Les miroirs sankakubuchi shinjū : témoins de l’émergence d’un pouvoir centralisé dans le Japon protohistorique (iiie-ive siècle)

The Chinese bronze mirrors played an important role for the japanese elites of the Yayoi period (3rd c. BC – AD 1 st c.) in the north of Kyushu island: they were attributed by the Chinese power with other diplomatic gifts as a recognition of their vassalage. Sign of power, these precious mirrors were buried with their owner in rich tombs until the area and its chiefs collapsed during the AD 1st century. But in the 2nd half of the 3rd century, big tumulus tombs called kofun, appear in the Yamato plain (Nara prefecture) and they contain a new type of mirror, the sankakubuchi shinjū-kyō. Far more numerous than the mirrors known during the Yayoi period, the sankakubuchi shinjū-kyō of the Kofun period have a special feature: concentrated in a few big kofun of the Yamato, some of them belonging to the same mould have been found in more little kofun through the whole Japanese archipelago. Scholars think that these mirrors were used as diplomatic gifts for the rising power of Yamato to local chiefs of less importance owing them “alleagence”, as Chinese did during the Yayoi period towards their Japanese “barbarian” neighbours. Symbols of a support to the rising power that would become the first Japanese empire, the distribution of the sankakubuchi shinjū mirrors shows the existing political and cultural links between some areas of the Japanese archipelago and shows the progression of the Yamato’s centralizing domination of which some areas seems still excluded at this time