The People of the North, Part 1

Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan

This is the first in a two part series on the people living to the Northeast of Yamato, in the areas of Tohoku and Hokkaido. They are called in the Chronicles, the Emishi and the Mishihase, and these designations appear to refer to areas that include the Epi-Jomon and later Satsumon cultures as well as members of the Okhotsk Sea Culture, all archaeological designations for various people whom we know primarily through their archaeological remains. We also discuss a bit about how all of this ties in (or doesn't) with the modern Ainu, and why we don't necessarily use that term until much later in the historical record.

For more, check out our podcast blog at: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-116

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua and this is episode 116: The People of the North, Part 1

A soldier stood watch on the Nutari Barrier. It was only a few years old—built to define and defend the boundaries between the lands under Yamato rule and the untamed wilds, beyond. Looking behind him, the soldier could see the smoke from the nearby settlement, also newly constructed, which would supply him and his fellow guards with food and clothing while they took their turn at the border.

Looking outwards, the soldier wondered what life beyond the barrier was like. He had seen people crossing through, mostly with various trade goods. For the most part, they didn’t seem all that different, but he had heard stories: stories of wild men and women who lived in caves and slept under the trees. They were hunters who knew the woods and could easily slip through areas that didn’t even have roads. As one traveled further north, things grew only more wild and untamed—or so the stories said. Giant bears with paws as large as a human head roamed the land—he’d seen a skin once and it was massive. The people of the north fought with them and, or so he’d heard, even kept them as pets.

Further, well beyond the pale, there were people who lived on the sea. They traveled between islands in the frozen north, and hunted the beasts of the ocean. They were few, but they were mighty people.

A chill went through the soldier’s spine. He’d only ever heard stories of most of these outsiders, and even then it was hard to tell what was truth and what was merely exaggeration. He had never actually gone out to see it himself, though he’d met some who claimed they had.

It gave him some sense of worth that he was out here, defending the settled, civilized lands of his people from the wild, ungoverned tribes beyond the border. That said, he hoped with all his heart that things remained peaceful. Yes, it would certainly be better that way for all involved.

We are just starting out the second reign of Takara Hime, which started in the year 655. For her first reign, the Chroniclers would give her the title of Kougyoku Tennou, but when she retook the throne they named her Saimei.

As we talked about in the last couple of episodes, there was a lot going on at this point, not just on the archipelago, but in the rest of Asia as well. We’ll summarize that briefly just to set the stage for the beginning of Takara Hime’s reign, but this episode we’re going to primarily focus on the expansion of Yamato authority throughout the rest of the archipelago, or at least the rest of Honshu. In this context, we’ll be talking extensively about the people that the Chronicles call the Emishi, since this section of the Chronicles contains numerous entries that give us our clearest look, to date, at who they were, at least from a Yamato perspective. We’ll also be looking at another group in the north, known to us as the Mishihase, for whom we have even less information.

As this whole episode got a bit long, we are going to be doing this in two parts. This episode, I’d like to introduce you to some of the terms, discuss some of the problems and considerations around these topics, and touch on what we know based largely on the archaeological record. In the second episode we’ll focus on the narrative as it appears in the Nihon Shoki, which hopefully will be something that makes more sense once we have that archaeological context. While there are certainly some things that appear to coincide between the two narratives, there are a lot of differences. Archaeology can help us understand the material culture, and give us some insights into the lifeways of a particular group of people, but it doesn’t let us know what they said, and rarely gives us information about a particular event.

Before we dive into this, I think it would be useful to touch on terms that we are going to be using this episode, and next. I mention this because while we are dealing with the past, our story of the past is very much affecting the lives of people in the present. Most specifically, the lives of the Ainu people of Hokkaido, and how their history and experience intertwines with the concept of the “Emishi” that we see in the Chronicles. So let’s explore these terms, and see where it takes us.

First, I should probably make a note about the difference between “Wa” and “Yamato”, at least as I’m using it in this episode. When I use “Wa” I’ll be referring to the ethnic group, while “Yamato” refers to the state. For the most part, as we are focused on the historical state forming in central Honshu, we’ll talk about Yamato, or the State of Yamato. That is a political entity that is majority Wa in its make-up, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t Wa people outside of the Yamato state, nor that Yamato was made up of only people who identified, ethnically as Wa. As we’ve seen, the Yamato state also included immigrants who identified as people of Baekje, Silla, Goguryeo, and even Emishi.

