Historical Notes and Further Reading

(Warning: I am not a historian and I unashamedly embellish when the story requires.)

Yayoi period Japan (300 BC–300 AD) is when the people of Japan changed from hunting and gathering to cultivation of rice. Yes, there were big cats and bears in Japan. The people of Japan didn’t have a system of writing, and any written language was borrowed from China, so little is known about the period.

One of the Yayoi period’s most striking legacies is their use of large jars for burial. These jars are available for viewing in a number of museums in Japan, together with pottery bowls and human effigies. The jars really were huge: some of them are as tall as me. There are some on display at the Kyoto University Museum (www.museum.kyoto-u.ac.jp) and occasionally on show at Tokyo University Museum (um.u-tokyo.ac.jp).

The people buried in these jars looked more like Ainu than modern Japanese. Based on bone structure, anthropologists surmise that the Ainu were actually the original inhabitants of Japan and were pushed northward by colonising Han-related people from (what is now) mainland China and Korea. As a result of this, I’ve used Ainu-sounding names instead of standard Japanese ones for the Yayoi locals.

Empress Himiko is a folkloric ruler of Japan who supposedly ruled from 170–248 CE. There isn’t any recorded information about her from Japan; everything we have about her came from China (‘Wei’), where she supposedly met with Chinese explorers and sent representatives to China in return. She is reported to have had a thousand handmaids and a single male servant who acted as go-between for her and her subjects.

There is a keyhole-shaped Yayoi-style burial mound in Nara that is believed to be Himiko’s, but it cannot be opened because it’s royal and only the royal family have the right of access – and have not given anyone permission to open it. It’s on Google Earth and surprisingly unimpressive.

It’s quite likely that domestic life in Japan didn’t change very much between prehistory and World War 2. I had some difficulty tracking down resources on what daily life for the average Japanese was like; most of the texts describe the life of the Emperor or Shogun, with court details and international diplomacy. I wanted to describe life for ordinary people.

One of my most important resources was a book by Englishwoman Isabella Bird (1831–1904), who deserves her own whole biography. Bird was an obsessive traveller, less than 150 cm tall, with a painful tumour at the base of her spine, who would go to the most remote and undeveloped places on the planet alone – or with a single assistant – and unarmed. She was the first woman to be voted a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and tellingly was actually allowed to be a member and go to meetings two years later. She wrote books on her journeys to Hawaii, the American West (where she is rumoured to have had an affair with a Rocky Mountain outlaw), Korea, China, Iran (then Persia), and Kurdistan. She was a bestselling author, explorer, photographer, and artist.

The book is called Unbeaten Tracks in Japan and you can read it online for free. I found a 1911 edition in a second-hand bookstore. This is Ms Bird’s description of her travels through Japan in 1878 – when Tokyo was still commonly called Edo, and only ten years after the Meiji Restoration. She didn’t just go to a Japan that was undergoing huge social upheaval and the conflict about contact with the West – she went to the most isolated, undeveloped part of Northern Japan and visited Ainu people in their own villages, something even most of the locals wouldn’t do. It is an extraordinary journey and you have to admire the courage of this woman who seemed to revel in the hardship of parasites, illness and injury.

Fair warning: there is an extremely unpleasant racist undercurrent through this book that is definitely a product of its time. At the same time, Bird unashamedly finds some of the women she meets in Japan extremely attractive (she married an English peer later in life and had two children).

Another excellent description of pre-war Japan is a book called Memories of Silk and Straw (1987) by Dr Junichi Saga and translated by Garry Evans. Dr Saga saw the stupendous changes happening in Japan post-World War 2 and collected a combined autobiography of all the old people in his village. Most of them were children before the turn of the 20th century and had memories of a Japan that is now long-gone.

Egg-man is in this book and I have described him almost exactly as he is in Memories of Silk and Straw. Eggs were a vital protein source for the people of Japan, (the other major sources being fish, tofu and horse meat). Eggs are still an important (though largely unacknowledged) part of Japanese cuisine. If you’re lucky, you can catch a short Miyazaki film about the Egg Princess of Rabbit Kingdom on rotation at the Studio Ghibli Museum.

Another excellent read is Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan by Giles Milton (2002), which is the story of an Englishman who was shipwrecked in Japan in 1600 and became a favourite of the Shogun (and if that sounds like Shogun by James Clavell, that’s because Clavell’s book is based on this true-life story). It’s a bit heavy on rulers-and-diplomacy but a fun read nevertheless.

One other source I’m going to name (among many others I’m not going to quote because I don’t have to) is Peasants, Rebels and Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan by Mikoso Hane (1982). It’s much more dry and scholarly than the three references above and a bit of a slog to read.

The lake is Lake Yamanaka, and the town next to it is Yamanakako, and they’re on Google Earth. The onsen is called ‘Yamanakako Onsen Benifuji no Yu Hot Spring’ and not only is it on Google Earth, you can take a Google Earth tour of the interior of the onsen as well.

Again, I’d like to thank Madeleine Chan for acting as tour guide and translator on my research journey to Japan in 2019, and Mika Ishikawa, who translated the ‘Dark Heavens’ series into Japanese, and has been a staunch supporter of my writing efforts from distant Kyoto.

Kylie Chan, 2020