Iki no Hakatoko

Who They Were

Iki no Hakatoko (伊吉博徳) was a Japanese diplomat, jurist and writer of the seventh century, active in the Asuka period (飛鳥時代, Asuka jidai), the era of Japanese history running from 538 to 710 during which the imperial court was based in the Asuka region and Japanese statecraft, law and writing were reshaped under heavy continental influence. He belonged to the Iki family (壱岐氏, Iki-shi), a lineage whose name is also that of Iki, an island off the north-west coast of Kyushu.

Hakatoko is known above all for two things: service on embassies to the Chinese Tang court and to the Korean kingdom of Silla, and a written record of those journeys, Iki no Hakatoko no Sho (伊吉博徳書), which is counted as the oldest diary written by a Japanese. The original text does not survive; its contents are known from passages quoted in the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀), the court chronicle completed in 720.

Life and Career

Hakatoko's career is dated by convention from around 650, in the Hakuchi era (白雉, Hakuchi), a nengō (年号, era name) adopted at the court in that period. He worked in three connected roles — diplomat, jurist and writer — a combination that was natural in seventh-century Japan, when men who had studied Chinese letters and law were precisely the men sent abroad to represent the court and to observe how a great continental state governed itself.

His diplomatic service took him to Tang China (唐, Tō) and to Silla (新羅, Shiragi), the south-eastern kingdom of the Korean peninsula. Japan in this period sent repeated missions to the Tang court, importing Chinese law, Buddhism, script and administrative technique, and it also dealt intensively with the Korean kingdoms, sometimes as ally, sometimes as rival. Hakatoko's missions belong to this traffic.

The record he kept of his embassy to Tang China is the work for which he is remembered. Iki no Hakatoko no Sho (伊吉博徳書), also referred to as Iki no Hakatoko no Fumi, set down the course of the journey and the business of the mission. No copy of the original has been preserved; what is known of it comes from extracts quoted in the Nihon Shoki, which used such records as source material for its account of the court's foreign relations.

Why They Matter

Hakatoko's importance is twofold. First, his diary is regarded as the oldest example of a diary in Japan — the earliest Japanese writing of the kind that records events day by day from the writer's own experience, rather than chronicle entries compiled after the fact. Second, the diary is one of the earliest first-hand Japanese accounts of the continent: a Japanese official describing, in his own words, a mission to Tang China.

That the text survives only in quotation matters for how it is read. The Nihon Shoki's extracts preserve fragments of a personal record inside an official chronicle, and those fragments are among the few windows onto how a seventh-century Japanese embassy actually travelled and conducted itself. Hakatoko's legal expertise also places him among the specialists through whom Chinese-style law and administration entered Japan during the Asuka period.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 伊吉博徳, read in kana as いき の はかとこ, and romanised as Iki no Hakatoko. The の (no) between family name and personal name is the possessive particle, standard in Japanese names of the period.

• 伊 — read い (i) here. The character means "that one" or "he"; in Japanese names it is largely phonetic, chosen for its sound rather than its sense.
• 吉 — read き (ki) here. It means "good fortune" or "lucky", and is a common element in personal and place names.
• 博 — read はか (haka) here. It means "broad", "wide", or "extensive", and by extension "well-versed" or "learned" — a fitting element for a man described as a scholar and jurist.
• 徳 — read とこ (toko) here. It means "virtue", "merit" or "moral excellence".

Read together, 伊吉 (いき, Iki) is the family name, written with two characters used for their sound. 博徳 (はかとこ, Hakatoko) is the personal name, and its two characters carry real meaning: "broad virtue" or "wide merit". The name as a whole therefore reads as a family name of the Iki lineage followed by a given name built from auspicious, scholarly characters — typical of seventh-century names among families serving the court.

Legacy

Iki no Hakatoko's legacy rests on a text that no longer exists as a physical document. The Iki no Hakatoko no Sho is known only through the Nihon Shoki, yet on that basis it holds a fixed place in the history of Japanese writing: the oldest Japanese diary, and an early first-hand record of a Japanese embassy to Tang China.

For the history of the Japanese language, the diary is a landmark in the shift from inscribed, public, monumental text toward private, sequential, experiential prose — writing that follows a journey as it happens. Hakatoko's double career, as a jurist trained in continental law and a diplomat sent to the Tang and Silla courts, also makes him a representative figure of the Asuka period: an age when Japanese officials travelled abroad, studied what they found, and wrote it down.