A Study of Himiko

Where did Himiko, the queen of the third-century Chinese "Account of the People of Wo" (Wa, in the Japanese reading), rule? In 1910 the Kyoto historian Naitō Konan answered: not in northern Kyushu, as most scholars of his day believed, but in Yamato. His "A Study of Himiko" became one of the founding documents of the Yamatai debate that still divides historians of early Japan.

Naitō builds his case by philology. He chooses between the Chinese histories, reproduces the Wei chronicle's account of the Wo people in full, and then tests it phrase by phrase, matching its countries, officials and persons against place names in the Nihon shoki, the Engishiki register of shrines and early Japanese dictionaries. The book closes with his postscript of 1928, in which he corrects a flaw he found in his own argument and surveys the scholars who had taken up the question since.

This edition translates Naitō's Japanese and the classical Chinese text he quotes complete and unabridged, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information. His identifications are presented as he made them, as the scholarship of 1910, not as settled results.