Emishi Language

[Ross Bender]

In the Nihon Kōki account of Kanmu's reign for Enryaku 11 (792) there is a batch of names of "surrendered Emishi"  夷俘  from Dewa and Michinooku:: (The readings are from the 2003 edition edited by Kuroita Nobuo and Morita Tei) Some are given the kabane of 'kimi' and some have Japanese sounding names (Sukunamaro). See at bottom:

These names prompted me to see what I could find about the Emishi language in English language sources. 

From "Japan considered from the hypothesis of farmer/language spread" (2020) ed. de Boer, Yang, Kawagoe, Barnes:  Japan considered from the hypothesis of farmer/language spread - PMC   

"‘Emishi’ in the Nara period is understood to have been a word that designated people who lived in the north beyond the reach of the state. It was neither an ethnonym nor referred to a way of life but was an administrative term – and so encompassed everyone living beyond state jurisdiction regardless of subsistence, language, or genetic background. We assume that those emishi who practised rice agriculture spoke Japanese, but Ainu place names surviving from Niigata and Fukushima northwards clearly indicate that the Ainu language was being spoken by some emishi (see Hudson, 1994, fig. 1). Historical documents record the need for interpreters at least once during the state expansion into the north (the Emishi Wars 774–811), which ended abruptly with the court abandoning its military campaigns (Friday, 1997); the Epi-Jōmon included among the emishi were very likely speakers of an Ainu-related language, and most linguists view Ainu as a relic Jōmon language. It is clear that evidence of the Ainu language predates the emergence of the Ainu people in historical documents in the seventeenth century (Hudson, 1999)."

Mark Hudson in "The Linguistic Prehistory of Japan: Some Archaeological Speculations" (1994 -p. 224, Fig 1) gives a map of the distribution of Ainu place names in Hokkaido and Tohoku. The Linguistic Prehistory of Japan: Some Archaeological Speculations

Alexander Vovin's article "On the Linguistic Prehistory of Hokkaido" (2016) examines the relaionship between Ainu and the Nivx of Sakhalin/Kuril. (Studia Orientalia 117 - Crosslinguistics and Linguistic Crossings in Northeat Asia)

This only scratches the surface of studies on whether Ainu and or Emishi were Jomon remnants, etc etc etc. My question is whether this is an active field of research and what other sources might be found in English or Japanese.

Isawa no Kimi Adoshiki 胆澤公阿奴志己

Isanokimi Awaso 爾散南公阿破蘇

 

Kimikobe no Mamaro 吉彌侯部眞麻呂

Otomobe no Sukunamaro大伴部宿奈麻呂

Isanokimi Awaso 爾散南公阿波蘇

Ukame no Kimi Onga 宇漢米公隱賀

Kimikobe Arashima 吉彌侯部荒嶋

Ross Bender

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[John Kupchik]

Emishi were certainly Ainu, though the term may have also encompassed other non-Japanese groups in the area (if there were any others). For a good overview of this topic, see the chapter by Juha Janhunen ("Ainu ethnic origins") in the recent Handbook of the Ainu Language (Anna Bugaeva, ed., 2024).

As for the names of the surrendered Emishi, 胆澤 isapa (nö) in 胆澤公阿奴志己 might be an attempt to transcribe Ainu e-sapa(ne) 'head (position), chief', since 胆澤 is nonsensical in Old Japanese, and thus clearly ateji. 

Best,

John Kupchik

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Kupchik

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[Elijah Bender]

Forgive my ignorance here as I'm way off in the 16th century, but my understanding was that it is not at all clear that Emishi were Ainu (or I suppose it would be the other way around), nor is the question of whether or not either of those groups are direct descendants of Jomon people.

Have there been some recent breakthroughs on this topic? 

