARY REVIEW OF THE NORTHERN TRIBES' CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON JAPAN AND NORTHEAST ASIA'S MOMDERN HISTORY
[1] The causes of the rise and fall of the northern tribal kingdoms in ancient times
We reviewed at the beginning of this paper the process of the “aristocratization,” or more simply “sinicization,” of the rulers of the northern tribal kingdoms. This process became a dominant trend in the history of Northeast Asia while the ostracized tribal sub-leaders became progressively impoverished and rebellious quickening the process of the regime’s ultimate collapse.
In the case of Japan, the process was more or less the same in so far as the sinicization of the Asuka-Nara Courts brought about by the wholesale adoption of the Tang culture and government institutions. However, Japan opted not to adopt China's public service examination system (科挙制度), and instead, maintained its own traditional governing system dominated by the ruling clans with emphasis on blood lineage similar to those of the northern tribal kingdoms. Even the Tang system of public farmland allotment (口分田制) did not escape the same fate. It was once adopted and tried, but did not last long in part due to the exceedingly intensive care required by the wet-rice farming, given the Japanese climactic conditions less favorable than in the sub-tropical zones.
In its stead, there arose in Japan a widespread manorial system owned by the ruling court aristocracy and the religious institutions. And, their absentee ownership required them to hire and assign armed guardians and tax collectors to the manors, eventually permitting the usurpation by these armed resident managers giving rise to a new class of Samurai peculiar to the western regions of Japan.
Among the Shugo (守護) and Jito (地頭), the manor guardians and tax collectors, the most powerful Taira clan (平家一門), who eventually replaced the highly privileged and aristocratic Fujiwara clan, began swaying a dominant influence in the Kyoto political life. However, once again, the Samurai culture typified by the Taira clan whose influence grew inside the Kyoto Court was destined from the beginning to "aristocratize" itself as it happened in China, and fell pray to the fate of the northern tribal kings of the continent. The pomp and glories of the Taira Clan, which was touted as an “Era of a Perpetual Full Moon,” in the end followed the fate of collapse like its continental counterparts.
[2] The northern tribes' heritage in the Samurai society of the medieval Japan
In comparison with the Taira Clan’s fate, the situation in eastern Japan was fundamentally different. The primary members of this Samurai society were the armed local families that descended from the Tungusic settlers of the continent and those others who had hailed from western Japan as settlers but eventually integrated themselves into the evolving regional social culture unique to eastern Japan.
As mentioned before, though the Imperial Court rulers in Kyoto did share the same continental ethnic roots and cultural heritage, the emerging Samurai society of eastern Japan was distinctively different from their counterparts in western Japan, as was typically represented by the Tiara Clan.
Instead of assimilation with the Imperial Court through “aristocratization,” the eastern Samurai groups with their own northern dry field farming and horse ranching culture, gave birth to a new life style by fusing it with the much more productive wet-rice culture into their own economic system. This not only gave it a greater stability, but also gave birth to a new family system peculiar to their martial tradition.
For now, let us tentatively call this martial culture of eastern Japan an “Ie” (family household) culture. This “Ie” culture is vastly different from the aristocratic life style of the Imperial Court of Nara and Kyoto copied after the Tang China. It was a uniquely Japanese product in that it was born in the process of the total integration, accomplished over centuries, of the southern culture into their northern tribal culture.
The most important aspect of the "Ie" culture was that the entire members of the Samurai family were integrated into a well coordinated system both for farm production management on which the family’s livelihood totally depended (一所懸命の地) on the one hand, and at the same time, it was designed to maintain a constant defensive military readiness. In other words, the "Ie" organization in eastern Japan was in direct charge of both the production system and the military operation quite unlike their western counterparts.
The most salient characteristic of the early "Ie" family was that there was no institutionalized class distinction between the farmers and the Samurai ruling class unlike all other wet-rice growing countries of Asia including western Japan. In other words, what happened to the Taira clan in western Japan was not about to repeat itself in the eastern frontier land. To the contrary, the tightly guarded integrity of this Ie organization was such that the peasants at the bottom of the social pyramid did have the chance to prove themselves and rise above to join the lower echelons of the ruling Samurai class.
Further, we must note the fact that the Japanese archipelago stretching out some 7000 kilometers north to south along the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent with the dominant Kuroshio warm current running along on both the Pacific and the Japan Sea sides. This unusual climactic condition made it possible for the Samurai society of eastern Japan to come in direct contact with the wet-rice culture originated in the regions south of the River Chang Jiang of central China. Such encounter never happened to any of their continental brothers in the northeast Asia.
