Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 c.e. Brill’s Japanese Studies Library Edited by Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor) Caroline Rose Kate Wildman Nakai VOLUME 42 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bjsl Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 c.e. Relic, Text, Object, Fake By Joshua A. Fogel LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: The Gold Seal Unearthed in Shikanoshima in 1784. Courtesy of the Fukuoka City Museum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fogel, Joshua A., 1950– Japanese historiography and the gold seal of 57 c.e. / relic, text, object, fake By Joshua A. Fogel. pages cm. — (Brill’s japanese studies library; volume 42) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-24388-0 (hardback : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-90-04-24419-1 (e-book) 1. Shikanoshima (Fukuoka-shi, Japan)—Antiquities. 2. Japan—Seal—History. 3. China—Seal— History. 4. Japan—Relations—China. 5. China—Relations—Japan. I. Title. DS897.S45575F64 2013 327.52031—dc23 2012045777 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0925-6512 ISBN 978-90-04-24388-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24419-1 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. To Joan כלי זהב . .לא יגע בהן עד שיבוא אליהו [If a person finds] vessels of gold . , [he places them in the earth for safekeeping. But since gold does not corrode, he must leave them in the earth and] he may not touch them until [the prophet] Elijah comes [and tells us to whom they belong]. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Metzia, 29B (parenthetical material by R. Adin Steinsaltz) CONTENTS List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ xi Abbreviations ................................................................................................... xiii Introduction: Historiography and the Biography of an Object ........ 1 PART I REASON, IDENTITY, PHILOLOGY: FROM RELIC TO TEXT 1. Wa-Han or Archipelago-Mainland Relations before 57 c.e. ........ 15 2. The Material Object ................................................................................. 43 3. Kamei Nanmei: “Politics Is Learning and Learning Is Politics” .... 55 4. Commentaries on the Gold Seal in the 1780s: Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend ................................................................. 79 5. Ascendancy of the “Ito no kuni” Reading from the Late Eighteenth Century .................................................................................. 99 6. Revival of Interest in the Gold Seal in the Meiji Era and Miyake Yonekichi’s Breakthrough ....................................................................... 117 PART II SCIENCE AND DOUBTS: FROM TEXT TO OBJECT Introduction to Part II ................................................................................... 131 7. Modern Science and the Gold Seal ..................................................... 133 8. Persistent Problem Areas in the Twentieth Century ..................... 155 PART III CHALLENGES, REJECTION, INSTITUTIONALIZATION: FROM OBJECT TO POSSIBLE FAKE 9. Recent Challenges to the Gold Seal’s Authenticity: Conspiracy Theories and Better Science .................................................................. 227 viii contents 10. Conclusion: Institutionalization of the Gold Seal and Future Research .................................................................................................... 269 Appendices A. Miyake Yonekichi, “A Study of the Seal of the Ruler of the State of Na in Wa under the Han Dynasty” ................................... 291 B. Miyake Yonekichi, “A Critique of the Theory That the Gold Seal [Inscribed] to the Ruler of the State of Na in Wa Is a Forgery” ............................................................................................. 297 C. Okazaki Takashi, “Measuring the Gold Seal [Inscribed] to the ‘Ruler of the State of Na in Wa under the Han’ ” ......................... 303 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 323 Index ................................................................................................................... 371 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Jinbee’s affidavit ........................................................................................ 16 2.1 & 2.2. Gold seal with inscription: 漢委奴國王 ........................... 19 3. Opening page of Kin’in no ben .............................................................. 67 4. Stele at site of gold seal’s discovery and entrance to “Gold Seal Park” ......................................................................................... 139 5. Kamei Nanmei’s hand-drawn map of Shikanoshima (1784) ....... 142 6.1 & 6.2. “Dian wang zhi yin” seal (Yunnan) ...................................... 170 7.1 & 7.2. “Guangling wang xi” seal ......................................................... 178 8. “Wendi xingxi” seal ................................................................................... 180 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I recently received a book from a young professor, her first, of East Asian literature. It was a beautifully produced book, long, immense bibliogra- phy, very impressive, though I was unsure what I had done to earn such an expensive reward, as I hardly knew her. I opened the volume to the acknowledgements and saw a list of well over one hundred names, people from many places being thanked for many things, but despite my receipt of the book, I didn’t even make the long list. All those books, I thought, it must have cost her a month’s salary! The list gets shorter as we get older and move further from the swad- dling of graduate school to the big wide world. I have been lucky to have given many versions of the research in this volume orally to wonderfully receptive audiences in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Israel. Let me thank all those respon- sible for the invitations and all those who posed questions and criticisms, or just sat there and were kind enough to listen more or less attentively. I was fortunate and honored to spend a month over the summer of 2008 as a visiting professor at Kansai University’s Center of Excellence on East Asian Cultural Interaction, and to collect a mountain of secondary essays at their wonderful library. Thanks are due in particular to Professor Tao Demin and his colleagues for the invitation. But, there is no end to pub- lishing on the gold seal, and both Ishikawa Yoshihiro at Kyoto University and Konrad Lawson at Harvard University have been extremely helpful tracking down books and articles not easily accessible elsewhere. Kate Wildman Nakai read the entire manuscript with extraordinary acuity and provided me with a long set of comments which have enabled me to rethink and rework the manuscript immeasurably. I owe her a great debt of thanks. One other person read the entire manuscript, and although her criti- cisms were stinging at times and required considerable work to address, there is no substitute for that sort of love. ABBREVIATIONS “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” kin’inten, kin’in hakken nihyaku nen 「漢委 奴国王」金印展：金印発見二百年 (Exhibit of the goal seal [inscribed] to the “ruler of the state of Na of Wa under the Han”: Two hundred years since the discovery the gold seal) (Fukuoka: Fukuoka shiritsu rekishi shiryōkan, 1984). Shikanoshima Shikanoshima: “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” kin’in to Shikanoshima no kōkogakuteki kenkyū 志賀島：「漢委奴国王」金印と志賀島の考 古学的研究 (Shikanoshima: The gold seal [inscribed] “Han Wei Nu guowang” and archeological research at Shikanoshima), ed. Kyūshū daigaku Bungakubu Kōkogaku kenkyūshitsu 九州大学文学部考古 学研究室 (Department of Archeology, Faculty of Letters, Kyushu University) (Fukuoka: Kin’in iseki chōsadan, 1975). INTRODUCTION HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN OBJECT What follows is an extended essay in the discipline of historiography, understood as the historian’s sub-discipline that attempts, among other issues, to explain why earlier observers of the past—both professional his- torians and educated and concerned lay people—have framed historical questions in the ways that they have and come to the conclusions that they have. It thus falls within the fields of cultural history and the history of ideas. I will be examining numerous interventions in the long and often heated debates surrounding virtually every aspect of the “gold seal,” the item presented