Next, the Emishi. The term “Emishi” is an exonym used by Yamato to describe those who are outside of Yamato’s borders and controls, especially up in Tohoku. By “exonym”, I mean that it’s a term imposed from outside – in this case, by Yamato – on the group of people known as the Emishi, because we really don’t know what they called themselves.

Moreover, the term “Emishi” is complex, and doesn’t necessarily describe a single, monolithic ethnic group or culture – more a group of possible ethnicities, that occupied a particular “slot” relative to Yamato cultural identity, namely that of outsiders. The Chronicles refer to several different geographic regions as “Emishi”, situated relative to the core of the Yamato polity -- but the archeological evidence is much more nuanced.

A prime example are the studies carried out on the “Emishi” mummies of the Oshu Fujiwara, a 12th century ruling elite who lived in Hiraizumi and who were considered “Emishi” by the court in Heian-kyo—modern Kyoto. In studying the mummies, it was determined that they were closely related to the Wa people of Japan and the Kinki region. This finding is important and I’ll come back to it in a bit, but the takeaway is that “Emishi” doesn’t automatically mean physical or cultural differences like we might assume. There were likely ethnic Wa Emishi, along with Emishi who were more closely connected with the indigenous people—descendants of the Jomon and possible ancestors to the later Ainu people.

Finally, the Ainu. It’s extremely likely that some of the people that the Chroniclers called “Emishi” may have been the ancestors of the Ainu people of today. But the correspondence is definitely not one-to-one, as some historians used to think. And since this is a sensitive topic with ongoing patterns of inequity and silenced voices, it’s important to lay some groundwork before going further. For my part, I would like to do my best to introduce the people and the history as we know it with as little bias as I can manage, but please realize that there are certainly controversies around this area and open wounds that have not yet healed.

The modern Ainu are the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kuril islands. They also once inhabited the very northern part of Tohoku. In their own language, Ainu Itak, these islands are part of Ainu Mosir, the Lands of the Ainu, and “Ainu” itself is simply a word for “humans” or “people”. While there are many cultural and linguistic ties to the Japanese—they have been neighbors for centuries—they are culturally distinct, and their language, Ainu Itak, is considered a linguistic isolate, with no known relatives outside of the Ainu homelands.

The relationship between the Ainu and the Wa people—the general term for ethnic Japanese—has been one of tension and conflict born of colonization. In the 19th century in particular, the nation of Japan claimed Hokkaido and began to settle it. The wide open spaces were great for new industries, such as cattle ranching, which could supply dairy and beef, two things that had come into vogue with other aspects of Western culture. I won’t get into the entire history of it, but the Japanese government used tactics similar to those used in the United States against indigenous populations, often forcing people to speak Japanese instead of their native language in a paternalistic attempt to quote-unquote “civilize” the Ainu people. Only relatively recently have the Ainu been accorded some protections in Japanese law.

For our part, the study of Ainu history has long been one conducted by outsiders looking in, which of course has come with all sorts of baggage. For instance, as I alluded to above, there has long been a tendency to equate the Ainu with the Emishi, which along with everything else cast the Ainu as somewhat less culturally evolved. Much of this study was also taking place during a time when Marxist concepts of societal evolution were in vogue. Add to that the generally patronizing and Colonialist concepts that were rampant in Western anthropology at the time—things like the stereotype of the “noble savage” and even the concept of “primitive” societies—and there were definitely some problematic concepts that continue to echo through into modern discussions.

Another complexity in understanding Ainu culture and history has been that the Ainu people do tend to be physically distinct from many other Japanese, which has been linked to outdated ideas about physical types and ethnicity. Many Ainu people show more tendency towards body and facial hair than mainland Japanese, with bushy beards being common among men, and blue eyes aren’t uncommon – which, combined with overall light skin, led to early identification of Ainu people as being of “Caucasian stock” according to outdated racial classifications. The theory was that they traveled from the west across Asia in the distant past and somehow settled in the islands north of Japan.

