Names Change or Stay the Same

During the first half of the twentieth century, Japan transformed much of Northeast Asia into the Empire of Great Japan (AHA^S), renaming places and people according to the imperial architects’ worldview.^[560] ^{^[561]} In 1928 when the Japanese government gained international recognition for the name, ‘Sea of Japan’, a very different history was in motion for this sea.

Japanese officials in Tokyo were preparing to expand their nation’s hoped for rule over the world’s ‘eight directions under one roof’ (A^i^) from an envisioned new capital in northeastern China that they would call Shinkyo in Japanese (literally, ‘New Capital’). However, when the empire collapsed in 1945 this city returned to the name it had before: Changchun. Although the Japanese empire disintegrated before Shinkyo would replace Tokyo, during the 1930s the imperial government and its related emigration companies sent millions of Japanese into the empire’s reaches on a migration course over the now officially named Sea of Japan that reversed the paths that were historically followed over this water - now moving from east to west. At the same time, the Japanese government and these companies also transferred similar numbers of colonial subjects to the homeland (as the core Japanese islands came to be called) following the more traditional flow from west to east.

Noticeably, much of the twentieth-century movement took place on an ocean network that had not been so active for over a thousand years. From 698 to 926 a realm known in Korean as Balhae (Bokkaikoku in

Japanese) encompassed much of today's North Korea and the Russian Federation's Maritime Province before the Mongols conquered it. From ports along its extensive coastline, such as today's Kim'chaek in North Korea, delegations regularly crossed the sea to Japanese ports on the country's north central coast from which they would carry their trade and envoys south overland by river, canal and portage routes to Kyoto, which was then capital.

All of this greatly enhanced the ongoing development of ancient Japan with people, poetry and painting, too.^[562]

Japanese historians such as Amino Yoshihiko demonstrate that the Chinese characters for Japan ( H^) gained traction in the mid-seventh and early eighth centuries when Korean and Chinese emissaries and monks travelling on Balhae's routes as well as essential ones developed much earlier by competing kingdoms in southern Korea crossed through this sea's southern straits surrounding Tsushima Island (where some of their tombs remain today). Collectively, they brought texts from the Tang capital at Chang'an (now Xi'an) that referenced Japan with these Chinese characters. As Amino explains, ‘It is also important that we recognize that this influence came to Japan via the sea, which functioned as both a transportation route and an obstacle to intercourse.'^[563] The name ‘Japan' (H^), Amino further explains, literally translates as the ‘source of the sun... reflecting] a strong consciousness of the Tang empire on the Chinese mainland... [And, moreover, unusually] the name H^ signifies a natural phenomenon or orientation and... is neither the name of the place of origin of the dynastic founders nor that of a dynasty or tribe.'^[564] At the time that Japan's early chieftains settled on this name H^ to help centralise their rule, the ill-fated Baekje Kingdom in southern Korea (18 BCE-660 CE) was nearing the end of its abundant overseas transfer of goods and people through the sea's southern passage to the Wa realm, as the southern Japan region was commonly known beforehand (and may also have included southern Korea). Together with yet another southern Korean realm called Gaya, renowned for ironwork and metallurgy, Korean intercourse laid the foundations for the archive of Japan: writing, systems of law and literature, urban planning, Buddhism, pottery, weapon design and production, and, likely, even the proto-members of the Japanese imperial family as well as tens of thousands of other people moving from west to east.^[565]

Although southwestern Korea’s Baekje’s rulers once had extensive relations with overseas counterparts, they failed to forge alliances with regional chiefs in what was becoming Japan, which might have helped them to withstand local rivalries as well as Chinese encroachment.

Conversely, the Balhae Kingdom’s rulers in what is now North Korea viewed interaction with ancient Japan’s early leaders as elemental to their own security in order to withstand Tang advances as well as local competition. Part of this worldview entailed at least fifty diplomatic exchanges over the sea between Korea and Japan during the latter ninth and early tenth centuries. Also at the time, there is indication of a Balhae-Japan naval alliance in the making in part to attempt to conquer the eighth century’s magnificent Silla Dynasty in southeastern Korea. That never materialised, however, and although speculative, this failure would surely have pleased the legendary late seventh-century Silla King Munmu. At the kingdom’s height, Munmu ordered his 682 entombment in an offshore rocky grave, still visible from Korea’s southeastern coast near the ancient capital of Gyeongju (which counted over one million inhabitants at the time he died). With his sarcophagus in the sea, Munmu vowed that his spirit would become a dragon to protect his people from advances by water, especially from what Koreans and Chinese have referred to for nearly two thousand years as ‘wako’ (^^), a derogatory term that conveys barbarity and translates as ‘Japanese pirates’ - literally ‘dwarf pirates’ (thus, Japanese distaste for the term). Like ‘East Sea’, this term is first recorded in writing on the 414 Gwangaetto stele, exclaiming the great northern king’s defeat of a marauding raid in 404. Peak pirate activity arose over a thousand years later during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, which Japanese historian Murai Shosuke explains as a moment when Japan itself had entirely devolved from centralised rule into an era of internally warring clans.^[566] At the time, there were several pirate raids near the area of King Munmu’s tomb, yet it appears that the pirates preferred to head to the Chinese coast, turning south in the Korea Straits into the East China Sea to places such as Ningbo and Xiamen.

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

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