The Yamato People

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In the third decade of the eighth century, scribes at a court in the Nara basin set down in writing what had until then lived in the mouths of reciters: a single descending line that ran from the birth of the islands, through the gods of heaven and the gods of the land, to the reigning house in whose service they wrote. The work they finished in 712 and the longer one finished in 720 were not the records of a curious antiquarian. They were a charter. They named the people of the central plain as the bearers of a throne descended from the sun, and they fixed, in characters that could no longer drift, who in the islands stood at the meeting point of heaven and earth.

The Yamato are that people: the majority population of the central Japanese realm and the human matrix of its imperial line. The name belongs first to the old heartland — the plain south of the mountains that ring modern Nara, where from roughly the third to the sixth centuries a confederation of clans coalesced under a paramount house in the age of the great keyhole tomb-mounds (see Yamato for the early state itself). From that basin the polity took its name, and from the polity the people took theirs. As an ethnic term, Yamato is itself a modern coinage: it came into use in the later nineteenth century to mark the inhabitants of the main islands off from the Ainu of the north and the Ryukyuans of the southern arc — to name a majority by setting it beside the peoples it did not include. What binds the Yamato as a people, in the account the tradition gives of itself, is the worship of the kami and a descent that makes the kami the ancestors of the throne.

Genealogy: the plain, the mounds, and the line from the sun

The deep past of the Yamato is the deep past of the central state. In the flat basin at the foot of Mount Miwa, settlements drew together, and at their edge rose the first of the colossal tombs — the kofun, mounded burial chambers, the greatest of them shaped like a keyhole: a round chamber joined to a long triangular forecourt, raised on a scale that demanded the coordinated labor of thousands. The largest, the Daisen mound near Sakai, runs close to half a kilometer in length. Its scale is not decorative. A grave of that size is a statement of command, the living shape of a will that could move the islands. The kofun-builders are the ancestors the imperial house claims as its own; the cluster of the greatest mounds at Mozu and Furuichi was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as the material trace of that ancient power.

The earliest outside notice of the people comes not from their own pens but from across the sea. Third-century Chinese histories describe the land of Wa — the islands — as a quilt of small countries, and tell of a paramount, the priestess- queen Himiko, who ruled by rites and sent envoys to the Wei court. The picture they give is of a people not yet a single nation: many clans, many shrines, a ritual authority gathering them loosely toward a center. It is from that loose gathering, over the kofun centuries, that the central house drew the federation into one realm and one descent — and it is the gap between that quilt of clans and the seamless line of the chronicles that marks how much the eighth-century record was a work of construction.

Daisen-kofun (Daisenryō Kofun), the largest of the keyhole-shaped imperial tomb-mounds, near Sakai. Aerial photograph, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (National Land Image Information), 1985 — CC BY (attribution).

The genealogy the chronicles record is not the genealogy of the spade. It is a sacred descent. In the account set down in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, the sun-goddess Amaterasu — Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the great kami who illumines heaven — sends her grandson Ninigi down from the high plain of heaven to rule the land below, the Central Land of the Reed Plains. He carries with him three treasures she bestows: the mirror Yata-no-Kagami, the sword Kusanagi, and the curved jewel Yasakani-no-Magatama — the sanshu no jingi, the three sacred regalia, valor and wisdom and benevolence made into objects that can be handed down. Ninigi’s great-grandson, Jimmu, the chronicles name as the first emperor, seated by their reckoning in 660 BCE; from him the treasures pass through every emperor since, the visible proof that the one who holds them holds heaven’s descent.

Here the registers must be kept apart, for the chronicles do not keep them apart. That the kofun were built and that a paramount house arose on the Nara plain belongs to the record of the spade and the Chinese annals. That the line runs unbroken from the sun is the tradition’s account of itself — a charter of rule, compiled at court to legitimize the house that commissioned it, not a neutral history. The figure of Jimmu, and the founding date of 660 BCE, belong to that charter and not to the documented past; the historicity of the first nine or ten reigns is contested by scholars and unsupported outside the chronicles. The two books did precisely what such a record is built to do: they gathered the scattered myths of many clans into one descending line and set the imperial house at its end, so that to tell the origin of the world was to arrive at the reigning emperor. Inside the frame, the descent is true and the sun-goddess is the ancestress of the throne. In the documentary record, the descent is a claim, and a powerful one — a thing made, at a known time, for a known purpose.

