was all the rage in China now, and was seen as a symbol of contemporary sophistication.
The arrival of this embassy sparked an explosive scandal, which is likely to have had very little to do with religion and everything to do with the one-upsmanship of certain noble families at the court who were seeking rank and position and arguing over whether intervention or isolation was the best policy toward the Korean peninsula. Emperor Kinmei’s ministers immediately began bickering about omens and portents and perceived threats to the local religion, suggesting the continuing existence of ancient enmities and rivalries at court, shakily held alliances and dynastic pacts stretching back into the mythical past.
Emperor Kinmei, says the Nihongi, was enchanted by the foreign paraphernalia, pronouncing it to be “of a severe dignity which We have never seen before.” Sensing an opportunity, Soga no Iname—who was not only the emperor’s pro-intervention chief minister but also the father of two of his wives—agreed with his august opinion and noted that Buddhism was swiftly attaining prominence on the continent as the religion of choice. If Buddhism were welcomed at the court, it could lead to closer contacts with the mainland.
But Soga was not the only wily schemer who saw his chance. Representatives of two other clans, the Nakatomi and the Mononobe, sensed that the emperor was inviting dissenting opinions. Whereas the Soga clan had strong connections to the mainland, and still had relatives and contacts there, their rivals were drawn from clans “descended from the gods,” who were likely to have been connected to the indigenous people assimilated by earlier invaders. The Mononobe regarded themselves as the armorers of the court and loyal warriors who had been first to support the legendary emperor Jinmu in his conquests. This made them staunch supporters of Japan’s indigenous religion, and they were horrified at the thought of introducing a new idol to the country when there were already “180 gods of Heaven and Earth, and the gods of the Land and of Grain” to consider. “If just at this time we were to worship in their stead foreign deities,” they cautioned, “it may be feared that we should incur the wrath of our national gods.”
Still wavering, Emperor Kinmei decided to have the best of both worlds, and ordered the Soga clan to take the Buddhist statue and worship it for a while, to see what happened.
Unfortunately for the Soga clan, while their leader was busy setting up a temple and burning incense to his new idol, a plague broke out. His rivals were swift to point this out to Emperor Kinmei, who finally made an actual decision, ordering that the hapless statue should be thrown into a canal and the temple razed to the ground. Omens, however, continued to be unhelpfully vague, since the flames from the temple then spread to the great hall of the palace.
Worried now that he had incurred the wrath of Buddha, Kinmei flip-flopped again, and was ready to receive reports of mysterious chanting heard across the waves at Izumi; he also ordered the carving of two new statues from a piece of camphor wood that had supposedly washed up on the seashore.
It was Kinmei’s grandson, Prince Shōtoku (574–622) who would really integrate Buddhism firmly into the Japanese state, along with many Chinese organizational ideas. Although he boasted a degree of Soga blood, which helped him in his dealings with that clan, Shōtoku was also a member of the imperial family. His reforms were aimed at slapping down the continued meddling in government by the feuding Soga and Mononobe families. The imperial family needed to maintain its link to the Sun Goddess by keeping its blood as pure as possible. This was already developing into a tradition in which each emperor’s chief wife was liable to be his own half-sister. Many emperors hence only had a single imperial grandfather, with inbreeding often even closer, depending on the families of the grandmothers.
Such dangerous family planning seems to have been designed to keep non-imperial relatives from exercising undue influence, although instances inevitably arose when a direct-line heir was not available, occasionally presenting the threat of outsider bloodlines sneaking in.
Kinmei’s son, for example—the thirtieth emperor, Bidatsu (r. 572–85)—was married to his own half-sister, whose mother hailed from the Soga family. After a messy series of intrigues over his successors, and the assassination of an emperor who tried to stand up to the Soga family, Bidatsu’s widow-sister was enthroned as Empress Suiko (r. 592–628).
Her accession masked ugly competition behind the scenes, with her chief minister and uncle, Soga no Umako, in an uneasy standoff with her nephew-regent Prince Shōtoku. It would erupt again after her death, but for as long as she was in power, Japan enjoyed thirty-five years of peace, concurrent with renewed and strong contacts with China’s Sui dynasty, the first family in centuries to claim overlordship over all of China.
Suiko’s reign got off to a bad start, with an earthquake in Nara that led to further mutterings about grim portents. Before long, however, increased contacts with a resurgent China brought powerful influences to her court.
Her leading adviser, Prince Shōtoku, is one of the iconic figures of Japanese history—his image graced the 5,000-yen banknote for much of the later twentieth century. In any other state, he might have been ideal sovereign material, but he lacked the double imperial-line descent required of an unassailable ruler. He is the subject of breathless hero-worship in ancient chronicles, although his real-world achievements are difficult to pin down. If we are to believe the chronicles, Shōtoku was an unearthly child prodigy who had the power of speech at birth, and who grew up to become a multitasker who could somehow hear ten petitions at once and rule on them simultaneously. Shōtoku was intimately associated with the arrival of Buddhism in Japan, and also with the establishment of firmer contacts with China. It is this latter achievement that is liable to have caused much of his popularity, as he would have been seen as the figurehead of an era that flooded Japan with new inventions, sophisticated luxuries, and the beginnings of literature. Chinese civilization, previously glimpsed only in the form of mirrors and tall tales, seems to have spread throughout Japan at a fast rate, spearheaded and remembered today as “Buddhism,” but likely to have been associated at the time with uncountable trade goods, new toys, and fads.
Buddhism itself offered a radically different set of beliefs from those previously practiced by the locals—not the least with its offer of a concept of salvation rather than a nebulous, unappealing eternity in the underworld. Shintō—which seems to have only been adopted as a term at all around this point in order to distinguish it from the new import—was still very much concerned with reverence for spirits and the placating of supernatural forces. Buddhism, however, introduced the notion of karma, and the idea that all living creatures were living a cycle of life after life, the state of their being largely determined by whatever merit they had won for themselves in their previous existence. To new aspirants, such claims might be misread as the offer of eternal life and an improvement in personal circumstances—for women to be reborn as men, for men to return wealthier or more powerful, so long as they appeased the Buddhist deities, soon to be seen as incarnate within the many new temples springing up all over the country. None of this had much to do with true Buddhist philosophy, but as in China itself, translation errors and philosophical misunderstandings would characterize much of Buddhism’s early dissemination. Meanwhile, Buddhist practices would override much of the old order. As cremation replaced burial as the prevalent funeral practice, giant grave mounds fell out of fashion, with much of the effort previously expended on tombs redirected into the construction of elaborate Buddhist temples. The very architecture that defined the era became a matter of temple precincts and palaces inspired by Chinese designs.
Shōtoku’s love of things Chinese also extended to managerial strategies. It was under his tenure that the archipelago stopped being an inefficient, haphazard federation of occasionally hostile states and was transformed into a single unified polity with a reigning sovereign. The old tribal rivalries and ethnic tensions would, arguably, endure for another thousand years, but they would henceforth happen below the throne, acted out as a matter of loyalty to the emperor.
It was Shōtoku’s reforms, inspired by China and aimed at reducing the powers of the great families, which truly forced an organizational structure on the Japanese state. He established a court ranking system with a dozen grades, which clearly stipulated that positions were not hereditary; henceforth, it would theoretically be easier to keep nepotism from the government.
He