Yamatai


Yamatai-koku or Yamato-koku is the Sino-Japanese name of an ancient country in Wa during the late Yayoi period The Chinese text Records of the Three Kingdoms first recorded as Yamatai guo or Yemayi guo as the domain of Priest-Queen Himiko. Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated where Yamatai-koku was located and whether it was related to the later Yamato province.

History

Chinese texts

The oldest accounts of Yamatai are found in the official Chinese dynastic Twenty-Four Histories for the 1st- and 2nd-century Eastern Han dynasty, the 3rd-century Wei kingdom, and the 6th-century Sui dynasty.
The c. 297 AD Records of Wèi, which is part of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, first mentions the country Yamatai written as Yamaichi.
Most Wei Zhi commentators accept the Yémǎtái transcription in later texts and dismiss this original word yi "one" as a miscopy, or perhaps a naming taboo avoidance, of tai "platform; terrace." This history describes ancient Wa based upon detailed reports of 3rd-century Chinese envoys who traveled throughout the Japanese archipelago:
Going south by water for twenty days, one comes to the country of Toma, where the official is called mimi and his lieutenant, miminari. Here there are about fifty thousand households. Then going toward the south, one arrives at the country of Yamadai, where a Queen holds her court. takes ten days by water and one month by land. Among the officials there are the ikima and, next in rank, the mimasho; then the mimagushi, then the nakato. There are probably more than seventy thousands households.

The Wei Zhi also records that in 238 AD, Queen Himiko sent an envoy to the court of Wei emperor Cao Rui, who responded favorably:
We confer upon you, therefore, the title 'Queen of Wa Friendly to Wei', together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon. …As a special gift, we bestow upon you three pieces of blue brocade with interwoven characters, five pieces of tapestry with delicate floral designs, fifty lengths of white silk, eight taels of gold, two swords five feet long, one hundred bronze mirrors, and fifty catties each of jade and of red beads.

The ca. 432 CE Book of the Later Han says the Wa kings lived in the country of Yamatai :
The Wa dwell on mountainous islands southeast of Han in the middle of the ocean, forming more than one hundred communities. From the time of the overthrow of Chaoxian by Emperor Wu, nearly thirty of these communities have held intercourse with the Han court by envoys or scribes. Each community has its king, whose office is hereditary. The King of Great Wa resides in the country of Yamadai.

The Book of Sui, finished in 636 CE, records changing the capital's name from Yamadai to Yamato :
Wa is situated in the middle of the great ocean southeast of Baekje and Silla, three thousand li away by water and land. The people dwell on mountainous islands. …The capital is Yamato, known in the Wei history as Yamadai. The old records say that it is altogether twelve thousand li distant from the borders of Lelang and Daifang prefectures, and is situated east of Kuaiji and close to Dan'er.

Japanese texts

The first Japanese books were mainly written with the Man'yōgana system, a rebus-like transcription that phonetically uses kanji "Chinese characters" to represent Japanese phonemes. For instance, using Chinese jiā, which was pronounced ka in Japanese, to write the Japanese mora ka. Irregularities within this awkward system led Japanese scribes to develop phonetically regular syllabaries. In many cases, the new kana were graphic simplifications of Chinese characters. For instance, ka is written in hiragana and in katakana, both of which derive from the Man'yōgana 加 character.
The c. 712 Kojiki is the oldest extant book written in Japan. The "Birth of the Eight Islands" section phonetically transcribes Yamato as what would be in Modern Standard Chinese Yèmádēng. The Kojiki records the Shintoist creation myth that the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami gave birth to the Ōyashima of Japan, the last of which was Yamato:
Next they gave birth to Great-Yamato-the-Luxuriant-Island-of-the-Dragon-Fly, another name for which is Heavenly-August-Sky-Luxuriant-Dragon-Fly-Lord-Youth. The name of "Land-of-the-Eight-Great-Islands" therefore originated in these eight islands having been born first.

