The , also read as Ashihase and Shukushin, were a people of ancient

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

, believed to have lived along the northern portion of the coast of the

Sea of Japan The Sea of Japan is the marginal sea between the Japanese archipelago, Sakhalin, the Korean Peninsula, and the mainland of the Russian Far East. The Japanese archipelago separates the sea from the Pacific Ocean. Like the Mediterranean Sea, it h ...

. The term

Sushen Sushen is the modern Chinese name for an ancient ethnic group of people who lived in the northeastern part of China (in the area of modern Jilin and Heilongjiang) and what is in modern times the Russian Maritime Province and some other Siberi ...

, rendered 肅愼, is found in Chinese records, but is annotated as Mishihase or Ashihase in

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

documents, which should have developed into *''Mishiwase'' or *''Ashiwase'' in modern Japanese if the word had survived in colloquial speech. According to the '' Nihon Shoki'', the Mishihase first arrived at

Sado Island is a city located on in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. Since 2004, the city has comprised the entire island, although not all of its total area is urbanized. Sado is the sixth largest island of Japan in area following the four main islands and Ok ...

during the reign of

Emperor Kinmei was the 29th Emperor of Japan, Imperial Household Agency (''Kunaichō'') 欽明天皇 (29) retrieved 2013-8-22. according to the traditional order of succession. Titsingh, Isaac. (1834)pp. 34–36 Brown, Delmer. (1979) ''Gukanshō,'' pp. 261– ...

. In 660, Japanese General

Abe no Hirafu was a Japanese military strategist and commander of the Asuka period. Some sources say he lived from c.575-664 Biography Events in his life are accounted in the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki, both written several decades after his death. His father ...

defeated the Mishihase in ''"Watarishima"'' at the request of the native inhabitants. During the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

Arai Hakuseki was a Confucianist, scholar-bureaucrat, academic, administrator, writer and politician in Japan during the middle of the Edo period, who advised the ''shōgun'' Tokugawa Ienobu. His personal name was Kinmi or Kimiyoshi (君美). Hakuseki (白� ...

proposed that Watarishima was

Ezo (also spelled Yezo or Yeso) is the Japanese term historically used to refer to the lands to the north of the Japanese island of Honshu. It included the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, which changed its name from "Ezo" to "Hokkaidō" in 18 ...

, which was later renamed

Hokkaidō is Japan's second largest island and comprises the largest and northernmost prefecture, making up its own region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō from Honshu; the two islands are connected by the undersea railway Seikan Tunnel. The la ...

. The battle place was recorded as the mouth of a large river, which is proposed to be

Ishikari River The , at long, is the third longest in Japan and the longest in Hokkaidō. The river drains an area of , making it the second largest in Japan, with a total discharge of around per year. It originates from Mount Ishikari in the Daisetsuzan V ...

. Some historians consider that the Mishihase were identical to the Tungusic Sushen in Chinese records, but others think that the

Japanese people The are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Japanese archipelago."人類学上は，旧石器時代あるいは縄文時代以来，現在の北海道〜沖縄諸島（南西諸島）に住んだ集団を祖先にもつ人々。" () Jap ...

named the indigenous people in the northeast based on their knowledge of Chinese records, just as the Chinese did during the

Three Kingdoms The Three Kingdoms () from 220 to 280 AD was the tripartite division of China among the dynastic states of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu. The Three Kingdoms period was preceded by the Han dynasty#Eastern Han, Eastern Han dynasty and wa ...

period. Most, including Kisao Ishizuki (1979) of the

Sapporo University , also known as 札大 (Satsu-dai) for an abbreviation, is a private university in Sapporo, Japan. It was founded in 1967. In 2018, 2775 students were enrolled at the university, including 103 foreign students. Teaching staff * Yūtokutaishi Ak ...

, suggest that the Mishihase were the

Nivkhs The Nivkh, or Gilyak (also Nivkhs or Nivkhi, or Gilyaks; ethnonym: Нивхгу, ''Nʼivxgu'' (Amur) or Ниғвңгун, ''Nʼiɣvŋgun'' (E. Sakhalin) "the people"), are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Islan ...

belonging to the

Okhotsk culture The Okhotsk culture is an archaeological coastal fishing and hunter-gatherer culture that developed around the southern coastal regions of the Sea of Okhotsk, including Sakhalin, northeastern Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands during the last half o ...

References

Tribes of ancient Japan Oni {{japan-hist-stub