In addition, it should also be noted that the Tungusic migrants who came directly from the continent did have, if any, little influence of China’s Confucian and Buddhist cultures, allowing them to keep their own religious tradition of shamanism intact. Their unique encounter with a different kind of shamanism that accompanied the wet-rice farming produced an unusual compound form of shamanism peculiar to Samurai Japan and came to be known as “ancient Shinto” of ancestor warship handed down by the "Ie" society into the present-day Japan.
Primarily, the “Ie” culture’s religious aspect is a simple system of worshiping the family ancestor as the god of the family. Thus, the overriding need to keep a given “Ie” family lineage uninterrupted tilling the inherited farmland and expanding it became a matter of utmost importance superseding kinship ties. In fact, what became a common practice in feudal Japan to ensure the continuity of the family lineage was for an “Ie” family to “adopt” a capable individual from outside if the real son was incapable of performing his duty as the family head.
Thus, the Samurai culture of eastern Japan became an independent cultural entity free from the kinship-based life style and the structured mythology of the Imperial Court of the Nara and Heian eras. It was also free from the influences of the Buddhist and Confucian traditions of the Chinese civilization. Instead, They subscribed to their own shamanistic belief in the oneness of their ancestors with the god.
Having twice repelled the Mongolian invasions, the Kamakura regime and its successors extended its sway over much of the country's western regions, and began exploring the wisdom and actual scheme of coexisting with the Kyoto-centered Imperial aristocracy through trials and errors over the ensuing centuries. Their effort finally came to fruition upon the establishment of the Tokugawa Bakufu in Edo, the present-day location of Tokyo, Japan.
In comparison with Tokugawa Japan, its continental counterparts such as Northern Wei of Xianbei(鮮卑の北魏：386-534), Liao of Qidan(契丹の遼：916-1125), and Jinn of Jurchen(女真の金：1115-1234) managed to govern large tribal empires, but they lacked a sustainable economic base and a viable system of government of their own. Therefore, as if so many shooting stars in the darkness of the sky, all of them disappeared from the history of the East Eurasian continent.
[3] The northern tribes' heritage in Japan’s post-Meiji foreign policy and the distinct characteristics of its Westernization
The modern diplomatic history of Japan began with the contact with the unfamiliar cultures of the Western powers. The Samurai Japan’s diplomatic posture was to adopt whatever element of the Western civilization as long as it made pragmatic sense from the Japanese standpoint. Thus, Meiji Japan was more than willing to “Westernize” itself on the surface, functionally and materially so as to make Japan look like an equal to the Western powers as quickly as possible by hiring a large number of advisors and consulting administrators form the West, but opted not to incorporate the cultural and religious underpinnings that supported the Western civilization.
This attitude harkens back to the times of the northern tribes' conquest and empire building in northern China by the nomads such as Xiongnu (匈奴). They did not hesitate to use foreign advisors and administrators for governing their empires. Meiji Japan’s policy of “Exit Asia and enter the West (脱亜入欧)” was just another, if modern, example of this northern tribes’ behavioral pattern.
In short, one thing both Japan and those northern empires shared in common was that they did not care much about the values underpinning the civilizations of their superior neighbors when selectively borrowing their institutions and technologies. In other words, they adopted whatever they considered desirable in a way that might be called “cultural relativization. ”This author calls this a pragmatic shamanism. It is indeed the most obvious common trait of the northern tribal cultures, if most prominently of the horse-riding nomads.
While Japan, which opted to keep the northern tribal cultural heritage intact even after the Meiji period, continued to be a constitutional monarchy built upon the northern tribal tradition of considering the Emperor as the living ruler as well as the heavenly god on earth, the young Meiji reformists, mostly from the rank of lower echelons of Samurai class, steadfastly maintained this pragmatic attitude to move on with Westernization wearing Western suits and discarding their Samurai swords.
This act of "relativizing" the values of the imported cultures and institutions, dates back to the wholesale imitation of the Tang culture during the Nara period, and continued on with the incorporation of the Dutch learning (蘭学) selectively in the field of natural science during the Tokugawa period, all the way down to the Meiji Japan’s all-out Westernization. It happened again after World War II when Japan adopted the American political and cultural institutions. Throughout the process, the same key word “value relativization” prevailed.
[4] Historical characteristics of Japan’s Imperialism and the invasions in East Asia
Given the international environment of the late 19th century where the Western Imperialist powers were accelerating their acts of encroachment upon East Asia, Japan quickly moved to take steps to protect itself from falling into the fate of Qing China. Japan annexed Korea and moved into "Manchuria" with an aim to acquiring exclusive rights in northeastern Asia, the historical homeland of the northern tribes, as a new rising Imperialist power in competition with the Western rivals.
