Himiko the Shaman Queen ~ by Lesley Downer

‘Your ambassadors have arrived here with your tribute, four male slaves and six female slaves plus two pieces of cloth with designs, each 20 feet in length. You live very far away across the sea; yet you have sent an embassy with tribute. Your loyalty and filial piety we appreciate exceedingly. We confer upon you therefore the title “Queen of Wa Friendly to Wei,” together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon. We expect you, O Queen, to rule your people in peace and to endeavour to be devoted and obedient.’

Emperor Cao Rui of the state of Wei, China, to Pimiko, Queen of Wa, 238 AD

Lady of the period with haniwa
terracotta figure showing clothing
 and hairstyle 

All-powerful Himiko

Two thousand years ago the land we now know as Japan was a patchwork of over a hundred small kingdoms, perpetually at war. Armies fought to grab more and better land for farming and to control the water supplies of river and lakes, fighting with bows and arrows and stone and bronze weapons. They lived in fortified communities surrounded by moats and walls with watch towers and gated fences, where the king lived in the inner enclosure.

In 190 AD thirty of these kingdoms decided they’d had enough of warfare. The kings made a truce and formed a federation and, seeing that men had proved unable to maintain the peace, they appointed a woman to rule over them. It was a little more than a hundred years after Boudicca led her ill-fated rebellion against the Romans. But these kings chose not a warrior queen but a woman who had a very different sort of power.

Haniwa - figure of a shamaness

Shamans were the heart of this society. They formed a bridgehead between the human and the divine, interceding with the gods and the ancestors to ensure that the weather was good, crops were abundant, and to protect against disasters like earthquakes and fire. They carried out secret rituals and presided over festivals wearing awe-inspiring bronze mirrors that reflected the sun’s rays. Many of these visionaries and prophets were women and it made sense to appoint one as their ruler.

Out of the mists of time
The kings chose a woman of extraordinary powers called Himiko. She was nineteen or twenty. Hers is the first name in Japanese history to come floating out of the mists of time.

Shaman at an altar, 
Yoshinogari Yayoi village

She set herself up in a palace surrounded by towers and stockades and guarded by a large and formidable army, with a thousand women attendants and one man to serve her food and drink and act as her spokesperson. There she set about conducting the rites and rituals necessary to keep the gods on side and the crops flourishing. To maintain the mystery necessary for communing with the gods, she was seldom seen in public.

She didn’t just deal with religious affairs, she also wielded temporal power. She issued laws and ensured that her country remained at peace and her people were law-abiding and peaceful.

In 238 when she was fifty, she sent a diplomatic mission on the long and enormously dangerous journey by ship, palanquin, ox cart and horseback to Luoyang, the capital of the neighbouring empire of China, with tribute for the emperor, a bit like the ancient Britons sending an envoy to Rome, but a lot further. China was huge and powerful and very advanced and dominated the neighbouring kingdoms. To have the Chinese emperor’s seal of approval was the ultimate accolade.

Warehouse and market area,
Yoshinogari Yayoi Village 

The emperor accepted Himiko’s tribute and recognised her as Queen of Wa, meaning ‘Dwarf Country’, the rather insulting Chinese name for foreign peoples. As well as the gold seal with purple ribbons he sent other gifts including a hundred bronze mirrors, enormously valuable and an essential resource for conducting rituals. He also sent a legation to study the small island kingdom and they produced a series of reports.

  

Emperor Cao Pi of Wei

Chinese envoys in the land of Wa

The Japanese had no writing, whereas the Chinese did, though there were some Japanese scholars who were able to read Chinese. Thus we know about Himiko from Chinese sources, not Japanese.

 

This was all a very long time ago and there are quite a few mysteries. For a start the name ‘Himiko’ is written ‘Pimiko’ in Chinese but for some reason in Japan she is always known as ‘Himiko’. Her country is known as Wa or Yamatai. It’s not even certain where it was. It may have been in the northern part of the island of Kyushu or, more likely, in central Japan, around where the ancient capital, Nara, was later built.

