Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan by Saeki Arikiyo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan by Saeki Arikiyo John R. Bentley (bio) Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan. By Saeki Arikiyo; translated by Joshua A. Fogel. MerwinAsia, Portland ME, 2018. x, 420 pages. $55.00, cloth; $32.00 paper. Imagine students in a history class at a high school on the North American continent in the year 3719 CE. They are reading an ancient record about an emissary from an ancient country called France journeying to a loose federation that was once known as the United States of America. This emissary's record states, Ambassador Bernard and his group depart from a port called O'Hare in a settlement known as Chicago; they travel north 75 miles and arrive at a place called Milwaukee. The ruler there is a chieftain called Barrett. The emissary and his group bend their journey west, heading 35 miles, arriving at a cultural center called Oconomowoc. A minor chieftain called Mayor resides here. Traveling another 60 miles west the ambassador and his party reach a lake called Madison. This locale is famous for cheese. Reading this account, the students learn about their early ancestors who lived in a territory called Wisconsin. Perhaps unwittingly, several questionable assumptions are made based on this surviving text. The most tenuous assumption is that these linguistic fragments represent an early form of their modern (English) language. After roughly 1,700 years, the knowledge that these six place names represent five different languages, only one of which is English, would have been primarily lost. Chicago, Milwaukee, and Oconomowoc are actually from two different native Amerind languages (Miami and Potawatomi). Little is known about the inhabitants of the Japanese islands around the third and fourth centuries. During the first 250 years CE, emissaries from Eastern Han and Cao Wei China or from the commanderies on the Korean peninsula traveled the peninsula then crossed the Tsushima Straits to Kyushu and into parts of Honshu, recording the titles, toponyms, and cultural artefacts of the people they observed. Depending on the locale, the Chinese referred to these non-Chinese peoples by specific labels, such as "Han (韓)" or "Wa (倭)." The label "Wa" survived into the Yamato dynasty [End Page 444] in early Japan, so modern readers and scholars find it difficult to resist the temptation to connect the Wa with the ancestors of the Japanese. While the connection is logical, this assumption is still not scientifically proven. These archival accounts of the Wa were compiled in varying degrees of detail in Hou Hanshu (fifth century), Wei lüe (circa 260, lost), and Wei zhi (circa 284). The common reaction in modern Japan is to view the accounts in these records as describing the people and culture of early Japan. Wa titles and toponyms in Wei zhi are often interpreted as being Japanese linguistic forms that are then uncritically mapped on to surviving titles and toponyms, but this exercise tends toward obfuscation instead of elucidation. It is easy to forget that we really do not know much about the Wa who lived 1,700 years ago, so these data in Wei zhi need to be used with great care. Saeki Arikiyo's important two-volume work, Gishi wajinden o yomu (rendered by Joshua Fogel as "Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei"), starts by amassing a large amount of documentary evidence to demonstrate that the account in Wei zhi should be taken seriously and not swept aside as wholly unreliable. Having said that, it is still prudent to be cautious as we approach this text and what it can (or cannot) tell us about the early inhabitants of the Japanese islands. Saeki's important contribution is to help the reader process the information in Wei zhi as accurately as possible. Saeki goes through the 2,000-character account of the Wa piece by piece. He does this by combing through the considerable amount of Chinese texts that have accrued over time, picking up examples of...