Strange in the Extreme: The Emishi and the Early Japanese Court

For the past several decades, historians of premodern Japan have debated the role of immigrants and their descendants in establishing the foundations of the early state in Japan. Much of this debate has been framed in terms of ethnicity or ethnogenesis, and has focused on demonstrating the significance of the contributions made by immigrant lineage groups of Korean and Chinese origin. While this work was critical to correcting the idea that there was a purely “Japanese” people or polity, it also stopped short of considering if and how concepts like ethnicity and race were relevant in premodern Japan. This chapter draws inspiration from the growing number of classicists and medievalists who have applied broader and more structural understandings of race to the premodern world, and focuses on the relationship between the early Japanese court and the people(s) in the northern part of the archipelago that the court referred to as the Emishi. This relationship is particularly intriguing because even the earliest descriptions of Emishi in the court chronicles make it clear that they were understood to be fundamentally (physically, culturally, socially) different from Japanese people in ways that other outsiders were not. At the same time, the Emishi were never a distinct category in the law codes that defined the early Japanese court, and legal commentaries of the time insisted that they were eligible for the process of becoming subjects, framed as a “transformation” from barbarian to civilized people. In this talk, I will discuss the mechanisms that preserved the hierarchy in which Emishi subjects were disadvantaged by systems of status and rank in ways that other new subjects were not. I argue that we must not take the lack of explicitly racist laws in classical Japan to mean that there was no systematic oppression of the Emishi and similar groups in Japan.