著者

河内 春人

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.113, no.1, pp.43-61, 2004

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The Emishi 蝦夷, who resided in the northeast portion of the Jap-anese archipelago, appear in the Chinese sources both as "Emishi" and as "Mojin" 毛人. The description of the former includes their geographical location, customs and year of arrival in China, while the latter merely mentions them as living in northeastern Japan. All of this information was amassed from interviews with foreign emissaries to the Tang Dynasty. Regarding the Emishi, there are both Chinese and Japanese records of them accompanying an envoy from the land of Wa 倭 (Japan) in the year AD 659 and also an account of the Chinese inquiring about them from a Japanese envoy in AD 702 ; however, the latter account, which appears in Shin-Tojo 新唐書, cannot be verified, so 659 is the only time that Emishi became part of a Japanese envoy to China. The information concerning Emishi customs in the Chinese sources matches the content of the report submitted by the 659 Wa envoy to China ; and all of it is characterized by them being introduced through Japan. In particular, the inclusion of Emishi in the 659 envoy was politically motivated to create the image of Wa/Japan as a great empire, but the Tang Dynasty was not impressed. As a result, the Japanese were unable to realize their diplomatic goals, and a gap appeared in the international relations between the two countries. While the Japanese expressed the term "Emishi" with the characters 蝦夷, there is also the strong opinion that the characters 蝦〓 were originally used. However, the source for such an argument being the historically spurious Shin-Tojo, there is no other source to prove that ; and the manuscript of the Nihon Shoki 日本書紀 expresses the term with different characters. The expression 蝦夷 appeared during the late seventh century, together with the creation of a Wa/Japanese ideology concerning its frontiers, leading to the move to take Emishi to China. However, the existence of the Emishi in Tang-Wa diplomacy following the Japan defeat at the Hakuson 白村 River in Korea, had to be covered up, as the term Mojin came into use at the time of the Taiho era Japanese envoys to China. After that time, no new information about the people of northeastern Japan surfaced in Tang China.