Elijah Bender, PhD
History Department
Concordia College

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[Margaret McKean]

I usually lurk rather than speak up, but I went to the site of Shiwa-jo in Morioka -- the fort built in 803 by Sakanoue no Tamuramaro after he subjugated the Emishi, or so he claimed – in 2014 with a professor of Japanese history at Iwate National University (sorry I can’t remember his name…).  He told me that he was convinced that the Emishi were not Ainu, or at least not totally so, because in addition to guerrilla tactics, they used mounted horseback archery, and the Yamato Japanese did not yet do so. 

 

Sakanoue fought with the Emishi in the 38 years’ war, first being defeated by the Shiwa Emishi, and then at the battle of Koromo river by Aterui and his Isawa Emishi.  Sakanoue eventually won over the Shiwa Emishi as  allies to defeat the Isawa Emishi, defeating the Emishi in 802 only by adopting horseback archery himself.    This is consistent with the possibility that most of the Emishi, or at least the leaders who taught military tactics, were actually renegade Japanese who did not want to be taxed by Yamato or who wanted to create their own independent state in the north, either ruling over or ruling with the Ainu.  If we assume, as prevailing evidence suggests, that the Yamato Japanese elites, including Sakanoue himself (and maybe ordinary people also) were largely immigrants from Paekche in Korea like the Yayoi Japanese before them who had brought horses (and at some point, horseback archery) to Japan, the mystery then becomes why the Yamato Japanese were not using these techniques to start with.  Perhaps their military leaders had forgotten about these methods, or didn’t think it necessary to use them on a people they assumed were far less skilled than they actually were, whereas the Emishi escapees and leaders remembered well. 

 

Meg McKean

Normally a political scientist, but a fan of earlier Japanese history also.

Duke University

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[Howell, David L]

The Ainu culture of ethnographic accounts emerged by around the 13th century, many centuries after the Emishi lived. And of course, Ainu culture continued to evolve afterward, even before the Ainu came under the modern Japanese state. Accordingly, although it’s entirely reasonable to suppose the Ainu share ancestors with the Emishi, it would be misleading to say the Emishi were Ainu, full stop. The most responsible course would be to characterize the Emishi as “unassimilated people” in northeastern Honshu and leave it at that. Archaeologists have written about the material cultures associated with the Epi-Jōmon and succeeding Satsumon periods in the Tōhoku region. Changes in material culture, combined with the shift from reading 蝦夷 as Emishi to reading the compound as Ezo (which seems to have become prevalent at around the time Satsumon culture was giving way to Ainu culture), suggest a great deal of evolution over time. Small populations of people we can identify as Ainu survived in the Tsugaru peninsula until the Tokugawa period. As for language, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Emishi and Ainu spoke similar languages, or even that it was related to the Jōmon people’s language, but saying that the Emishi spoke Ainu, full stop, would be as misleading as saying the Venerable Bede spoke English, full stop. 

David L. Howell
Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History
Professor of History

Harvard University

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
2 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
dho...@fas.harvard.edu

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[Karl Friday]

With all due respect to Prof. McKean's Iwate colleague, he or she is entirely incorrect with regard to early military affairs in eighth-century Japan. Mounted archery was the premier military technology in Japan by the late fifth century, (and perhaps even much earlier). The role of archery on horseback continued to expand during the seventh century. Cavalry that was the decisive element when Tenmu swept to victory in the Jinshin War (672-73), and continued to be the main technology in later civil conflicts as well, carrying the day for the court in the Fujiwara Hirotsugu (740) and Fujiwara Nakamaro (764) revolts. The ritsuryō codes contain numerous exhortations for soldiers to train "with bow and horse," and required regimental officers and members of the palace guards to be skilled in mounted archery. The special contingents assembled to attend to ceremonies held for visiting foreign dignitaries were also invariably cavalry units. 

