Relevant Material

We’ll start off with some relevant material that will help with understanding some of what we are discussing as well as things that were mentioned in the podcast. We have two articles by our founder, Anthony J. Bryant, a lineage chart to keep track of who’s who, and then a map of the various kofun mentioned by Kishimoto as being in either they main or subsidiary line, showing their relative ages, which demonstrates the idea of at least two lines and their move away from the Makimuku region.

First, the two articles—though they are discussing Heian period architecture and attitudes, that is not necessarily when these concepts originated, and so I believe they are relevant to understanding our current situation.

Forced Affection: Rape as the first act of romance in Heian Japan
An article on common acts of so-called “romance” in the Heian period. Given similarities between those stories and the “romance” seen in the chronicles, it seems that the 7th and 8th century authors may have been working with similar cultural views.
Shinden-zukuri estates of the Heian Period
A description of the Heian period estates, which were the evolution of the earlier estates of the Nara and Asuka periods, which would have been familiar to our Chroniclers.

Next, we have a lineage chart (click on chart to see full size version). This is only showing those major characters relevant to our present story and doesn’t show all of the other relationships around them. It also shows assumed or conjectured instances where an individual in one source may be a different name for an individual in another.

We also have a chart showing the relative locations of various kofun in the Yamato basin. These are the kofun identified by Kishimoto Naofumi as listed in his article, “Dual Kingship in the Kofun Period as Seen from the Keyhole Tombs.” The lines are shown connecting subsequent tombs in their respective lineages. This is roughly from the 3td through 4th centuries.

Main Line:

Hashihaka (Himiko/Yamato Totohi Momoso Hime)
Nishitonozuka
Andon’yama (Mimaki Iribiko)
Hōraisan (Ikume Iribiko)
Gosashi (Okinaga Tarashi Hime)

Subsidiary line

Sakurai-Chausuyama
Mesuriyama
Shibutani-Mukaiyama (Ō Tarashi Hiko)
Saki-Misasagiyama (Hibasu Hime)
Saki-Ishizukayama (Waka Tarashi Hiko)

Podcast Summary

So this may get a bit spoilery, so if you decide to listen to the podcast, you may want to do that first.

Ready? Okay. So this episode we are still talking about the 12th sovereign, Ō Tarashi Hiko Oshiro Wake, aka Keikō Tennō. Only, rather than talk about his supposed military campaigns, we go into some of his more, shall we say, “romantic” episodes. And his behavior in these stories is what prompted the episode title because, well, “no means no” seems to have been a distant concept.

The first story in this episode is about the sovereign and Inami no Wake (or Waki) Iratsume. This story is only found in the Harima Fudoki. The basic gist of the story is that Ō Tarashi Hiko hears about the beauty of Inami no Wake Iratsume, in Harima. He travels to Harima to find her, but she runs away to an island. He and his escort, Okinaga, travel to the island and find her, and Ō Tarashi Hiko makes her his queen. He then settles down in Harima until and beyond her death—which seems to create some weirdness, given that the government was supposedly still in the Makimuku area at this point.

The next story, found in the Nihon Shoki, is about Oto Hime and her sister, Yasaka Hime. Similar to the first story, Ō Tarashi Hiko hears about the beauty of Oto Hime in the country of Mino. He travels to Mino to find her, but she runs away and hides. Ō Tarashi Hiko has a koi pond built to lure her out, and when she does he surprises her. In the end, though, she declines his offer of marriage and suggests he take her sister, Yasaka Iribime, instead. She is installed as Queen.

This does leave us with a bit of a conundrum, though, because there was a Queen before Yasaka Iribime, and that was Harima no Inabi no Ō Iratsume, the mother of Yamato Takeru, who was Queen until she died, shortly after Yamato Takeru (according to the Chronicles). The fact that her name is suspiciously similar (and “Harima no” meaning “Of Harima”) has led various people to assume that this is supposed to be the same person, but then the timelines really get messed up.

