How Xu Fu got to Japan

A tomb of Xu Fu stands at Shingu, on the Kumano coast, under a marker that reads 秦徐福之墓, “tomb of Xu Fu of Qin”.⁷ The marker is dated 1736.⁷ Its inscription is credited to the Confucian Yi Maegye, who lived from 1617 to 1682, at the order of Tokugawa Yorinobu, the first lord of Kishu, who died in 1671.⁷ By our count, both men had been dead for more than fifty years when the stone was dated.⁷ The Shiji sends Xu Fu over the sea and does not say where he went.⁸¹

Twenty places claimed him

By the Edo period more than twenty places along the coasts of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku claimed a Xu Fu site.³ Wu Weiming, who has surveyed the writing of the Tokugawa age, says the Kumano telling stayed the most widely told of them, and that the relics piled up there: a tomb of seven retainers, Xu Fu paper, a Xu Fu dance, a saddle and an old stone wall.¹²

Xu Fu paper has a story attached. A monk of the Enshin temple at Nachi-Katsuura told Momoi Tōu that Xu Fu had lived at Kumano and taught paper-making, and that a village or two nearby still made it.¹¹ Wu notes that paper appeared only under the Eastern Han, long after Xu Fu’s time.¹¹

At Saga the claim rests on a picture of the origin of the Kinryū shrine, dated 1648, which shows his landing.¹³ The shrine’s account makes Xu Fu the First Emperor’s third son.¹⁴ The Hizen koseki engi of 1665 calls him taishi, “prince”, and has him set a cup afloat at the landing place, which gave the place its name, Bubai, “floating cup”.¹⁵ Hua Xuemei, who traced Saga’s place names, objects and records, concludes that the telling spread among ordinary people in the Edo period.¹⁶

The official histories of the age took him in. The Honchō tsūgan of Hayashi Razan and his son Gahō says under Emperor Kōrei, “in the seventy-second year, Xu Fu of Qin came”, and the Mito Dai Nihonshi has the First Emperor sending the books of the Five Emperors and Three Kings to the Japanese emperor.¹⁷ Not everyone agreed. Arai Hakuseki wrote in 1716 that Yizhou did not mean Japan and that Xu Fu was not the first immigrant from China.¹⁸ Takizawa Bakin, in 1820, said the standard histories do not record Xu Fu at Kumano, but that the story comes from old custom and cannot be denied, and he guessed that the herb Xu Fu sought was Kumano’s wild ginseng.⁹

The stone at Shingu has its own puzzle. The city’s page dates the marker to 1736, and the Kumano tourism page says Yorinobu planned the tomb and that it was put up at its present site about a hundred years later.⁷ Shimada Masao placed the founding of the tomb in the late Muromachi period.¹⁹ No source we read says whether the stone of 1736 replaced an older one carrying the same words.

Later claims went further. The Miyashita documents of Fujiyoshida, made public in 1883 and tied to Xu Fu, are held by most scholars to be a forgery.²⁰ In 1950 Wei Tingsheng argued that Emperor Jimmu was Xu Fu himself, and Japanese scholars led by Ienaga Saburō questioned it.²¹

A chronicle that leaves him out

The earliest Japanese-written text we could open that names Xu Fu is a poem, and it was written in China.²² In 1376 the Zen monk Zekkai Chūshin was received by the Hongwu emperor of the Ming, and on the emperor’s order wrote a poem on the “three mountains” that opens with a Xu Fu shrine in front of the peak at Kumano.²² Wu reports older Kumano poems, by the monk Mugaku Sogen and the Yuan poet Wu Lai, and dates a first mention of a Xu Fu shrine at Kumano to a text of 1075.²³²⁴ We have seen none of them.

The other early Japanese text is a chronicle, the Jinnō shōtōki, written in 1339 by Kitabatake Chikafusa.²⁵ Its passage under Emperor Kōrei brings in the First Emperor of Qin and does not name Xu Fu.²⁶

Thirty-five years later, the chronicle says, China burned its books and buried its Confucians, so Confucius’s complete classics stayed in Japan.²⁶ Chikafusa adds that this is recorded in the books of a foreign court, and admits that nobody has heard of writing in Japan as early as Kōrei’s time, though high antiquity may simply not have been recorded with care.²⁷ There is no Xu Fu in any of it.²⁶

A poem about a sword

A Song poem on a Japanese sword makes Xu Fu the ancestor of the Japanese.²⁸ It says Japan lies on a large island, that Xu Fu deceived the Qin people, went to gather herbs and lingered until the boys he took grew old, that craftsmen and the five grains came with him so that Japan’s craftwork is still fine, and that he left before the books were burned, so that lost books survive there.²⁸ Jin, following Zhu Dongrun, says it was probably composed in 1058.²⁹

Whose poem it is has been disputed for centuries. It stands in the supplementary collection of Ouyang Xiu and in the collected writings of Sima Guang.³⁰ Jin Chengyu argues for Sima Guang. The poem is in the collection Sima Guang compiled himself, while Ouyang’s supplementary collection was compiled by later hands, and scholars have long said it contains forgeries.³¹ Jin says the first to state it clearly was a Japanese scholar, Kusaka Hiroshi, in an essay of 1883, and that Yang Shoujing, who was in Japan collecting books at the time, took the view over.³² A Northern Song anecdote already has a courtier quoting the lines as Ouyang’s, to answer a minister who asked whether Korea held a hundred chapters of the Shangshu.³³

