The Emperor Kami Yamato Ihare-biko's personal name was
- ↑ Emperor is as near an equivalent as possible of the Chinese 天皇. Both are foreign words. The Japanese interlinear gloss is Sumera Mikoto "supreme majesty," sumera having the same root as suberu, "to unite as a whole"; hence, "to have general control of." See Satow, "Rituals," "T.A.S.J.," VII., ii., p. 113.
Yamato, see above, note to p. 13.
Ihare is the name of a district of Yamato; Hiko means prince.
Jimmu (divine valour) is a posthumous name. These names for the earlier Mikados were invented in the reign of Kwammu (782–806), after the "Nihongi" was written, but it is necessary to mention them, as they are in universal use by Japanese writers.
In this narrative we have probably a legendary echo of a real movement of population from Kiushiu eastwards to Yamato, at some time before the Christian epoch, but it is not safe to go further than this. The details are manifestly fictitious, some of them, as the quotations from Chinese books put into the mouth of Jimmu Tennō, demonstrably so.
Granting for a moment that the narrative of the Conquest of Yamato by Jimmu Tennō is substantially true, the question arises, Of what race were the tribes whom he found there? I would suggest that they may have been the Southern Wa mentioned in the "Shan hai king," a very ancient Chinese book, as being, along with the Northern Wa, subject to the kingdom of Yen. The Chinese in ancient times had a notion that Yamato lay to the south of Kiushiu. Yen, a kingdom of Northern China, had an independent existence from B.C. 1122 to B.C. 265. Chamberlain has pointed out that the ancient legends of Japan are connected with three distinct centres—Idzumo, Yamato, and Tsukushi, which is some indication that these places were also centres of governmental authority. The names given to the chieftains subdued by Jimmu Tennō are unmistakably Japanese, as are also those of the places which they inhabited. I cannot agree with Chamberlain in deriving Yamato, Ki, Shima, etc., from Aino words, when obvious Japanese explanations are available. There is another Yamato in Chikugo, where the Aino derivation is surely out of place. I have no desire, however, to dispute all his Aino derivations of place names