While it's true that the ritsuryō expeditionary armies--including those that were sent north to "pacify" the emishi in the late eighth and early ninth centuries--were predominantly infantry, that was a product of logistical issues, NOT a lack of Yamato appreciation for cavalry. There were several factors at play here, but perhaps the most fundamental was the difficulty of training short-term peasant conscripts to be useful mounted archers--an ability that required years of practice to master. The court addressed that problem by drawing cavalry troops from among those who already possessed the necessary skills--sorting those who knew how to ride and shoot into cavalry units and the rest into infantry. That policy had enormous affects on the future of Japanese military development, but that's another long story . . .

The court armies actually did quite well against the emishi, when the latter could be maneuvered into direct confrontations, but the emishi didn't need to stand and fight--and they didn't. Instead, they adopted hit-and-run raiding tactics, utilizing a tactical offense for strategically defensive purposes. The upset the court suffered at the Battle of Koromo River in 789 illustrates the problem very well. I discussed this in detail in my "Pushing Beyond the Pale" article a few years back, so I won't go into it here. But the key takeaway is that while Koromo River was a painful and humiliating experience for the court armies, it was only a short-term tactical setback, not a major strategic victory for the emishi. 

The court's eventual "victory" in the north had little to do with military developments, and lots to do with political loss of interest in the conflict. The strategy that did eventually work for the court was the same one it had employed since the mid seventh century: establishing outposts that drew emishi into the court's economic sphere, and coopting emishi leaders with ranks, titles, and positions of authority under the ritsuryō umbrella. This was, of course, a long, slow strategy, and not one conducive to the sort of quick, decisive victory the court had set out for at the start of the pacification era. So basically, the court just declared victory in 811, announced that the emishi had been pacified, and went home. From this point forward, the state's view of problems in the region shifted from one of controlling a foreign people on its frontier to one of internal administration and maintenance of order--but that was more a change of policy and outlook than of reality. Subjugated or not, the emishi continued to maintain a distinct identity as fushū  and continued to present special problems for administrators in the north into the tenth century and beyond. Armed uprisings by former emishi also continued. 

The whole notion of a "pacification era" was mostly a creation of court rhetoric and propaganda, bounded on both ends not by meaningful changes in military circumstance, but by declarations from the court.

Best,

 

======================================

カール・フライデー 歴史学博士

Karl Friday, PhD

Professor Emeritus 名誉教授

University of Georgia ・Saitama University

 ==================================

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[John Kupchik]

To clarify some points, here is a quote from Janhunen's recent book chapter (p. 66) on the Emishi-Ainu connection:

"The potentially most ancient ethnonym of the Ainu is “Enchiw”, which has been compared
with Japanese Emishi and its variants Ebisu and Ezo, all of which can reflect
an original form of the type *emisV ~ *emiciV. If this comparison is correct, 
it gives us another argument for identifying the historical Emishi as the ethnic ancestors of the Ainu."

And on p. 69 he goes on to write:

"We do not know, however, how ethno-specific this term (Emishi) originally was, where it came from, and whether it is a lexeme of true “Ainu” origin. The speakers of the directly ancestral forms of Ainu were, consequently, “Ainu” in the sense that they spoke a language of the same lineage, although they did not use the term “Ainu” for ethnic self-identification."

Proto-Ainu as a language can only be projected back roughly 1000 years from the present based on the dialect data available to us, but it developed from an earlier form of Ainu (there were likely several "Ainuic" languages in antiquity). Therefore, the language spoken during the Nara period is most accurately termed "pre-Proto-Ainu". With that in mind, there are some Ainu words in the Azuma-uta and Sakimori-uta and most of these are not attested in other Old Japanese texts. The majority are toponyms, but there are also some nouns (ya 'shore', na 'river', kariba 'sakura', etc.) and a conjunction (sida 'when'). This is linguistic evidence for an Ainu presence in areas of Azuma during and prior to the Nara period. 

Best,

John Kupchik

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Kupchik

PS: The publication date of the "Handbook of the Ainu Language" is 2022, not 2024 as I wrote in my previous message. Apologies for the error.