After having won the two important wars for its own survival, the Sino-Japanese War of1894 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, Japan, with the Korean peninsula fully under its control, Japan moved on to further expand its continental foothold. At this time, though acting as an equal of the Western Imperialist states, but the most significant aspect of the Japanese Imperialism was that it was motivated by the northern tribal ideology and behavioral pattern, and not by those of the West to the dismay of the Western observers.
As it is evident in the case of the Li Dynasty Korea, Japan forced the Koreans to accept its own Shinto religion and political culture including the shamanistic rituals and warship of the Shinto god, and established the puppet Manchu Empire by bringing the abdicated Qing Emperor Aishin Kakura Fugi (愛新覚羅溥儀=宣統帝） back into the throne. Using this Manchurian regime, Japan, under the sway of the Kanto Army (関東軍), built a firm continental foothold for the invasion of China.
Critically important in all this was the fact that there arose in Japan a new national political movement ignited by the hotly debated issue of 1935 regarding the political role of the Emperor soon after Japan made the fatal move in Manchuria by what was then called the “Manchurian Incident (満州事変).” It was called “Clear National Identity (国体明徴)” movement, and was used to justify Japan’s subsequent Imperialist expansion by calling it a “Holy War (聖戦)” executed in the name of the Emperor who is a “human being, and at once the God,”a typically northern tribal ideology used to justify Japan’s invasion of the Eurasian continent as an act of realizing the will of the God to bring the entire world under one roof （八紘一宇） Thus, for the Japanese, it superseded the norms of the international law of the Imperialist Era.
The Japanese Imperialist ideology thus defined was more than likely to look like an act of unacceptable violation of the prevailing international norms from the viewpoint of the Western Imperialist states, which championed the slogan of bringing the blessings of the Christian civilization, even if by force, to the peoples of the "less civilized," parts of the world. Obviously, Japan in those days was unaware of the impending “clash of civilizations” between East and West surrounding Japan's continental Imperialist expansion.
The Japanese army called Kantogun (関東軍=KanTong Army) stationed in "Manchuria" during the 1930s was indeed a Samurai garrison made up of the foot soldiers recruited from the farming families throughout Japan under the young commanding officers on horse back with Samurai swords on their waists. This in fact was a modern version of the typical Samurai fighting corps led by a cavalry followed by an army of Ashigaru (足軽=foot soldiers) recruited from the local farming families during the several centuries of the feudal era of warring Samurais.
The so-called “Northern Strategy” of the KanTong Army which was then in full charge of the South Manchurian railroads was an unmistakable manifestation of Japan’s subconscious desire to build a new empire on the continent. And, after the tragic 5.15 Incident in which Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai and the peace proponents around him fell to the bullets of the revolting army officers, the KangTong Army, aided by a strong rightwing populist movement in Japan, gained a free hand to move on with its plan of military invasion of China.
[5] Impact of the tribal cultural values on Japan’s Imperialism
Japan's compound shamanistic culture of the “Country of Gods (神の国)” has produced, because of its unusual degree of tolerance to divergent, and often mutually conflicting values of foreign cultures, a remarkable life style evolved in the post-World War II Japan, in which people hold wedding ceremonies in Christian churches, plan funerals at Buddhist temples, pray before family tombs at the annual Festival of the Dead during late summer, and visit Shinto shrines on the first day of the new year. This degree of tolerance, or what appears to be a fuzzy world of relativity. or an inexcusable mixture of mutually conflicting values is, to say the least, difficult for most foreigners to understand.
However, this shows beyond reasonable doubt the reality that the northern tribal system of values, or the lack thereof, can coexist with the Western modern culture in the passive sense of the word so long as this "value relativization" can be ignored. When Japan, during the course of modernization, or Westernization, developed its own version of Imperialism, it opted to make a similar approach by fusing the Western Imperialism with the religio-cultural values of their State Shinto religion.
What happened after World War II was no exception to this rule. This time around, the West tried to incorporate the ruggedly individualistic American institutions of democracy with special emphasis on freedom of individuals and human rights into the Japanese society through the forced reforms during the Occupation years. It seemed to work, and as a result, at the turn of the new century today, most Japanese are proud that Japan is the world’s second largest economy and widely recognized as a democracy subscribing to the values shared in common with the countries of the West. But, is there any clear evidence that this is not a repeat of the modernization of the Meiji and Taisho era?