Add to that the fact that in the Harima Fudoki, Inami no Wake Iratsume is descended from a man sent by the “Prince of the Taka Anaho Palace in Shiga”, a name usually reserved for Waka Tarashi Hiko, aka Seimu, Ō Tarashi Hiko’s son and successor, then we’ve really entered some kind of weird time loop.

And speaking of our thirteenth sovereign, well, there isn’t much more to say about him. The Kojiki only gives him 4 lines—the most he gets in any chronicle is 21. And even then those lines are largely filled with continental style speeches about how great his father was and then some comments about making sure that all the titles were properly aligned. The only major thing he does of any import is to nominate his nephew, Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko, son of Yamato Takeru, as his successor. And yet he’s said to have lived to be 107 years old.

And so it looks like we may be seeing the seams where the Chroniclers were trying to patch up the various stories and royal lineages of different locations as a single, unbroken line. But they were probably working off of a lot of oral history which, even if it was written down, may not have been extremely reliable.

We also see what appears to be two “dynasties” of a sort. We have the “Iribiko” dynasty (with Mimaki and Ikume) and then the “Tarashi” dynasty (Ō Tarashi, Waka Tarashi, Tarashi Nakatsu, and Okinaga Tarashi). And with known “missing” rulers (Himiko and Toyo, for example) and an apparent subsidiary line that may have been active in concert with a main line of rulers, well, it is understandable why there is so much confusion around this time.

It does seem to be about the right timeframe, though, and I suspect that there was enough memory of at least the large, sweeping events that we can tie things somewhat together. For instance, in Ō Tarashi Hiko’s final three years he moves the palace to Taka Anaho, in Shiga—which is why Waka Tarashi Hiko, who would rule from there according to the Chronicles, is known as the Prince (or Sovereign) of that particular palace. Why he moves it is not made clear, and we don’t have a definite move of the Miwa polity up to the shores of Lake Biwa as that would suppose. What we do have, however, is the move away from Miwa and Makimuku as something seems to have caused the breakdown of whatever political authority there was. While the Chroniclers may not have wanted to admit to such a thing—or perhaps memory of it had been covered up long before they got to the sources—it does seem there was at least an acknowledgment of a move. Indeed, from the building of Saki-misasagiyama kofun to that of Gosashi kofun, it would seem that the locus of power had moved to the north of the Nara basin.

In the coming episodes we’ll take another look at what is going on in the archipelago and the peninsula and move on with our next couple of sovereigns—Tarashi Nakatsu Hiko and then Okinaga Tarashi Hime. Technically, Okinaga Tarashi Hime is only considered a “regent” by the patriarchally inclined Chroniclers, which is weird, considering all of the female rulers who were controlling the court in the 8th century, but we’ll count her among the “sovereigns” in our story because she certainly behaved like one.

References

Ō, Yasumaro, & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
KISHIMOTO, Naofumi (2013, May). Translated by Ryan, Joseph. Dual Kingship in the Kofun Period as Seen from the Keyhole Tombs. UrbanScope e-Journal of the Urban-Culture Research Center, OCU, Vol.4 (2013) 1-21. ISSN 2185-2889 http://urbanscope.lit.osaka-cu.ac.jp/journal/vol.004.html
Bentley, John. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: a New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. ISBN-90-04-152253
Aoki, Michiko Yamaguchi (1997). Harima Fudoki. Records of Wind and Earth: A Translation of Fudoki with Introduction and Commentaries. As published at https://jhti.berkeley.edu/texts19.htm
Chamberlain, B. H. (1981). The Kojiki: Records of ancient matters. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN4-8053-0794-3
Brazell, Karen (tr.) (1973). The Confessions of Lady Nijō. Stanford University Press. ISBN0-8047-0930-0.
Aston, W. G. (1972). Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times to A.D. 697. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN0-80480984-4
Philippi, D. L. (1968). Kojiki. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN4-13-087004-1