When Marco Polo heard about Japan in 1295, he called it Chipangue — an island of endless gold whose white, civilised people answered to nobody. He had never been there. The real history of Japan was already far older and considerably stranger than his secondhand account suggested: a chain of tribal conquests, a prince who killed his disobedient brother and answered his horrified father with perfect calm, an empress who concealed her husband's death to launch a war, and a tax-abolishing emperor who let his palace roof rot rather than break his promise to his people.
In 1295, Marco Polo returned to Venice from twenty-four years of travel through Asia and told Europe something it had not known: somewhere in the seas east of China lay an island called Chipangue, whose people were white, civilised, well-favoured, and answerable to nobody. Gold, he said, was endless there — the islanders found it in their own soil. He had never been. The description came from Chinese sources, the name was a Chinese rendering of the Japanese, and the gold detail was inflated in the way that distant wealth tends to be inflated by people who have not personally seen it. But Chipangue — Japan — entered European awareness for the first time through Marco Polo's account, and the country he described so loosely had already been building its own history for the better part of a thousand years before he heard of it. That history, in its earliest centuries, is mostly legend. The first written records were made by order of the Emperor Temmu toward the end of the seventh century CE, and they reached back through a thousand years of oral tradition to collect what the culture had preserved about its own beginnings. What those records contain is not what most people expect from historical documentation. It is stranger, and in some ways more honest.
Marco Polo's description of Chipangue — his phonetic rendering of the Chinese name for Japan — was Europe's first knowledge of the island empire, written in 1298 from secondhand Chinese accounts by a man who had never actually been there.
Before Japan Was Japan — The People Who Were There First
Scholars believe there were two major migrations into Japan from the Asian mainland, both arriving across the Korean peninsula. The people who came found the islands already occupied. The older inhabitants included a people the Japanese called pit-dwellers — small in stature, living in holes dug into the ground and covered with branches rather than in built structures. Japanese legend called them earth-spiders. The Ainu, who were already present, called them Hole-Men. They disappear from the historical record fairly early, pushed out or absorbed by the incoming population. The Ainu themselves were not absorbed. They were driven north — from the fertile plains of the main island to the wilder northern territories, where communities of Ainu people were still identifiable and still living by hunting and fishing centuries later. They are a distinct people: remarkable for the amount of hair that grows on the faces and bodies of the men, giving an appearance that struck every outside observer as notably different from their Japanese neighbours. They had no written language. They traded skins and fish with the Japanese for manufactured goods. Their religion centred on the worship of rivers, rocks, and springs, with the bear occupying a special and complicated position in their ritual life. The bear festival was the great event of the Ainu year. In spring, hunters went into the mountains and brought back a live bear cub. A woman of the village nursed and raised it. When it outgrew that arrangement it was caged, kept until the following autumn, and then — at the festival — deliberately starved and goaded into fury before the cage was opened. What followed was a full confrontation between the enraged bear and the assembled hunters, weapons drawn. The bear was killed, butchered, and shared among the village families. Ask an Ainu what the ritual meant and, according to the oldest accounts, they could not tell you. It was older than explanation. It simply was.
The Ainu — the indigenous people of Japan pushed northward by successive waves of mainland migration — maintained their own distinct culture, language, and religious practices for centuries, centred on hunting, fishing, and the annual bear festival whose original meaning had been forgotten even by those who performed it.
Jimmu — The First Emperor and the Feast That Was a Massacre
The legendary first emperor, Jimmu, is said to have begun his reign around 660 BCE. Whether he was a historical individual or a composite figure standing in for the whole period of early tribal conquest, the stories attached to him describe a world of genuine violence between incoming settlers and the people who were already there. One story about Jimmu and the pit-dwellers is particularly stark. He invited eighty warriors of the earth-spider people to a feast in one of their own underground dwellings, assigning one of his own soldiers to each guest as a personal attendant. Every soldier came armed with a sword. Jimmu positioned himself outside. He began to sing. The soldiers waited for a specific line of the song — a prearranged signal. When Jimmu reached it, every man drew his sword and killed the earth-spider beside him. The story is told in the old records without particular horror. It was the kind of thing a successful conqueror did.
The Custom That Buried the Living — and the Emperor Who Stopped It
For centuries, the death of a great man in ancient Japan meant the death of those who had served him. When a lord died, his retainers and the horses that had carried him were buried alongside him — not already dead, but alive and placed upright in the earth with their heads above ground, left to die of hunger and exposure. This was not a fringe practice. It was standard. The records preserved it without comment as ordinary procedure. The eleventh emperor, Suinin, brought it to an end — or tried to. His brother died in 2 BCE, and the retainers were buried around the body as custom required. Suinin heard them. The sound of people starving to death within earshot of the palace was apparently something he could not ignore, and he determined that it should not happen again. An adviser offered a practical solution: replace the living retainers with clay figures. The substitution was made. The clay burial figures — found now in archaeological sites across Japan — were the direct result of one emperor's decision to stop a practice that had been normal for as long as anyone could remember. The practice did not end immediately. An imperial decree issued in 646 CE still found it necessary to prohibit the burial of living retainers, which tells you how long the custom persisted despite official opposition.
The Conspiracy Against Emperor Suinin — and the Empress Who Prepared Her Escape
Suinin's reign also produced one of the more detailed political stories in early Japanese legend. His wife's brother wanted the throne. He came to the Empress with a direct question: which do you value more, your brother or your husband? She said her brother was dearer. He gave her a dagger and told her to kill the Emperor while he slept. She took the dagger. She went to Suinin as he lay sleeping with his head in her lap. She raised the blade. At the last moment she could not do it, and began to cry. The tears fell on the sleeping Emperor's face. He woke suddenly and told her of a vivid dream: a storm-cloud had covered the sky, rain had soaked his face, and a small red snake had curled around his neck. What did it mean? She told him everything. Suinin moved against his brother-in-law, who had fortified himself behind a stockade. The Empress fled to her brother. When the Emperor's troops arrived, she came to the stockade wall holding her newborn son, offering the child to Suinin while declaring she would stay with her brother. Suinin sent his best soldiers to bring both the child and the mother. The Empress was ready for them. She had cut off her hair and fastened it back on loosely. Her jewel-strings had been left to rot. Her garments had been soaked in wine until the fabric was weak. The soldiers grabbed her hair: it came away in their hands. They seized her jewels: the strings snapped. They clutched her clothing: it tore and she pulled free. She escaped into the stockade. The soldiers returned with the child but not the mother. Suinin was furious — and directed his fury not at his wife or his own soldiers but at the jewellers who had made the strings that broke. He ordered them punished. The stockade was set on fire. Suinin called through the flames and asked his wife what name she wished to give their son. She answered. He asked how the child should be raised. She gave instructions. A conversation conducted through the fire of a burning fortress wall, negotiating the details of a child's upbringing between two people on opposite sides of a rebellion. The brother was killed in the fire. The Empress died with him.