This ties into how much of the archaeological fervor of the 19th and 20th centuries in Japan was wrapped around ethno-nationalist ideals and looking to find the origins of the Japanese people, often using concepts of eugenics to seek out physical and cultural differences between the Japanese and “other” people, such as the Ainu, to help better define who are—and who are not—Japanese. For example, remember those Oshu Fujiwara mummies and how they were from a group described by the Chronicles as “Emishi” but ended up being more physically similar to modern Wa than modern Ainu? Some scholars took this finding to mean that all of the Emishi were Wa people, effectively denying any ancestral claims or links that Ainu people may have had to Honshu, other than those historically attested to from about the 15th century onwards. In similar ways, for each instance of some new “finding”, there have often been those who would use it as a further reason to discriminate against the Ainu.

There is a lot of important archaeological work that has been done in Tohoku and elsewhere to help shed more light on the people living in areas that the Chronicles associate with the Emishi and beyond. But while archaeological digs in places like Honshu and Kyushu were often done with great public support, archaeological work in places like Hokkaido often involved investigating burials of potential ancestors without consent, and even today there is some contention over how various artifacts were acquired. As with too many places in the world, the data was not always gathered under what we may consider, today, the strictest of ethical standards. So as important as the archeological perspective is – at least we are going off of physical items that we find rather than on the narrative imposed on the region by those in Yamato – it’s important to keep that context in mind.

Even recent attempts to better contextualize Ainu history at places like the Upopoy National Museum in Shiraoi, while apparently doing their best to provide that context, are still hampered by the weight of previous missteps in the relationship between the Ainu and the government. Activists have noted that even Upopoy, the first such national museum devoted to the Ainu themselves, is still built on colonialist policies and artifacts and human remains acquired without all of the necessary consent and consultation with local Ainu. Upopoy, for its part, appears to have reached out to those willing to work with them, and for all that there may be some controversy, it certainly has a lot of information for those interested in it.

So, given these caveats, what does the archeological record tell us about the wide range of people and areas called “Emishi” by the Chronicles, including both those areas closer to the Yamato heartland, and the areas we know today as Ainu Mosir?

To understand the patterns of settlement and cultural trends that we see up north – in Tohoku and Hokkaido --let’s go back to the end of the Jomon period and the very start of the Yayoi. As wet rice paddy cultivation (and accompanying pottery styles and other material goods) began to make its way into the archipelago, up through about the Kinki region—the original land of Yamato, or Yamateg—it was brought by a people that seem quite strongly connected to other people in east Asia, and these people largely replaced the indigenous Jomon era populations in western Japan. However, the new material culture traveled faster and farther than the new people themselves, and it appears that in eastern Honshu, at least, much of the new farming technology, pottery, and other lifeways of the Yayoi culture were adopted by people that appear to share a great deal in common, physically, with the previous Jomon populations, suggesting that local populations were, themselves, adopting the new technology and being absorbed into the Yayoi culture.

This expansion of Yayoi culture and rice farming initially exploded all the way up to the very northern edge of Tohoku, but over time it started to decline in the northernmost regions. Whether due to a change in the climate or simply the fact that the colder, snowier regions in Tohoku were not as hospitable to farming, we see that rice cultivation fell into disuse, and people seem to have once again picked up the lifeways of their ancestors in the region, returning to a more hunter-gatherer style of subsistence. Indeed, in northern Tohoku and Hokkaido we see the continued evolution of Jomon culture in a phase that is generally known as the Epi-Jomon, or, in Japanese, the Zoku-Jomon period, which generally lasted through the end of the 7th century.

This Epi-Jomon or Zoku-Jomon cultural region lay far outside the “official” Yamato borders according to the Chroniclers in an area considered to be part of “Michinoku” – literally past the end of the road – so it’s understandably commonly associated with the Emishi. But once again, it’s not that simple, because we do see Yayoi and Kofun culture extending up into this region. In fact, there are even keyhole shaped kofun up in Tohoku, the largest of these being Raijinyama kofun, thought to have been built between the late 4th and early 5th centuries. It sits south of modern Sendai, and there are numerous other tombs there as well, suggesting it was well connected to Yamato and the kofun culture of central Honshu.

