Paekche Yamato 026

BACKGROUND MATERIALS 259
6.
THE OJIN LINE OF THE PAEKCHE

ROYAL FAMILY:
Interruptions and Recoveries
was succeeded in turn by Nintoku , Richu , and Hanzei .

But then some complications in succession seem to have occurred and it was
some years after Hanzeis death before the Ministers of the Yamato court
chose Ingyo to succeed Hanzei. According to Nihongi (NI: 312 & 313),
when Hanzei died, Ministers held counsel and decided to offer Ingyo the
imperial signet. It is said that Ingyo had lost the free use of his limbs
because of an illness he had sufferred upon attaining manhood. Ingyo is said
to have declined the offer made by the ministers, saying: I am an unlucky
man, long afflicted with a grievous disease, which I cannot shake off. I am
unable to walk . . . . [T]he two Emperors ( Richu and Hanzei) . . . despised me
and thought me a fool, as is known to all the Ministers . . . . [M]ake another
choice of some wise Prince, and let him be established as Emperor. As a
result, it is recorded that the throne remained vacant for years and months
and the Ministers and functionaries [were] grieved, and [knew] not what to
do. In due course, the Ministers made another offer to Ingyo (NI: 314), and
this time he accepted the offer and assumed the title of Imperial Dignity.
Two years later (NI: 315), [a]n envoy was sent to Silla to produce a good
physician . . . . The physician arrived from Silla, and was forthwith made
to tre at the Empero r s disease. Not long after, he was healed of his
disease.<1>
Unlike Nintoku, Richu and Hanzei, Ingyo seems to have been
related to the Silla royal families. Nihongi (NI: 325-326) records that: the
King of Silla, when he heard that the Emperor had died [in A.D. 453 ?], was
shocked and grieved, and sent up eighty tribute ships with eighty musicians of
all kinds. They anchored at Tsushima, and made a great wail. When they
260 LINE OF PAEKCHE ROYAL FMAILY
arrived in Tsukushi they again made a great wail. Anchoring in the harbour
of Naniha, they all put on plain white garments , and bringing all the
articles of tribute, and stringing their musical instruments of all kinds, they
proceeded from Naniha to the capital. Sometimes they wept and wailed,
sometimes they sang and danced, until at length they assembled at the Shrine
of temporary interment.1 <2> Despite this show of kinship by the King of
Silla, Ingyo was succeeded not by the Heir Apparent but by Anaho [Anko
] who seems to have been unrelated to the Silla royal families, and in fact
rather hostile to them.
Nihongi (NI: 326) records that [t]he Silla messengers of condolence,
when the funeral ceremonies were concluded, returned home. Now the men
of Silla had always loved Mount Miminashi and Mount Unebi ,
which are hard by the capital city . Accordingly, when they arrived at the
Kotobiki Hill, they looked back, and said: Uneme haya! Mimi haya! This
was simply because they were unpracticed in the common speech
, and therefore corrupted Mount Unebi, calling it Uneme2 . . . . Now
the Yamato no Muma-kahi Be , who were in attendance on the men of
Silla, heard these words, and conceived a suspicion that the Silla men had
intercourse with the Uneme . So they made them go back, and gave the
information to the Prince Ohohatsuse. The Prince straightway threw the
Silla messengers, every one, into prison, and put them to an examination.
Then the Silla messengers made a statement, saying: We have done the
Uneme no harm. Our words were simply expressive of our love for the two
1
Douglas (1978) quotes J. Edward Kidder: Earlier immigrants (like Sujin and
may indeed have come from other parts of Korea, but the horse trappings and
the social structure of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, Kidder says, bear much
closer resemblance to those in Silla than to those in either Paekche or Koguryeo. Thus
the second wave of immigrants the horseriders most likely came from Silla.
Toward this conclusion, literature and archeology go hand in hand perfectly by the
end of the fifth century, he says.
2
This implies that the only thing needed for Koreans and Japanese to communicate
with each other in those days was to be practiced in the common speech. According
to (1962), the people in western Japan in the Jo mon period spoke a language of
southern origin with a phonetic system like that of Polynesian, but a language with a
grammatical system and vowel harmony like the Altaic [i.e., Korean] was introduced
with Yayoi culture and spread eastward from northern (1962) notes that
Japanese is quite unlike Chinese with respect to grammar; the Korean and Japanese,
however, share many points of grammar, including an ancient use of vowel harmony,
and share about two hundred vocabulary cognates as well.
BACKGROUND MATERIALS 261
mountains close to the capital. Upon this it was recognized that the charge
was ground-less, and they were all released. But the people of Silla resented
it greatly . . . .<2>
According to Nihongi (NI: 323-324), [t]he Imperial Prince Kinashi Karu
was made Heir to the Throne, but the Heir Apparent was accused of
having seduced his younger sister by the same mother. Nihongi (NI: 328)
further notes that the Heir Apparent was guilty of a barbarous outrage in
debauching a woman. The nation censured him, and the Ministers would not
follow him, but all without exception gave allegiance to the Imperial Prince
Anaho [Anko]. It is said (NI: 328) that Anahos mother was the
daughter of a son of Nihongi (NI: 328-329) records that the Heir
Apparent pr epared an army to attack Anaho [Anko] but was surrounded by
Anahos troops and died by his own hand in the house of Ohomahe no
Sukune.<3>
Anko was definitely of imperial line. Hence, after the death of
Ingyo, Anko and his support e rs we re ap p a re n t ly afraid that the Silla
messengers of condolence would conspire with the Uneme to establish Sillas
line of emperors, in the person of the Imperial Prince Kinashi Karu.
Kiley (1973) states that [Kojiki and Nihongi] themselves stress . . . [that]
fraternal relationship between Richu and Hanzei, but treat Ingyos succession
as unrelated to his two predecessors . . . [and] the Liu-Song history, in
explaining the ge n e a l ogical re l ationship of the five Wa kings, fails to
mention any kinship tie between Ji [Sai], who is unmistakably Ingyo, and
the two brothers who preceded him on the throne.3
Covell and Covell (1984: 25-31) note that was the first of a line of
ten emperors with Horserider blood who occupied the throne of Japan from
the late fourth century to 510 A.D. Then a compromise candidate was put on
the throne. His descent was half-Horserider, the other half tracing back to
Yayoi-period Korean immigrants to Japan (Shintoist powers) . . . . It seems
apparant that the Paekche recognized the new rulers in Japan as suzerain in a
remote kind of way, and so sent goods and personnel to the islands in efforts
to cement friendly relations . . . . As the first official ruler of a new line of
kings, tomb needed to be splendid for the sake of prestige and to stamp
his dynasty with permanence by ove rcoming the earlier Stone Age
inhabitants. Local clan chieftains were regranted their fiefs in exchange for
cooperation . . . . Few, if any, court officials even realized the possibility that
such tombs belong to a line of foreign conquerors. Although the branches
3
According to Nihongi (NI: 328), Anaho (Anko ) was the second child of Ingyo,
and his mother was the granddaughter of Homuda-wake
262 LINE OF PAEKCHE ROYAL FMAILY
were sometimes remote, still in a sense, line continued on the throne

