From Korea to Kyoto— Korean Kingdoms and the founding of Kyoto

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Many aspects of Kyoto’s early history are coming into view of late, as scholars rework historical narratives that were first created during Japan’s pre-WWII era, when political objectives, such as its recent “annexation” of Korea encouraged a singular interpretation of Japan’s relationship to its surrounding nations. Japanese history and Kyoto’s role in this (and also of Kyoto’s history and “Japan’s” role in this) form pieces of the narrative that serves to position Koreans in the social space of today’s Kyoto. Much of this position is the result of Japan’s modern, colonial history. But Koreans in Kyoto are not ready to forget the long history that connects their city to the Peninsula.

Clans and claims

The early history of Japan is dominated by the presence of two connected types of dominant organizations: noble clans (uji) with their affiliated occupational-clans (be); and clan-deity/Buddhist shrine/temple institutions¹.

“The influence of Korea in this transmission of Chinese civilization to Japan has not yet received adequate attention among scholars...
Koreans and Chinese had migrated to Japan from at least the beginning of the fifth century. But during Silla’s rise to power the number of immigrants from the continent—especially refugees from Paekche and ²Koguryou—increased substantially, as we can tell from accounts of how they were given land and allowed to settle in different parts of the country”
(Varley 1984, 22).

Claims for the continental origins of Buddhist institutions are the most clearly documented. But the other institutions, the noble clans themselves (either their structure or their own clan histories, or both), and thus the clan deities as well, can also sometimes be traced to the Asian continent. And where this trace is obscure, this obscurity itself can no longer support a claim for aboriginal clan/institutional beginnings within Japan.

Some historians working on the history of resident Koreans in Kyoto tell another story of the early history of the archipelago. Because of its position downstream on the Yellow river from China, they remind their readers that Korea was influenced far earlier than Japan by Chinese culture, and so were in a more “advanced” technological state even from early pre-historic times (ZenChoKyouKyouto 1993, 108). During the final centuries of the Neolithic, Jomon, period of Japanese history, they note that:

“...many people used the oceans to travel to the Northern side of Kyushu and the San’in (Japan Sea) side of [what is now] Kyoto Prefecture.... These people, perhaps in groups of a dozen or so, would have come to Japan where it was warm and suitable for farming. They carried seed for foodstuffs, such as rice, tools for farming, and decorative goods for ceremonies. In various places [in Japan] they made paddy fields that used irrigation systems, and they increased the efficiency of their agriculture and their military with iron and bronze implements. This was the beginning of Yayoi culture” (ibid).

Contrast this account with that supplied by Tokyo University historian (now emeritus) Saitou Tadashi:

“The culture of the Yayoi period... is distinguished from the preceding Joumon culture by irrigated rice cultivation and the use of bronze and iron artifacts. There was considerable contact with China and Korea during this period, and it is supposed that these technological innovations, which spread northward from Kyuushuu, were made under continental stimuli...” (In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan 1983 edition).

This idea of some non-specific “stimuli,” rather than migration of peoples to Japan is also found in mainstream literature, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“In 108 BC the armies of the emperor Wu Ti occupied Manchuria and the northern part of the Korean peninsula, where they established Lo-lang and three other colonies. These colonies served as a base for a strong influx of Chinese culture into Korea, whence, in turn, it spread to Japan. The fact that Yayoi culture had iron implements from the outset, and bronze implements somewhat later, probably indicates borrowings from Han culture. ...
While these new cultural elements represent a migration to Japan from the Korean peninsula or China, the migration was not of a magnitude to change the character of the people who had inhabited the islands from Jomon times. Yayoi culture undoubtedly represents an admixture of new sanguineous elements, but it seems likely that the chief strain of proto-Japanese found throughout the country during the Jomon period was not disrupted but was carried over into later ages. Differences in Jomon and Yayoi skeletal remains can better be explained by nutritional than genetic reasons” Encyclopedia Britannica On-line, 1996).

Varly’s “diplomatic” account of the early Yayoi (300 bce-300 ce) also influenced by earlier Japanese sources, acknowledges the spread of wet-paddy agricultural technology from China to Japan, but then notes that this was, “transmitted almost simultaneously at this time to both southern Korea and western Japan” (1984, 4), a feat that begs some explanation.

It is, of course, possible for technology to spread without significant “sanguineous” admixing—thus preserving a homo-genetic (and -geneous) story of pre-historic Japan. However, this would presuppose some sort of active, and effective control over migration onto the archipelago at this early date—i.e., some method of acquiring the technology, while preventing those who hold this from moving in. Without evidence for this type of control, and with ample evidence for migration into Japan, and even of the active recruiting of cultural specialists from the Peninsula into early (Nara period—pre-ninth century C.E.) Japan, the above story becomes more difficult to accept. Instead we are faced with the task of uncovering a history of the migration of people, and not just of ideas. And, in fact, this history is now being explored.

Sansom (1958) is fairly generous in his description of the cultural impact of early immigrants from Korean and China. “Such people,” he noted, “entered Japan in large numbers, if we are to believe the native chronicles, which record the arrival of hundreds of households of ‘men of Ts’in’ and ‘men of Han’...” (ibid 38). He is talking about a later migration from around 400-700 CE, and he goes on to say:

“...by the sixth century they were firmly established and were without a doubt a most important, perhaps the most important, element in the composition of the Japanese people, if we exclude the mass of agricultural workers. Their contribution to the growth of civilized cultural life was indispensable, for whatever virtues the Japanese possessed, prior to the fifth century their leaders were very backward in comparison with the exponents of the great cultures of the Asian mainland” (ibid 39).