Another complication is that we have regions officially designated Emishi that were much closer in – on the borders of Yamato itself. Based on simply the written record, it would seem that “Emishi” resided as close to Yamato as the lands of Koshi and the land of Hitachi, at the very least. The Emishi in Koshi are mentioned several times in the Chronicles, and both the Nihon Shoki and works like the Hitachi Fudoki mention Emishi or people who are at least outside of the Yamato cultural sphere. This area bordering Yamato seems to have been the most affected by kofun and even Yamato culture, and also would have likely come into the most direct conflict with Yamato itself. It is also the area most likely to include those who, for one reason or another, decided to yet themselves outside the growing reach of the Yamato state, a pattern that would continue for centuries to come.

On top of that, there is something else going on in northern Hokkaido, where, starting around the 5th century, we see different archeological assemblages from the south, indicating further cultural distinctiveness from the Tohoku and southern Hokkaido inhabitants. These are mostly found on the coast in the northern part of Hokkaido, and match closely with the culture we see first in the Sakhalin island, and later the Kurils, along the edges of the Okhotsk Sea. Hence the name we’ve given to this unknown culture: The Okhotsk Sea Culture, or just the Okhotsk culture.

From what we can glean, the people of the Okhotsk culture subsisted largely off the hunting of marine mammals, such as seals, sea lions, sea cows, and whales. In contrast, the Epi-Jomon people appear to have subsisted more on inland hunting strategies, along with coastal fishing, which is represented in their settlement patterns, among other things. This latter description likewise tracks with descriptions of the Emishi as subsisting largely off of hunted game.

It is unclear what exactly happened to the Okhotsk Sea Culture, but they appear to be one of the ancestral groups of the modern Nivkh people, on the northern part of Sakhalin and the lower Amur River and coastal regions, though the Okhotsk Sea Culture also seems to have had a large influence on the development of the people known today as the Ainu. Modern DNA testing of Ainu demonstrate connections both with the earlier Jomon people of Japan—a connection that is much stronger than in most Japanese—but also with people from the Okhotsk Sea region. Still, how and in what ways those people came together is not clear.

The connection to the Jomon and Epi-Jomon people appears to be strengthened by the fact that throughout Tohoku there are placenames that appear to be more closely related to the Ainu language than to Japanese. For example, in Ainu itak, terms like “nai” and “pet” refer to rivers and streams, and we find a lot of placenames ending with “nai”, “be”, or “betsu”. These are often written with kanji that would be understandable to Japanese speakers, but the prevalence and location of these names often make people think that they are likely related to Ainu itak, in some way—possibly a proto-Ainuic language or dialect that is now lost.

While I can’t discount the fact that some this could be due to false etymologies, we can add to it the fact that the term “Emishi” was eventually changed to “Ezo”, which itself came to be used primarily for Hokkaido and the people there, including the people we know of today as the Ainu. However, it isn’t clear that the term Emishi, or even “Ezo”, was consistently applied to only one group, and its usage may have changed over time, simply being used in each period to refer to the people of the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions outside of the control of the Japanese court.

Another aspect of the archaeological record is the change in the Epi-Jomon culture to what we know as the Satsumon culture around the time of our narrative. Satsumon, like Jomon, is derived from the distinctive pottery styles found. “Jomon” means “cord-marked”, referring to the use of pressed cords and similar decoration on the pottery, and starting in the 7th century we see a new style using wood to scrape designs, instead. Thus the term “Satsumon”. It first pops up in Honshu, but by the 9th century it had spread to Hokkaido and eventually even spread to areas associated with the Okhotsk Sea Culture. It would last until roughly the 13th century, when it was replaced by a culture that is more clearly related to the modern Ainu people.

But the Satsumon culture wasn’t just new types of pottery. We see more ironwork appearing in the Satsumon culture, as well as the cultivation of millet and other types of agriculture. Tohoku and Hokkaido were still a bit cold for the ancient forms of wet rice agriculture that were prevalent in more southern regions, and millet and other crops likely fit more easily into the lifeways of the people in these areas.

