This episode we are taking a trip down the Silk Road--or perhaps even the Spice Road--as we investigate references in this reign to individuals from "Tukara" who seem to have arrived in Yamato and stayed for a while.

For photos and more, see our podcast webpage: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-119

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. This is episode 119: The Question of “Tukara”

Traveling upon the ocean was never exactly safe. Squalls and storms could arise at any time, and there was always a chance that high winds and high waves could capsize a vessel. Most people who found themselves at the mercy of the ocean could do little but hold on and hope that they could ride out whatever adverse conditions they met with.

Many ships were lost without any explanation or understanding of what happened to them. They simply left the port and never came back home.

And so when the people saw the boat pulling up on the shores of Himuka, on the island of Tsukushi, they no doubt empathized with the voyagers’ plight. The crew looked bedraggled, and their clothing was unfamiliar. There were both men and women, and this didn’t look like your average fishing party. If anything was clear it was this: These folk weren’t from around here.

The locals brought out water and food. Meanwhile, runners were sent with a message: foreigners had arrived from a distant place. They then waited to see what the government was going to do.

We are still in the second reign of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tenno. Last episode we talked about the palaces constructed in Asuka, as well as some of the stone works that have been found from the period, and which appear to be referenced in the Nihon Shoki—at least tangentially. The episodes before that, we looked at the expeditions the court sent to the far north of Honshu and even past Honshu to Hokkaido.

This episode we’ll again be looking past the main islands of the archipelago to lands beyond. Specifically, we are going to focus on particularly intriguing references to people from a place called “Tukara”. We’ll talk about some of the ideas about where that might be, even if they’re a bit far-fetched. That’s because Tukara touches on the state of the larger world that Yamato was a part of, given its situation on the far eastern edge of what we know today as the Silk Road. And is this just an excuse for me to take a detour into some of the more interesting things going on outside the archipelago? No comment.

The first mention of a man from Tukara actually comes at the end of the reign of Karu, aka Koutoku Tennou. We are told that in the fourth month of 654 two men and two women of “Tukara” and one woman of “Sha’e” were driven by a storm to Hiuga.

Then, three years later, the story apparently picks up again, though possibly referring to a different group of people. On the 3rd day of the 7th month of 657, so during the second reign of Takara Hime, we now hear about two men and four women of the Land of Tukara—no mention of Sha’e—who drifted to Tsukushi, aka Kyushu. The Chronicles mention that these wayfarers first drifted to the island of Amami, and we’ll talk about that in a bit, but let’s get these puzzle pieces on the table, first. After those six people show up, the court sent for them by post-horse. They must have arrived by the 15th of that same month, because we are told that a model of Mt. Sumi was erected and they—the people from Tukara—were entertained, although there is another account that says they were from “Tora”.

The next mention is the 10th day of the 3rd month of 659, when a Man of Tukara and his wife, again woman of Sha’e, arrived. Then, on the 16th day of the 7th month of 660, we are told that the man of Tukara, Kenzuhashi Tatsuna, desired to return home and asked for an escort. He planned to pay his respects at the Great Country, i.e. the Tang court, and so he left his wife behind, taking tens of men with him.

All of these entries might refer to people regularly reaching Yamato from the south, from a place called “Tukara”. Alternately, this is a single event whose story has gotten distributed over several years, as we’ve seen happen before with the Chronicles. . One of the oddities of these entries is that the terms used are not consistent. “Tukara” is spelled at least two different ways, suggesting that it wasn’t a common placename like Silla or Baekje, or even the Mishihase. That does seem to suggest that the Chronicles were phonetically trying to find kanji, or the Sinitic characters, to match with the name they were hearing. I would also note that “Tukara” is given the status of a “kuni”—a land, country, or state—while “sha’e”, where some of the women are said to come from, is just that, “Sha’e”.

As for the name of at least one person from Tokara, Kenzuhashi Tatsuna, that certainly sounds like someone trying to fit a non-Japanese name into the orthography of the time. “Tatsuna” seems plausibly Japanese, but “Kenzuhashi” doesn’t fit quite as well into the naming structures we’ve seen to this point.

The location of “Tukara” and “Sha’e” are not clear in any way, and as such there has been a lot of speculation about them. While today there are placenames that fit those characters, whether or not these were the places being referenced at the time is hard to say.

I’ll actually start with “Sha’e”, which Aston translates as Shravasti, the capital of the ancient Indian kingdom of Kosala, in modern Uttar Pradesh. It is also where the Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, is said to have lived most of his life after his enlightenment. In Japanese this is “Sha’e-jou”, and like many Buddhist terms it likely comes through Sanskrit to Middle Chinese to Japanese. One—or possibly two—women from Shravasti making the journey to Yamato in the company of a man (or men) from Tukara seems quite the feat.

But then, where is “Tukara”? Well, we have at least three possible locations that I’ve seen bandied about. I’ll address them from the most distant to the closest option. These three options were Tokharistan, Dvaravati, and the Tokara islands.

We’ll start with Tokharistan on the far end of the Silk Road. And to start, let’s define what that “Silk Road” means. We’ve talked in past episodes about the “Western Regions”, past the Han-controlled territories of the Yellow River. The ancient Tang capital of Chang’an was built near to the home of the Qin dynasty, and even today you can go and see both the Tang tombs and the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi and his terracotta warriors, all within a short distance of Xi’an, the modern city built on the site of Chang’an. That city sits on a tributary of the Yellow River, but the main branch turns north around the border of modern Henan and the similarly sounding provinces of Shanxi and Shaanxi. Following it upstream, the river heads north into modern Mongolia, turns west, and then heads south again, creating what is known as the Ordos loop. Inside is the Ordos plateau, also known as the Ordos Basin. Continuing to follow the Yellow river south, on the western edge of the Ordos, you travel through Ningxia and Gansu—home of the Hexi, or Gansu, Corridor. That route eventually takes to Yumenguan, the Jade Gate, and Dunhuang. From there roads head north or south along the edge of the Taklamakan desert in the Tarim basin. The southern route travels along the edge of the Tibetan plateau, while the northern route traversed various oasis cities through Turpan, Kucha, to the city of Kashgar. Both routes made their way across the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush into South Asia.

We’ve brought up the Tarim Basin and the Silk Road a few times. This is the path that Buddhism appears to have taken to get to the Yellow River Basin and eventually to the Korean Peninsula and eastward to the Japanese archipelago. But I want to go a bit more into detail on things here, as there is an interesting side note about “Tukara” that I personally find rather fascinating, and thought this would be a fun time to share.

Back in Episode 79 we talked about how the Tarim basin used to be the home to a vast inland sea, which was fed by the meltwater from the Tianshan and Kunlun mountains. This sea eventually dwindled, though it was still large enough to be known to the Tang as the Puchang Sea. Today it has largely dried up, and it is mostly just the salt marshes of Lop Nur that remain. Evidence for this larger sea, however, can be observed in some of the burials found around the Tarim basin. These burials include the use of boat-shaped structures—a rather curious feature to be found out in the middle of the desert.

And it is the desert that was left behind as the waters receded that is key to much of what we know about life in the Tarim basin, as it has proven to be quite excellent at preserving organic material. This includes bodies, which dried out and naturally turned into mummies, including not only the wool clothing they were wearing, but also features such as hair and even decoration.

These “Tarim mummies”, as they have been collectively called, date from as early as 2100 BCE all the way up through the period of time we’re currently talking about, and have been found in several desert sites: Xiaohe, the earliest yet discovered; Loulan, near Lop Nur on the east of the Ta...