State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-century Ruling Elite (review)

A singular event in Japanese antiquity is the sudden appearance around the end of the third century c.e. of monumental keyhole-shaped tombs, differing sharply from elite burials of the preceding Yayoi period in both size and uniformity. The 280-meterlong Hashihaka, located in the southeast Nara basin and considered the oldest of the colossal keyhole tombs, dwarfs the earlier Yayoi mounds, which never exceeded one hundred meters in length. And whereas the latter varied in outward form according to region, the standardized keyhole shape spanned the area from northern Kyushu to Kinai in the first stage of its appearance, then spread as far north as the Tôhoku region by the mid-fourth century. Recent reappraisals have moreover pushed the age of the earliest keyhole tombs back to the latter decades of the third century, tantalizingly close to the age of Himiko’s hegemony, intensifying interest over possible links between the two.

State Formation in Japan, Gina Barnes’s latest contribution to the study of the Japanese past, focuses on the keyhole tombs’ appearance and spread as critical steps toward the fifth-century emergence of the Yamato state. Approaching this topic from a comprehensive array of perspectives, it begins with a historical sketch against the wider canvas of northeast Asia (“Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere”), tracing the development from the Yayoi period of exchange with polities of the Korean peninsula and northern China, as seen through the movement of prestige goods such as bronze mirrors and strategic commodities such as iron, and through Chinese historic records. Barnes analyzes interaction in this arena as a combination of “core/periphery relations” on the one hand, such as the tributary system through which the Chinese court appeased distant peoples by providing prestige goods and titles, and “peer polity interaction” on the other, involving competitive emulation and differentiation among trans-regional networks of peers, both within Japan and between Japan and the Korean peninsula.

Within this multidimensional framework, Barnes traces the development of a Yayoi prestige-goods system in which western Japan, and particularly the northern Kyushu region, had greater access to bronze and iron sources through core/periphery and peer-polity relations than did the areas at the eastern end of the Inland Sea corridor, which were probably dependent on their western Japanese counterparts for the metal that filtered down to them. Prestige items like the bronze bells commonly found in the eastern region were not used for the promotion of individual or group status, but rather as part of fertility rites for the benefit of the community as a whole. By contrast, the prestige items buried in chief-like graves in northern Kyushu, such as Chinese mirrors, were status markers whose acquisition presumably enhanced social standing, although supply was apparently unstable and the focus of competition.

Historical records depict interaction at this time between the more advanced polities of northern Kyushu and the Late Han dynasty (25–220), through which particular individuals were able to receive titles as “king.” And while the archaeological record allows the identification of a small number of “kingly” graves in the region, Barnes disputes claims made by some Japanese scholars that stratification into ruling versus commoner classes had already emerged. Rather, she points to a gradient of prestige indicated by relative amounts of bronze mirrors, etc., and suggests that status was not ascribed but achieved through individual success in supervising domestic production, manipulating social networks to obtain such items, or perhaps warfare.

The archaeological record indeed indicates that warfare became increasingly prevalent from the first century b.c.e. on, as evidenced by the construction of villages at upland locations for defense and observations by the Chinese of a period of disturbance in the latter part of the second century c.e. In addition to pressure for land, competition intensified over the diminishing supply of prestige goods as the Late Han court fell to unrest and uprisings, and crude imitations of Chinese mirrors...