The kami as the binding tissue of a people

The Yamato did not begin as one people who happened to share a creed. They began as a federation of uji — clans, lineage groups bound by blood and by a common ancestral kami. Each uji had its ujigami: the tutelary kami from whom the clan reckoned its descent and to whom it owed its rites. The Nakatomi, the Mononobe, the Imbe, the powerful Soga — each tended its own divine ancestor, and the standing of a clan in the realm was woven into the standing of its kami. The order of the human world and the order of the gods were a single fabric.

What made the central house paramount was that its ujigami was the highest. The ruling clan of the Yamato plain claimed Amaterasu, the sun herself, as its ancestral kami — and once the chief of that clan became the paramount of the confederation, his clan-deity became the deity of the realm. The worship of the sun-goddess and the legitimacy of the throne were thus not two things that reinforced each other. They were one thing. To honor the imperial ancestress was to honor the imperial house; to question the descent was to touch the sacred. This is the sense in which the kami-cult is the matrix of the people: not a doctrine the Yamato held, but the relation of clan to ancestor-kami, generalized upward until the highest ancestor-kami was the goddess of the sun and her living descendant sat on the throne.

The shrine that holds this at its center is the Grand Shrine at Ise (see Ise Grand Shrine), the dwelling of Amaterasu and the home of her mirror — the Yata-no-Kagami, said to be the very treasure she gave to Ninigi, kept there as the goddess’s own emblem and seen by no one. Ise is rebuilt entire, on an adjacent site, once every twenty years in the shikinen sengū — the rite of periodic renewal, a cycle the tradition reckons back to the late seventh century — so that the dwelling of the imperial ancestress is forever new and forever the same. The shrine is the imperial cult made architecture, the sun-goddess kept close at the heart of her people’s land.

Amaterasu emerging from the heavenly rock-cave (Ama-no-Iwato), restoring light to heaven and earth. Woodblock print, Shunsai Toshimasa, 1887 — public domain.

The kami-world of the Yamato people was never theirs alone in practice, and a sober account must say so. From the sixth century onward Buddhism entered the islands from the Korean kingdoms, and for roughly a thousand years kami and buddhas were worshipped together in a fusion the later age would call shinbutsu-shūgō. Under the logic of honji-suijaku — original ground and trace-manifestation — the kami came to be understood as local traces of the buddhas and bodhisattvas: the war-kami Hachiman was honored as Hachiman Daibosatsu, a kami who was also a great bodhisattva. The mountain ascetics, the yamabushi, built their whole discipline on this weave of kami, buddha, and esoteric rite. To picture the Yamato people of the classical and medieval centuries as worshippers of a pure and bounded Shinto is to read a much later idea backward onto them. The term “Shinto,” and the notion of kami-worship as a single self-conscious religion marked off from Buddhism, are substantially later constructs; for most of the people’s history the kami were simply present — in the rice field, the clan hall, the mountain, the court — and the buddhas were present beside them.

Reception: the long line, the engineered god, and the renunciation

The imperial line endured. Through the centuries when real power passed to regents, to retired emperors, to military overlords and shoguns, the throne itself remained — often without temporal authority, never without its sacred descent. The emperor reigned as the descendant of the sun even when he did not rule, and the regalia passed from reign to reign as the sign that he did. The endurance of that line, in the tradition’s own reckoning across more than a millennium and a half, is the central fact of the Yamato people’s afterlife in their own memory: a house that reckons itself continuous, and a people that reckons itself the house’s.