Isn’t the northern tribes’ heritage within the Japanese culture, as discussed above, of “ralativizing” almost all imported foreign institutional values still at work in the post-World War II Japan? Isn't the northern tribes’ DNA which is still alive within the Japanese blood one day going to awaken again reacting to an external stimulus?
In fact, there seems to be an increasing number of stimuli today such as the problem of abduction of Japanese by North Korea, the Takeshima (Dok) Island territorial issue with South Korea, the Senkaku Island natural gas development issue with China, the Northern Island issue with Russia, and above all the disputes over the history and Yasukuni war shrine issues with both China and Korea. Where is the guarantee that orchestrating all these will not once again become a fatal stimulus?
During the Taisho and early Showa years, the left-wing theorists and ideologists such as Sanzo Nosaka and Eitaro Noro kept reminding the fellow Japanese that Japan still had regrettable “vestiges of feudalism” lagging behind the West in its “modernization effort” repudiating the imperfect nature of the Meiji era reforms..
Such self-inflicting sense of inferiority about their own history on the part of these leftist thinkers was one side of the history coin, of which the other side was the determined drive for change by the nationalist leaders of the Meiji Era such as Yukichi Fukuzawa whose ideology of “Exit Asia and Enter the West” was nothing but a reflection of the heritage of the northern tribes who feared and at once admired the civilization of the Middle Kingdom in ancient times.
Indeed, the Japanese historians since the Meiji Era have also been divided into two contending schools. Nationalists on the one side were influenced one way or another by the Shinto-based view of history often called “Imperial View of History (皇国史観)”built on the state Shinto mythology of the Imperial Court, and the leftists on the other side blindly followed the Hegelian and Marxist view of evolutionary progress of human society, and lamented the absence of a Western-style individualistic civil society in modern Japan.
But, in today’s rapidly globalizing world, in which cultural pluralism and diversity of values are becoming the name of the game, the rigidly Hegelian view of history is fast becoming irrelevant. The history of Meiji Japan’s modernization is the earliest example, and now it is followed by the rise of Korea as a modern nation after World War II, and finally, China is rapidly modernizing itself as a “socialist market economy.” There is a crying need at this time in history for all of us to work together to write a new regional history of East Asia, and in so doing identify the new set of values we all can share in common
[6] Why the Japanese common sense often runs counter to that of the rest of the world
Different from the cases of the short-lived northern tribal kingdoms and empires, the northern tribal heritage and values continues to stay alive in Japan. Strangely, however, most Japanese today claim that Japan has become a “member of the West,” sharing the same values and institutions. But, in the meantime, most Japanese are unaware of the fact the Westerners still often call Japan a “Samurai” country and associate it with its own peculiar Asian cultural past. Every so often, Japan's economic expansion overseas is described in the leading Western magazines by cover illustration of armed Samurai worriers on their drive into the world market with a wagon loaded with cutting-edge electronic products.
There are many other examples like this pointing to the gap between Japan's own self-image and the image held by the outside world. For example, when Japanese businessmen go abroad, they are often asked questions such as “What is your religion?” Most Japanese are ill-prepared and, after an embarrassing silence, come up with a statement like “I don’t have a religion,” or “I go to the Buddhist temple where my ancestral tomb is....so, may be I am a Buddhist,” or something like that. All of this come to the Westerners as something of a shock because no one is uncertain about what one’s religion is in the West, and one without religion is more often taken by ordinary people as an atheist, or a communist at best.
Most Japanese in foreign countries seldom proclaim that their religion is Shinto Shamanism to the Westerners because it is regarded as a primitive religion of the distant past in the West. This endogenous shamanism called “Shinto (神道)“ in Japan began in prehistory and is still kept very much alive today, practiced at all levels of the nation’s life from the “Daijosai (大嘗祭)” as the Imperial family's rite in which the Emperor communicates with his ancestral gods through elaborate rituals, all the way down to the village shrine festivals and prayers across Japan.
In the post-World War II Japan, the conflicting issues arising from the coexistence of this shamanistic religio-cultural tradition and the modern norms of the Western civil society are becoming Japan’s serious concern with its relations more with the neighbors than the Western countries. There are two contending schools of thought in the current national debate on the “history text book” issues for instance. One is what might be called “Democracy and Peace Constitution School” and the other “Neo-conservative Traditionalism” desiring to bring back much from the good old days of Imperial Japan.
