Of the two rivals of the Soga family, that which was the first to decline in power was the Ohtomo. The next to decay was the family of the Mononobe. The fall of the rivals of the Soga must be attributed to the growth of the latter family, which owed much to the help given by the immigrants mentioned above. And as the introducers of Buddhism were to be found among these immigrants, it was very natural that the family of Soga should be among the first to be converted to the new religion. Thus the aggrandisement of the Soga family, the propagation of Buddhism which it patronised, and the progress of civilisation in general went on hand in hand. In the middle of the sixth century, that is to say, in the reign of the Emperor Kimmei, Iname was the head of the Soga family. In his time the Mononobe family could still hold its own against him, though at some disadvantage. When, however, Umako, the son of Iname, succeeded his father, he was at last able to overthrow the power of his antagonist Moriya of the Mononobe, after defeating and killing him in battle, with the aid of the prince Shôtoku, who was also a devotee of the new religion.
Thus in the course of several hundred years the gradual process of centralisation had been slowly drawing to its goal. In the beginning of the seventh century at last, the noted families of old were all eclipsed by the single family of the Soga, which towered alone in wealth and power above the others. At the same time instead of having the imperial house as the nucleus of centralisation, the Emperor began to tower high above the other members of his family. He was the owner of a very vast domain and of a multitude of people of various classes. He was the head of the ancestral cult. The sacred emblem of his divine origin, which had formerly been kept in the imperial camp, was now removed from the palace for fear of profanation, and taken to its present resting-place in the province of Ise. Yet the removal did more to increase than to lessen the sanctity of his person. On the other hand, his authority was in danger of being usurped by the all-powerful mayor of the palace, the family of Soga, which had become too strong for the emperor easily to manage. The times became very critical. In order to push still further the process of centralisation which had been going on, and to make the empire better consolidated, some decisive stroke was necessary. And the revolutionary change was at last accelerated by the overgrown power of the Soga family, the opening of regular intercourse with China, and above all the strong necessity within and without to consolidate the empire more and more.
CHAPTER V
REMODELING OF THE STATE
Japan stood on the verge of a crisis, and it was saved from catastrophe by two causes. First, by the ceaseless importation of high Chinese civilisation, which steadily encouraged the political concentration; secondly, by the necessity of centralisation so as to push on vigorously the attack on the still powerful Ainu.
As I have mentioned several times before, the Ainu had been a losing party in the racial struggle with the Japanese, yet their resistance had been a very stubborn one, so that at the end of the sixth century they could still hold their ground against the Japanese on the southern boundary of the present provinces of Iwaki and Iwashiro, which roughly corresponds to latitude 37° N. The northern part of Japan, therefore, was still in constant danger of incursions by the hairy race. For a country in the infant stage of consolidation, as Japan was at that time, it was by no means an easy task to ward off the frequent inroads of that race, and at the same time to continue the process of the inner organisation of the state. One would perhaps wonder at my conclusion, starting from the consideration that the Ainu scare was not such a fearful thing as to influence the natural growth of a state formed by the stronger race. This misconception arises from the ignorance of the fact that the famous dictum "delenda est Carthago" was only pronounced after the first Punic war. Necessity by itself does not create the desire to secure what is necessary. The desire to attain any aim first comes into consciousness when one begins to feel strong enough to venture to attain it. When the Ainu was very powerful, the Japanese had to contend with them mainly in order to secure a foothold against them. It was none the less necessary for the Japanese to continue to struggle with the Ainu, when the former became strong enough to face the antagonist evenhanded. Lastly, the time arrived now when it became an urgent necessity for the Japanese to crush the Ainu, in order to achieve undisturbed a full political organisation in the domain within the four seas. In short, when the Japanese became so convinced of their might that they could not tolerate any rival within the principal islands, they found it even more indispensable to organise themselves as compactly as possible under one strong supreme head than ever before.
What most facilitated the centralisation under the imperial rule was of course the imported Chinese civilisation. To say sooth, several centuries of the slow infiltration of that high civilisation had already attained a great deal of influence, but it was rather a smuggled, and not a really legalised importation. Moreover, China herself, the source from which the civilisation had to be imported, had been dismembered for a long time, so that until 581 A.D. the country could hardly be called a unified state at all. How could we expect to find in a country where no order ruled a model suitable to be employed as exemplar to effect a durable political reform. It is not strange, therefore, that, notwithstanding the long years of intercourse between the two countries, only a very slight change had been thereby occasioned in our country as regards our political organisation. Any change which was wrought in our political sphere by Chinese influence was effected in a very indirect way, having worked its way through multifarious social changes caused by the contact with the high alien civilisation. No direct political clue could be followed up from China to this country. To achieve the purpose of borrowing from China the necessary materials for the reconstruction of political Japan, we had to wait longer, that is to say, till the inauguration of regular intercourse between this country and China also politically unified and concentrated.
That memorable year came at last. In 607 A.D. Ono-no-Imoko was despatched as official envoy to China, which at that time was under the second emperor of the dynasty of Sui. Even before this date, however, since the accession of the Empress Suiko, as the result of the busy intercourse between us and the peninsular states, various arts and useful sciences of Chinese origin had been introduced into this country, among which astronomy, the oldest perhaps of all sciences everywhere in the world, was the most noteworthy. Connected with this science, the art of calendar-making was introduced for the first time into Japan. It would be a gross mistake, if we thereby conclude that we had no means of defining the dates of events prior to this introduction. Although we could not by ourselves make an independent calendarial system, yet the Japanese, at least the naturalised scribes, had already been acquainted with two chronological methods. The one was to define a date by counting from the year of the accession of a reigning emperor. The other method was that which had prevailed long since in China, that is to say, to define a date by counting according to the cyclical order of the twelve zodiacal signs, interlaced with the cyclical order of ten attributes, so that to complete one cycle sixty years were necessary. Some groups of scribes, perhaps, pursued the former method, while others favoured the latter. Contradictory statements and evident repetitions abundantly found in the Nihongi were thus occasioned by the existence of historical materials, dated according to two different chronological systems. For the compilers of the famous chronicle sometimes mistook one and the same event found in different sources and given in two different chronological systems, for two independent events resembling each other only in certain superficial respects. Otherwise they misunderstood two entirely distinct events having the same cyclical designation in date as a single occurrence, narrated in two different ways, ignoring the fact that there might have been two like events which happened at a chronological distance of sixty years or some multiple of that cycle of time. Confusion of this kind was unavoidable in ages where there was no established method of defining a historical date. It was a great gain, therefore, that astronomy and the art of calendar-making chanced to be introduced in 602 A.D., the tenth year of the reign of the Empress.