Chamberlain notes this poetic name "Island of the Dragon-fly" is associated with legendary Emperor Jimmu, who was honorifically named with Yamato as "Kamu-yamato Iware-biko."
The 720 Nihon Shoki also transcribes Yamato with the Chinese characters Yèmádēng. In this version of the Eight Great Islands myth, Yamato is born second instead of eighth:
Now when the time of birth arrived, first of all the island of Ahaji was reckoned as the placenta, and their minds took no pleasure in it. Therefore it received the name of Ahaji no Shima. Next there was produced the island of Oho-yamato no Toyo-aki-tsu-shima.

The translator Aston notes a literal meaning of "Rich-harvest -of-island".
The c. 600-759 Man'yōshū transcribes Yamato as yama 山 "mountain" plus tö 蹟 "footprint; track; trace". Take for example, the first poem in the book, allegedly written by Emperor Yūryaku:
O maiden with a basket, a pretty basket, with a scoop, a pretty scoop, maiden picking greens on this hillside: I want to ask about your house; I want to be told your name. In the sky-filling land of Yamato it is I who rule everyone it is I who rule everywhere, and so I think you will tell me where you live, what you are called.

Commentators gloss this 山蹟乃國 as Yamato no kuni 大和の国 "country of Yamato". The usual Japanese reading of 山蹟 would be sanseki in Sino-Japanese on'yomi or yama'ato in native kun'yomi.

Pronunciations

Modern Japanese Yamato descends from Old Japanese Yamatö or Yamato2, which has been associated with Yamatai. The latter umlaut or subscript diacritics distinguish two vocalic types within the proposed eight vowels of Nara period Old Japanese, which merged into the five Modern ones.
During the Kofun period when kanji were first used in Japan, Yamatö was written with the ateji 倭 for Wa "Japan". During the Asuka period when Japanese place names were standardized into two-character compounds, Yamato was changed to 大倭 with a prefix.
Following the ca. 757 graphic substitution of 和 for 倭, it was written 大和 "great harmony," using the Classical Chinese expression dàhé 大和
The early Japanese texts above give three transcriptions of Yamato: 夜麻登, 耶麻騰, and 山蹟. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki use Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings of ya "night" or ya or ja , ma or ba "hemp", and tō or to "rise; mount" or tō "fly; gallop". In contrast, the Man'yōshū uses Japanese kun'yomi readings of yama "mountain" and to < tö or ato "track; trace".
The early Chinese histories above give three transcriptions of Yamatai: 邪馬壹, 邪馬臺, and 邪摩堆. The first syllable is consistently written with yé "a place name", which was used as a jiajie graphic-loan character for yé "interrogative sentence-final particle" and xié 邪 "evil; depraved". The second is written with mǎ "horse" or mó "rub; friction". The third syllable of Yamatai is written yī or ichi "faithful, committed; financial form of, one", tái or "platform; terrace" or duī "pile; heap". Concerning the transcriptional difference between Yamaichi 邪馬壹 in the Wei Zhi and Yamadai or Yamatai 邪馬臺 in the Hou Han Shu, Hong cites that Yamaichi was correct. Chen Shou, author of the ca. 297 Wei Zhi, was writing about recent history based on personal observations; Fan Ye, author of the ca. 432 Hou Han Shu, was writing about earlier events based on written sources. Hong says the San Guo Zhi uses ichi 壹 86 times and dai 臺 56 times, without confusing them.
During the Wei period, dai was one of their most sacred words, implying a religious-political sanctuary or the emperor's palace. The characters ya 邪 and ma 馬 mean "nasty" and "horse", reflecting the contempt Chinese felt for a barbarian country, and it is most unlikely that Chen Shou would have used a sacred word after these two characters. It is equally unlikely that a copyist could have confused the characters, because in their old form they do not look nearly as similar as in their modern printed form. Yamadai was Fan Yeh’s creation.