Likewise, by the 8th century, we also see a new type of stove appearing in Satsumon villages. This “kamado” seems clearly related to the type of stove that came over to Honshu from the Korean peninsula around the 5th century, reaching Hokkaido by the 8th, and eventually finding purchase on Sakhalin by the 11th, demonstrating a slow yet continuous adoption.

Some of these changes might be explained by greater contact with Wa people and the trade networks that extended through Honshu and over to the mainland, but there were also trade routes through Sakhalin island over to the Amur River delta and beyond that should not be overlooked, even if they weren’t as prevalent in the written histories of the time.

I previously mentioned that in the next episode, we’ll dive into more of what the Chronicles have to say about the Emishi, but to give a preview, the Chronicles have already mentioned the Emishi several times as trading and treating with the Yamato state. Back in the era before the Isshi Incident, Naka no Oe’s coup in 645, Soga no Emishi himself had dealings with the Emishi of the land of Koshi, which we covered in episode 107. Then, in the previous reign, Emishi had attended court, but the court had also erected barriers and barrier towns in Nutari and Ihabune in 647 and 648 to protect the border areas from purported raids by the Emishi. Hence the episode opener, imagining what it might be like for a soldier at one of these barrier towns.

But, there is also another people that we’ve already talked about, mentioned in the Chronicles: The Sushen people, also glossed as either the Mishihase or Ashihase people. In the Nihon Shoki, they first appeared in an entry in the reign of Kimmei Tennou, when a group of them came ashore on Sado island, which we discussed back in episode 86. In this period, however, the appear to be referencing a people who were living in the north of Hokkaido, and who were putting pressure on the people to their south, much as Yamato was putting pressure on the people to their northeast.

The Sinitic characters, or kanji, used to name them in the Nihon Shoki uses a term from mainland writings for the Sushen people. This name is first given to people mentioned in early Warring States documents, such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, as living on the Shandong peninsula. Eventually, however, as empires expanded, the term was used to refer to people along the Amur river region and the coast, in modern China and Russia—the eastern areas of what we know as “Manchuria”. These were probably not the same people originally referred to as living in Shandong, and instead seems to apply to the Yilou people, and likely also is cognate with the later term “Jurchen”.

In the ancient Sinic documents, the Sushen are described as hunter-gatherers who live in the open, using caves and other such natural features for temporary shelter. They hunted with bows and arrows, which were tipped with stone arrowheads. To the settled cultures of the Yellow River basin, they were considered a primitive and barbaric people.

As for the people mentioned in the Nihon Shoki, it is quite likely that the term “Sushen” was used differently. Rather than referring to Jurchen people, or someone from mainland northeast Asia, it is thought that the characters were used because of the similar role played by the people of northern Hokkaido and Sakhalin island—and possibly because of connection with the Amur river region, including the area referred to in older documents as “Su-shen”. Still, the people referred to in the Nihon Shoki were probably what we know as the Okhotsk Sea culture, especially based on what we know from later descriptions. From Yamato’s point of view, they were likewise living in the extreme northeast and they were a hunter-gatherer society that used stone arrowheads in their hunting. The fact that it is glossed as either Mishihase or Ashihase by later commentators suggests that this was the name by which the Yamato knew these people, and the kanji were just borrowed for their meaning of a people in the northeast.

And so in the 7th century we have both the Emishi and the Mishihase, at least in the northeast. There are also the Hayato, another group of people in the southern reaches of Tsukushi. We are told that they and the Emishi both attended the court in 655 in great numbers. Discussion of who the Hayato were is probably best left for another episode. Suffice it to say that they appear to be culturally distinct from the groups in the northeast, at least at this point.

And that’s where we are going to pause things for now. The archaeological record gives us some idea of the people inhabiting the areas of Tohoku and up to Hokkaido, but it only tells part of the story—and it is a story that we are continuing to uncover. Even today people are working on archaeological sites that just may turn up new information that will change how we see things.

Next episode, we’ll dive into the narrative of the Nihon Shoki and take a look at the actions of individuals—especially the actions of Abe no Hirafu, a key player in what was to happen in the north.

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And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.