The lines about the books outlived any proof of them. A Joseon envoy asked Hayashi Razan to let him see the pre-Qin books Xu Fu was said to have taken; Jin says it is not known how Razan answered.³⁴ In 1711 Arai Hakuseki told another envoy that lost books survived at Atsuta and Izumo.³⁵ When the envoy asked to borrow them, Hakuseki declined because sacred books could not be shown, and Wu, following Iki Ichirō, says they had probably burned in a fire and were likely forgeries.³⁵ Amenomori Hōshū, in a conversation the Joseon envoy Sin Yu-han reported from his journey of 1719, called Ouyang Xiu’s claim completely unreasonable.³⁶ Hayashi Kō named a collection of rare surviving books, the Isson sōsho of 1799, after the poem, while writing in its preface that he did not know the evidence for the hundred chapters.³⁷

The poem has Xu Fu carry the books to Japan. The chronicle of 1339 has the First Emperor send them to Japan on request.²⁸²⁶ Jin says nothing confirms a direct link between the two, though by Chikafusa’s time Japanese writers already believed the classics were kept in Japan.³⁸

A monk’s book of the 950s

The Yichu liutie is a Buddhist reference book compiled by the monk Yichu, begun in 945 and finished in 954, according to Sano Seiko.³⁹ Hua Xuemei calls Yichu the first to say that Xu Fu’s party went to Japan, though a Tang poem, below, comes close.⁴⁰⁶ The entry on Japan opens like this.

Further down the entry a mountain more than a thousand li to the northeast is named Fuji, and also Penglai.⁴ It says Xu Fu “stopped here” and called it Penglai, and that his descendants all bear the name Qin, as the entry puts it.⁴ Yichu puts Xu Fu at Fuji, not at Kumano.⁴

The Fuji lines come after a report from a Japanese monk, the Great Master Hongshun, in a passage the entry dates to the fifth year of Xiande, which is 958 by our conversion.⁴² Sano gives 954 as the year the book was finished.³⁹ The entry as printed therefore mentions an event four years later than that, and nothing we read says whether the sentence was added afterwards. Wu gives 955 for the book.⁴³

Islands beyond Kuaiji

Before Yichu, the Chinese histories that tell the story put Xu Fu on an island, and the island is not called Japan.⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶

The Sanguo zhi, by Chen Shou, who died in 297, says that in the second year of Huanglong, which is 230 by our conversion, Sun Quan of Wu sent the generals Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi with 10,000 men to look for Yizhou and Danzhou.⁴⁴⁴⁷ The text says elders passed on a report that Xu Fu had stopped on Danzhou and never come back, and that tens of thousands of households lived there now.⁴⁴ The fleet brought back several thousand people from Yizhou and never reached Danzhou.⁴⁴

The Hou Han shu, by Fan Ye, passes the story on as hearsay (傳言) at the very end of its section on Wo, a name for Japan.⁴⁵⁴¹ Xu Fu, afraid of punishment, stayed on the island, the paragraph reports, and its people sometimes come to the market at Kuaiji.⁴⁵ The paragraph is about islands beyond Kuaiji, not about Wo itself.⁴⁵ Wu and Hua both read these histories as stopping short of saying Xu Fu reached Japan.⁴⁶

A commentary on the Shiji quotes an older geography, the Kuodi zhi, on Danzhou: it lies in the East Sea, Xu Fu stopped there, and people from the island sometimes trade at Kuaiji.⁴⁸ The commentary adds a Wu-era map book that puts Danzhou 10,000 li from Langya.⁴⁸ A Song gazetteer of the Taizhou area quotes a note that puts Yizhou, and Xu Fu with it, thirty li from the prefecture; we read that only in a transcription not proofread against the scan.⁴⁹

One Tang poem comes closer to Japan. Pi Rixiu wrote two poems to send the monk Yuanzai home to Japan, and the second has a line asking how many of the regions there are Danzhou.⁶ A note on the line says the island lies beyond Kuaiji and is said to hold Xu Fu’s descendants.⁶ The copy we read, an unproofed transcription of the Siku Quan Tang shi, does not say who wrote the note.⁶ It is not a statement that Xu Fu reached Japan, but it puts his island among Japan’s lands in a poem addressed to a Japanese.⁶

The marshes in the Shiji

The Shiji tells of Xu Fu in the Basic Annals of the First Emperor and in the Huainan biography.⁸² In the 28th year of the First Emperor, Xu Fu, whose name is written 徐巿 there, a man of Qi, wrote that the sea held three spirit mountains, Penglai, Fangzhang and Yingzhou, where immortals lived.⁸ He asked leave to seek them with boys and girls, and the emperor sent him with several thousand.⁸ By the 35th year the emperor was complaining that Xu Fu and others had spent sums counted in the billions without finding the drug.⁵⁰

In the 37th year, on the coast near Langya, the Shiji says that Xu Fu and others had spent years at sea and large sums, and feared a rebuke, so he claimed a huge shark blocked the way to Penglai.⁵¹ The emperor dreamed of fighting a sea god, and at Zhifu he shot a large fish.⁵¹ The emperor died that year, in 210 BCE.⁵² The Basic Annals do not follow Xu Fu any further.⁵¹

The Huainan biography, which writes the name 徐福, has him in a speech. A courtier named Wu Bei tells the King of Huainan that Xu Fu came back with a false report of a sea god.² The emperor then sent 3,000 boys and girls with grain seeds and craftsmen, and Xu Fu found 平原廣澤, “plain and wide marshes”, stopped there and did not come back.² The craftsmen and grain that the Song poem credits to Xu Fu are in this speech, not in the Basic Annals.²⁸²⁸ The Shiji’s treatise on the Feng and Shan sacrifices describes voyages to the same mountains and does not name him.⁵³

None of these passages names a country, and the one place word, 平原廣澤, is the marshes.¹ Hua says scholars still argue where they were.¹ No text we read before the 950s says outright that Xu Fu reached Japan.⁴⁶⁴⁰⁵