Thus, the values underpinning the new “Peace” constitution and the democratic institutions introduced in Japan during the Occupation years have once again been “relativized” in the process of their implementation. This was proven by the fact, for an example, that the seemingly serious ideological confrontation between the Liberal Democrats and the Socialists in the National Diet sessions after the major political party realignment of 1955 so often turned out to be nothing but a cleverly staged political show to hide the routinely repeated practice of behind-the-scene settlement by shocking compromise. Most other countries in the world remain unaware of this, and continue to regard Japan as Asia’s stronghold of peace and democracy.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Then, what really is the task we in Japan must address at this critical juncture in history? In the opinion of the present writer, we must surgically extract the essence of our deep-seated northern tribal sense of inferiority, first displayed by Price Shotoku in the 7th century in his letter to Emperor Wen Di of the Sui Empire: “The Emperor of the land of the rising sun hereby sends his message to the Emperor of the setting sun. Are you doing well?”
We ought to find the ways and means ourselves with which to overcome it and free ourselves from the spell of this inferiority complex. I am certain Japan shares this problem with Korea, which is another heir to the same northern tribal culture and tradition, and it will be in the best interest of Japan to work with Korea in a joint task force to organize the grand plan together.
Japan and Korea of today, both robust and stable economies, do not have any justification for continuing to suffer from this kind of negative subconscious. Japan must first find the way to deal with its tendency to “relativize” the values of other cultures. It continues to give Japan's neighbors a sense of apprehension that Japan many once again revert to the same old northern tribes' instinct. What should Japan do now, then?
Just pouring more money into ODA programs will certainly not be a solution, nor will trying to tackle the disputed territorial issues from narrowly nationalistic standpoint help solve the problem.
To the contrary, Japan ought to team with Korea to jointly address the task of reexamining the history of the northern tribes and their empire building in Northeast Asia with an aim to re-evaluate the history of this region dating back into the ancient times as it relates to East Asia as a whole, and in particular in our relations with China.
As pointed out before, the Tungusic speakers did not have their own writing system in those days, and therefore, left no documented history of their past outside what the Chinese recorded about their occasional contacts and observations. We must, therefore, organize a complex cross-disciplinary study program of not only history but also including linguistics, archaeology, ethnology, and a number of relevant natural science disciplines.
Given all these requirements, Japan ought to take the primary initiative in organizing and funding such joint international project. Japan, as one of the two primary successors of the northern tribal cultural tradition, must take the lion’s share of the financial as well as intellectual responsibilities.
Different from the Pacific shores washed by the Kuroshio (黒潮) warm current, often associated with the image of "floating coconuts under the bright sun," the Japan Sea shores’ history of ethnic migration from the continent via the Liman cold current is little known even in Japan. But it will not be until Japan will have discharged these responsibilities that the conclusive resolution of the “history” and “Yasukuni” issues will come within sight. Unless this is done, these thorny issues will remain where they have been for many years to come.
We, the Japanese, as the last and well-to-do descendent of the northern tribal states, do possess the historical responsibility to put a conclusive end to this history of hostile relationships with China as well as the modern-day inter-tribal frictions with the Koreans by publicly making a declaration to that effect.
While Japan's historical liabilities the northern tribes have toward China and Korea, cannot be redeemed merely by making “apologies for what Japan has done since the Meiji era,” deep in the mind of the Japanese will remain another lingering thought: “Then who will take the responsibilities for what the Western Imperialist powers did in Asia?” The idea of “forgetting the past and moving on together for a better future” will fall woefully short of achieving a real regional peace in East Asia.
The most important task today for Japan is to take the initiative in undertaking this historical review project. This will produce a new vision of East Asia, which will become a regionally shared cultural bond as well as the foundation for the economic integration of the region. For the Japanese, it will free them from the limitations of the conventional concept of national history by presenting an entirely new stage for the further integration of the diverse cultures of this region.
It will be only then that the three nations of East Asia, i.e., China, Korea and Japan, can reaffirm the common cultural bond and spiritual heritage, and develop a sustainable framework of collaboration. In order to make such effort really worthwhile and productive, however, we must together create a higher moral standard we can share together in the 21st century. The new values and the norms evolving from this will mark the beginning of a new era not only for East Asia, but also for all Asia. Asia then can productively address the yet unresolved more important historical issue of the consequences of Western Imperialism of the last two centuries.
End (First finished writing on January 5, 2006, Tracy, Calif. and then re-written on August 10, 2010, Hachioji, Tokyo)
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End (First finished writing on January 5, 2006, Tracy, Calif. and then re-written on August 10, 2010, Hachioji, Tokyo)
Copyright held by Okamoto International Affairs Research Institute : Readers may redistribute this article to other individuals for noncommercial use, provided that the text, all HTML codes, and this notice remain intact and unaltered in any way. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author.