A Virgin Shaman
The Chinese envoys recorded that Himiko was quite elderly and came from a long line of queens. They called her country Queen Country because there were so many women rulers.

She never married, they wrote, but ‘occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people. Thereupon they placed her on the throne.’

Yoshinogari guard house

Yamatai prospered under Himiko’s rule and had more than 70,000 households, well-organised laws and a taxation system and thriving trade. Her people were gentle and peace-loving. They dined on rice and many other sorts of grain, alongside wild boar and deer and plentiful supplies of fish, all of which they served on beautifully burnished pottery dishes and ate with their hands.

They cultivated mulberry leaves to feed silkworms and wore beautifully woven garments of silk, linen, cotton or hemp, depending on their social standing. Men wore headbands and loose kimono-like garments while women looped their hair and wore jackets over long skirts, tied in place with obi-like belts. Some wore garments like ponchos which they slipped over their heads. Men of high status had four or five wives while the lower-ranking had two or three. Women, said these Chinese observers, were faithful and not jealous.

 

Hashihaka grave mound, Sakurai, Nara Pref

This was very much a hierarchical society. When a lower-ranking person met a superior on the road, the lower-ranking person bowed and stepped aside. They added that ‘in their meetings and in their deportment, there is no distinction between father and son or between men and women’, which the Chinese officials, with their strict Confucian notions of hierarchy, found extraordinary. And they had slaves who were catalogued like merchandise when they were sent to the Chinese emperor as part of Himiko’s tribute.

They also tattooed both their faces and bodies, one purpose being to protect themselves from dangerous fish when they went diving. They coloured their faces with pink or scarlet paint. ‘They are much given to strong drink,’ the chroniclers noted. ‘They are a long-lived race, and persons who have reached 100 are very common. There is no robbery or theft and litigation is infrequent.’

Himiko’s grave mound
By 247 trouble was brewing. Himiko sent a message to the new Chinese governor in Korea, complaining of hostilities with one of the other Wa states and asking for Chinese support.

But in 248 she died. She was around 80 and had ruled for 60 years. She was as awe-inspiring in death as she had been in life. She was given a burial appropriate for a queen of such extraordinary power and status.

 

Haniwa warrior, Tokyo National Museum,
National Treasure

‘A great mound was raised over her, more than a hundred paces in diameter, and over a hundred male and female attendants followed her in death,’ say the Chinese records. According to another source she was buried not with a hundred but a thousand slaves. But archaeologists say that there is no evidence of human sacrifice in Japan so perhaps she was buried with terracotta haniwa attendants such as fill later tomb burials.

After Himiko’s death a king took the throne but the people refused to obey him. There were assassinations and murders and more than a thousand people died. Finally they installed a new ruler, a thirteen-year-old girl named Iyo, a relative of Himiko, who was probably also a shamaness. Under this youthful shaman queen order was restored. The Chinese court too recognised her as the ruler.

After Himiko’s death, grave mounds like hers began to spring up around Japan. One of the oldest of these kofun (‘ancient graves’) is the Hashihaka tumulus outside Nara. It’s a heavily-wooded keyhole-shaped hillock with a square front and rounded back, rising steeply out of the paddy fields. Pots from inside have been radiocarbon-dated to 250 AD, around the time of Himiko’s death, leading some scholars to conclude that this may be her tomb. If so, that would mean that Himiko’s land of Yamatai was the Nara region.

Himiko is not mentioned in any of the Japanese written records, which were compiled around 700 AD. For a long time she was forgotten. Then in the Edo period there was a growing interest in the country’s history and she was rediscovered. Over the years there have been many debates as to where Yamatai was and whether Himiko actually existed or whether one of the legendary empresses mentioned in the Japanese annals was Himiko under another name.

Today she is very popular indeed and has attained new life as a character in manga, anime, video games and films.


Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. Amazingly she has two books coming out this year. The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) came out on September 10th - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters! Meanwhile Eland is reissuing her first ‘real’ book - On the Narrow Road to the Deep North - on October 5th, under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Image of lady is mine; all other images courtesy wikimedia commons.