Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast. Episode 53, The Sun Queen.

This week, we're going to talk about the earliest figure in Japanese history for whom we have

any written evidence. According to Chinese sources, she was the ruler of a land called

Yamatai, which she had unified after a devastating civil war.

Her name was Himiko, and though we have only scant evidence of her life, she's become a figure

of some importance in Japanese history and in the Japanese vision of their own history.

We know very little about who Himiko was or what she did.

The best record of her reign actually comes from China.

The Chinese have been writing histories for around 3,000 years.

The earliest written histories we have from China date from the Shang Dynasty in roughly 1200 BCE,

the so-called Oracle bone fragments, which puts them roughly at the same time as the historical

events surrounding the fall of Troy in the West. The Chinese historian Sima Qian was the first

to attempt to write a systemic narrative history of Chinese civilization,

completing the Taishur Gongshu, the records of the grand historian, around 100 BCE,

roughly at the same time as the struggle between Marius and Sulla for control of the Roman Republic.

Sima Qian submitted the traditional style of Chinese written history as narrative, moralistic,

with the goal of history being to provide moral examples to readers,

of both people they should emulate and figures they should disparage,

something it's shared with Greek and Roman history,

and most importantly, centered on the Chinese court.

It's from a later history written in the same style that we get the first mention of Himiko and her realm of Yamitai,

the Sanguo Jir, or Records of the Three Kingdoms, describing China in the 200 CE.

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