The name itself drifted, over those centuries, from a place to a polity to a people to an idea. Yamato began as the old heartland on the Nara plain; it became the realm that grew from it; and only in the modern era did it harden into the name of a people and, beyond that, into Yamato-damashii — the “Yamato spirit,” a phrase of long literary pedigree that the modern state and its ideologues would press into the service of an ethnic and martial nationalism. That hardening is itself part of the reception: the genealogy from the sun became, in time, raw material for a doctrine of the nation. And the genealogy from the sun has never gone unquestioned by the spade. Modern scholarship sets aside the notion of a pure and ancient Yamato bloodline, reading the people instead as the confluence of older island populations with successive flows of migrants and techniques from the Korean peninsula across the kofun centuries — a mixture, not a descent.

Then came the modern chapter, which must be told in full and without flinching. When the Meiji state seized the work of building a nation in 1868, it reached for the oldest sanction it had. The new government drew a hard line where for a thousand years there had been none: the shinbutsu bunri of 1868 forcibly separated kami from buddhas, and in its wake came haibutsu kishaku, a wave of anti-Buddhist iconoclasm that smashed images and stripped temples. Out of that rupture the state assembled what is called State Shinto — Kokka Shintō — an apparatus, not an ancient faith: a hierarchy of shrines brought under state control, numbering well over a hundred thousand, with the imperial cult at its apex and the descent from Amaterasu rebuilt into national doctrine. The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education made reverence for the throne the spine of every schoolroom. The emperor was now taught as arahitogami — a living kami, a deity in human form — and the sacred descent that had been a charter of rule became the engine of an aggressive nationalism, carried into the wars and the empire that ended in the catastrophe of 1945. The ancient relation of a clan to its ancestor-kami and this modern machinery are not the same thing, and the distinction is the whole point: the second was engineered out of the first, at a known time, for the purposes of a state.

The defeat unmade the apparatus. On 15 December 1945 the occupation issued the directive abolishing state sponsorship of Kokka Shintō, ordering the shrines cut loose from the government they had served. And on the first day of 1946 the emperor himself issued the rescript known as the Humanity Declaration — Ningen-sengen — in which he set aside the conception of the throne as divine, calling false the notion that the emperor is a living deity and the Japanese a race fated to rule others. Scholars have noted the careful wording: the term he used was akitsumikami rather than the schoolroom’s arahitogami, and the rescript opened with a quotation from the Meiji Charter Oath of 1868, so that its emphasis fell as much on continuity as on renunciation. The disavowal was real, and it was also worded with care. The throne that the postwar constitution left standing is the “symbol of the State and of the unity of the people” — a line that reaches back to the sun in the chronicles, shorn of the claim to be a god.

The Naikū (inner shrine) of Ise Jingū, where the sun-goddess Amaterasu is enshrined with the sacred mirror. Photograph by Oilstreet, 2019 — CC BY-SA 3.0.

One charged inheritance of that history remains unsettled in the present. The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo enshrines the spirits of Japan’s war dead as kami; in 1978 its priests secretly enshrined among them fourteen men convicted as Class-A war criminals by the postwar tribunal — seven of them executed, the others dead before or during the proceedings — including the wartime prime minister Tōjō. The reigning emperor, on learning of it, ceased his visits — and according to a memorandum made public in 2006, this was his stated reason. When prime ministers visit the shrine, the governments of China and Korea protest that the visits honor the architects of the aggression their peoples suffered; the shrine and its defenders answer that the dead are mourned, not the deeds. The dispute is not a relic. It is a living seam in the relation between the Yamato people’s sacred memory and the history that memory must carry.

To stand back from the whole arc is to see a single thread pulled through very different cloth. The relation of a clan to its ancestor-kami became the relation of a realm to the sun-goddess; the relation of a realm to the sun-goddess became, in the eighth-century chronicles, a written charter of rule; the charter became, in the modern state, the doctrine of a living-god emperor and the fuel of an empire; and that doctrine the emperor himself set down in 1946. The Yamato people remain — the great majority of a modern nation, the kami still honored at Ise and at a hundred thousand local shrines, the new year still begun at the clan and neighborhood kami’s gate. What they no longer carry, by the throne’s own word, is the claim that the one at the line’s end is a god.

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