And so, there is an alternative picture of the early Japan that is rather different from that promulgated by Japanese scholars before WWII—or, indeed, by some Kyoto historians today.

“The founders of Yamato Wa must have been a group of military leaders from Paekche’s ruling families who crossed over the sea in search of the New World.... Archaeological evidence clearly indicates that conquest was an important element in the formation of Yamato Wa. The development of Yamato Wa should thus be seen as one part of the history of Paekche.”
(Hong 1994, 271)

The uneasiness of city leaders in Kyoto to acknowledge the presence of tens of thousands of “Koreans” in that city also extends to the millennia of immigration, trade, warfare and other contacts between Kyoto and the Korean Peninsula (the one exception being spectacles of the diplomatic entourages of the Choson Court to Japan, which are available on paintings, and which can also serve to support the importance of the Japanese Court).

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Resident-Korean historians in Kyoto recount the arrival of Korean clans in the Kansai area before and during the pre-Kyoto (pre-Heiankyo), Nara period (646-794). Various notable clan names have corresponding Korean names, usually from Paekche. And no clan was more notable, and more notably Korean than the Hata clan of Kyoto.

“The Hatas, for example, reclaimed the Yamashiro basin in Kyoto, which became a bountiful agricultural area through their abilities. Until then, local people lived near the three rivers and on the hillsides, but the Hatas and others from Korea made a dam to store water, and transformed the low marshy ground [of Yamashiro] into a rice field. The Hatas also constructed the Kadono river dam near Arashiyama [in Kyoto] and they maintained their religious heritage. Hata Noimiki established the Matsuo great shrine in Fushimi where he prayed for the rice harvest... and [he donated] the statue of the Miryoku Boddhisattva at Horyuuji, which has been declared Japanese National Treasure number one...” (ZenChoKyouKyouto 1993, 108).

“Apart from the Hatas, the Yasakas made the Yasaka Shrine to their patron saint, which became the foundation for the Gion area [of Kyoto] and the Komas at Nansan castle... received visitors from Korea by the fifth century. If we turn our eyes if little bit east, to Lake Biwa, we find first the Wani clan, and from this the Onon Nishikiori, Ootomo, Okinaga... etc., who descendents are still there”
(ZenChoKyouKyouto 1993, 108).

The Nara period was a time of active diplomacy and cultural borrowing between the Yamato courts and those on the Korean peninsula. The official support for Buddhism in this period increased the traffic in Buddhism-related artists and practitioners, and in associated literature and arts. At the same time, other clan/ancestor-deity related practices also maintained whatever historical connections they had with the Korean Peninsula, and it is likely that they also entered into new connections with contemporary counterpart institutions or the literature of these institutions on the Peninsula. (Here I am suggesting that there is little information to suggest that the Shinto stream of the religious practice was not somehow insulated from inputs external to the archipelago.)

The choice of (what is now) Kyoto as site of the new palace and its surrounding city (heiankyou) in the late 8th century is often described in terms of proper geomancy (the position of the surrounding mountains and the river Kamo). But the social positioning of this new imperial home³ also suggests that connections with local, already established clans that were linked to Paekche were perhaps another consideration (as was perhaps some distancing from the powerful Kasuga/Toudaiji shrine/temple institution in Nara).

“At its beginnings in the eighteenth century, kokugaku [the school of “national learning’] concentrated on locating an authentic experience which had been suppressed by contemporary conditions that could be found only in literary works produced in the native idiom. Kokugakusha [proponents] quickly recognized, however, that the representation of such experience in texts had been seriously compromised by the use of Chinese conventions and that it was necessary to resuscitate the native language, which was buried under alien and unnatural Chinese words, syntax, and sounds.”
(Hartoonian 1988, 35-36)

For the emerging political and economic institutions of the time in Heiankyou (Kyoto), including recently imported Buddhist institutions, were heavily influenced and sometimes directly dominated by older institutions on the mainland. The building of the new capital on a Chinese model is a good example of the pervasive “continentalizing” of aristocratic, social and cultural production in Heiankyou.

Here we can see that Kyoto’s early “multicultural” institutions were a part of a widespread traffic in cultural materials and skills, a traffic that was, early on, dominated by cultural production on and from the Asian continent. Centuries before “modernization” or “Westernization,” other-Asian influences decentred Japanese cultural institutions (for example, priests first had to go to abroad to be ordained).

¹With various elaborations, these lineage-based organizations dominated local Kyoto affairs (often with internal and many times violent conflicts) until the Meiji period, when the exodus of ruling families to the new capital of Tokyo (and consequent and subsequent political and social changes under Meiji and later governmental control) resulted in the acephalous political structure that remains today. When the Emperor Meiji departed, 130 years ago, the city’s population dropped by about a third. Today, Kyoto, like any other Japanese city, competes for central government attention and largess. This attention comes with bureaucratic involvement, including assigned personnel from Tokyo to oversee how funds are used. While other cities may also chafe under these conditions, in Kyoto the loss of centrality still remains a deeper sore point. The transformation of Japan from a lineage-based ruling class to a ministry/corporate-based upper class needs to be further explored.

²Paekche, Silla and Koguryou were rival states occupying territories on the Korean Peninsula at that time.

³The possibility of direct kinship between the clan on the throne in Nara in the Sixth century CE (and therefore, later in Kyoto) and royal lineages on the Korean Peninsula is a topic that is difficult to examine, in large part because the tombs of early rulers in the Yamato area have not been excavated, in large part, one might suspect, to avoid the likelihood that the Japanese Imperial lineage might prove to be a side-family of some early Korean royal clan.