for a very long time.4
In A.D. 672, Prince a brother of Tenji ( A . D. 661-671),
unseated his nephew Kobun (A.D. 671-672) and took the throne himself,
reigning as Temmu (A.D. 672-686). The ensuing period is labelled the
Jinshin Disturbance. The Temmu lineage controlled the throne for a century;
the succession of Shotoku (A.D. 764-770) by Konin (A.D. 770-781),
however, implied the restoration of Tenjis line and the permanent loss of the
throne to the Temmu lineage. Konin was succeeded by Kammu (A.D. 781-
806) who, in A.D. 794, transferred the capital from Nara [
[Heijo -ky o
] to Kyoto [Heian- kyo ], which remained the seat of emperors
until 1869. Toby (1985) notes that Kammus mother was from a family
descended from Paekche immigrants and that he had supporters among the
Fujiwara who had placed Konin on the throne. According to Toby (1985),
Kammu moved the capital away from the power base of the Temmu line
in Yamato to the center of Yamashiro province, a stronghold of the
Paekche immigrants, where his own maternal relatives were entrenched.5
Kim Jeong-hak (1981: 6) notes that Kammus mother [Konins wife]
descended from Prince Sunta who was the son of Paekches King
Munyeong (A.D. 501-523).
4
According to (1977), a limitation to the study of the origins of Japanese
mythology is the fact that the Japanese myths set down in the Kojiki and the Nihon
shoki were based on oral traditions of the Imperial Family and closely connected
families. In other words, the myths retained in documentary records represent only a
very small portion of the whole body of the mythology built up by the inhabitants of
the Japanese Islands in those days. In particular, the myths of the common people and
of the provinces, as against those of the ru l e rs and the central area, are ve ry
i n a d e q u at e ly represented in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki. That is, the only
documented myths deal primarily with the foreign conquerors.
5
Toby (1985) notes that the Tenji line maintained a strong identification with
Yamashiro province even through a century of concentration of political power
wielded by the Temmu line in the Yamato basin.

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BACKGROUND MATERIALS 259

THE OJIN LINE OF THE PAEKCHE

was succeeded in turn by Nintoku , Richu , and Hanzei .

were sometimes remote, still in a sense, line continued on the throne

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