He additionally cites Furuta that the Wei Zhi, Hou Han Shu, and Xin Tang Shu histories use at least 10 Chinese characters to transcribe Japanese to, but dai 臺 is not one of them.
In historical Chinese phonology, these Modern Chinese pronunciations differ considerably with the original 3rd-7th century transcriptions from a transitional period between Archaic or Old Chinese and Ancient or Middle Chinese. The table below contrasts Modern pronunciations with differing reconstructions of Early Middle Chinese, "Archaic" Chinese, and Middle Chinese. Note that Karlgren's "Archaic" is equivalent with "Middle" Chinese, and his "yod" palatal approximant is replaced with the customary j.
CharactersModern ChineseMiddle ChineseEarly Middle Chinese"Archaic" Chinese
邪馬臺yémǎtáiyæmæXdojjiamaɨ'dəjjama:t'ḁ̂i
邪摩堆yémóduīyæmatwojjiamatwəjjamuâtuḁ̂i
大和dàhédajHhwaHdajʰɣwaʰd'âiɣuâ

Roy Andrew Miller describes the phonological gap between these Middle Chinese reconstructions and the Old Japanese Yamatö.
The Wei chih account of the Wo people is chiefly concerned with a kingdom which it calls Yeh-ma-t'ai, Middle Chinese i̯a-ma-t'ḁ̂i, which inevitably seems to be a transcription of some early linguistic form allied with the word Yamato. The phonology of this identification raises problems which after generations of study have yet to be settled. The final -ḁ̂i of the Middle Chinese form seems to be a transcription of some early form not otherwise recorded for the final -ö of Yamato.

While most scholars interpret 邪馬臺 as a transcription of pre-Old Japanese yamatai, Miyake cites Alexander Vovin that Late Old Chinese ʑa maaʳq dhəə 邪馬臺 represents a pre-Old Japanese form of Old Japanese yamato2. Tōdō Akiyasu reconstructs two pronunciations for 䑓 – dai < Middle dǝi < Old *dǝg and yi < yiei < *d̥iǝg – and reads 邪馬臺 as Yamaikoku.
The etymology of Yamato, like those of many Japanese words, remains uncertain. While scholars generally agree that Yama- signifies Japan's numerous yama 山 "mountains", they disagree whether -to < -tö signifies 跡 "track; trace", 門 "gate; door", 戸 "door", 都 "city; capital", or perhaps tokoro 所 "place".

Location

The location of Yamatai-koku is one of the most contentious topics in Japanese history. Generations of historians have debated "the Yamatai controversy" and have hypothesized numerous localities, some of which are fanciful like Okinawa. General consensus centers around two likely locations of Yamatai, either northern Kyūshū or Yamato Province in the Kinki region of central Honshū. Imamura describes the controversy.
The question of whether the Yamatai Kingdom was located in northern Kyushu or central Kinki prompted the greatest debate over the ancient history of Japan. This debate originated from a puzzling account of the itinerary from Korea to Yamatai in Wei-shu. The northern Kyushu theory doubts the description of distance and the central Kinki theory the direction. This has been a continuing debate over the past 200 years, involving not only professional historians, archeologists and ethnologists, but also many amateurs, and thousands of books and papers have been published.

The location of ancient Yamatai-koku and its relation with the subsequent Kofun-era Yamato polity remains uncertain. In 1989, archeologists discovered a giant Yayoi-era complex at the Yoshinogari site in Saga Prefecture, which was thought to be a possible candidate for the location of Yamatai. While some scholars, most notably Seijo University historian Takehiko Yoshida, interpret Yoshinogari as evidence for the Kyūshū Theory, many others support the Kinki Theory based on Yoshinogari clay vessels and the early development of Kofun.
The recent archeological discovery of a large stilt house suggests that Yamatai-koku was located near Makimuku in Sakurai, Nara.

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