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[Margaret McKean]

Many thanks to Professor Friday for resolving two questions that had troubled me – why Yamato was not using mounted archery for a long while and did Sakanoue really subjugate people who managed to keep putting up a good fight for four more centuries?   I am grateful for the lead, and I just finished reading “Pushing Beyond the Pale” (JJS, 1:1, Winter 1997). 

 

Professor Friday makes very clear that the Yamato regime had to rely on occasional conscription of recruits who needed to be farmers most of the time to produce tax revenue (the regime simply was not rich enough to generate a large full-time army or to rely heavily on methods and equipment that required bigger investments).  Although each stockade in the north might have several hundred horses, the emphasis in battle had to be on short-term use of light infantry.  He shares the accounts of Yamato generals who bemoan the logistical problems of feeding and moving the (thousands of) infantry in hostile surroundings (problems that would have been far more challenging for maintaining large cavalry units).  In contrast, the Emishi use of even small units of light cavalry worked because of the hit-and-run techniques that they could use in their home territory.  In the end, the conquest was a long-term process of co-optation (the comparison in the article is to England’s gradual conquest of Wales by the same methods of building stockade/castle settlements over time). 

 

Back to the question of Emishi origins – here too, Professor Friday notes that the Yamato court’s description of the Emishi was nasty overblown propaganda, as at least some Yayoi migration had spread rice agriculture, horsemanship, metallurgy, and weaponry in the north.  I remain quite interested and curious about the role of anti-Yamato renegades among the Emishi.  Yamato was only one of several power centers before consolidation in the Nara basin, and it seems logical to me that people from Yamato’s rivals, especially Izumo, might have been particularly reluctant to join the Yamato state.  The north afforded ample space for people who might have wanted to evade Yamato’s reach.  Ted Kidder told me once that he suspected the people of Izumo might well have been from Silla, not from Paekche, so that rivalry would have been built-in even before considering power struggles within Japan.  

 

I look forward to further discussion --

 

Meg McKean

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[Ross Bender]

Just one more brief note. There is a single reference to an Emishi translator in the Rikkokushi, which appears in Sandai Jitsuroku in the year 881:

《卷卅九元慶五年（八八一）五月三日庚戌》○三日庚戌。從陸奥蝦夷訳語外從八位下物部斯波連永野外從五位下。」

[Ross Bender]

For those who wish more of a deep dive into Ainu (and Emishi) language, culture, and art, let me recommend Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, (1999), ed. by Fitzhugh and Dubreuil, published by the Arctic Studies Center of the National Museum of National History at the Smithsonian in association with University of Washington Press. Available from the Internet Archive -  Ainu : spirit of a northern people : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Among other mentions of the Emish/Ainu relationship is this from a chapter by Toshihiko Kikuchi, "Ainu Ties with Ancient Cultures of Northeast Asia."

"Biological mixing between Honshu Yayoi and early Epi-Jomon people is also indicated, and during the formation of the Satsumon culture, contact with the people called Emishi, who were an Ainu or Ainu-related group in northern Tohoku known in early Japanese written records must have occurred." (p. 50)

Finally, for those interested in the "Battle of the Koromo River" discussed by Karl Friday above, see both Farris and Friday:

 William Wayne Farris (1992/1995), Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500-1300, especially Chapter 3 ‘War in the Northeast and Technological Remedies, 770-900.’ 81-119. Farris has a map of the territory, p. 87. Karl Friday (1997), Pushing beyond the Pale: The Yamato Conquest of the Emishi and Northern Japan. Journal of Japanese Studies, 23/1: 1-24.

Also attached are several pages concerning this lengthy campaign in 789 (Enryaku 8) from my 2025 Emperor Kanmu, 786-791: A Translation from Shoku Nihongi 

Ross Bender

Amazon.com: Emperor Kanmu, 786-791: A Translation from Shoku Nihongi: 9798282927573: Bender, Ross, Bender, Ross Lynn: Books

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