202
This section is designed to introduce briefly the 8th-century documents of
Japan. Information on the two chronicles given here is mainly derived from
the translators’ prefaces: by Philippi (1969) for the Kojiki, and by Aston
(1972) for the Nihon Shoki. In contrast to these official court histories, local
documents survive for several provinces. Also compiled in the 8th century,
these ‘Records of Local Customs’ (fudoki ) provide information on
outlying regions that are not fully represented in the court chronicles. All these
documents were originally written in kanbun , a method of writing in
Chinese with Japanese grammatical transformations indicated by annotation.
Kojiki
The Kojiki, submitted to the Nara Court in 712, was the first official
history of Japan (Philippi 1969). It was compiled from two earlier sets of
documents: clan genealogies and anecdotal histories. The sovereign Keitai
(r. 507–531) is reported to have commanded the noble families to begin
keeping genealogical records in the early 6th century, and the ‘now’ of the
Kojiki is thought to refer to the reign of Keitai (ibid.: 5). The text was written
in a hybrid style of kanbun and manyhgana , the latter being a
script using Chinese characters for their phonetic value only to transcribe
native Japanese words.
Three ‘books’ comprise the Kojiki. Book One is almost entirely
mythological in character, describing the activities of the gods and their
colonization of the Japanese Islands. Book Two begins with the tale of
Jinmu, the first legendary sovereign of Japan, describing his eastward
advance from Kyishi to establish himself in Yamato; it finishes with Hjin,
the 15th sovereign who allegedly died in AD 395 (see Kidder 1959 for
adjusted dates). Book Three then proceeds to describe the reigns of the 16th
sovereign Nintoku to the 33rd sovereign Suikh ending in 641. All anecdotal
history, however, finishes around 487, and only genealogical information is
Appendix Two
The Japanese Court Chronicles
offered for the remaining reigns (Philippi 1969). Philippi’s translation is the
standard work to consult in English, and the standard presentation of the
Kojiki original text in Chinese, its translation into modern Japanese, and its
scholarly annotations are published by Iwanami in the Nihon Koten
Bungaku Taikei series (Kurano and Takeda 1958).
Nihon Shoki
The Nihon Shoki (alternatively known as the Nihongi), was submitted to
the Nara Court in 720. It was apparently based on more documents than
the Kojiki and covers a longer timespan, from time immemorial to AD 697.
Only the contents referring to events from AD 500 onwards, that is, from
Keitai’s reign, are considered to be completely reliable history; earlier material
has been much distorted, both chronologically and genealogically, for
political purposes. As presented in Aston’s translation (1972), the work is
divided into two Volumes (I, II) and thirty Books (i–xxx), with Books i–xvi
in Volume 1 and Books xvii–xxx in Volume II; in the standard Japanese
edition, it is divided into two volumes (jh , ge ) with Books i–xv in the
former and Books xvi–xxx in the latter (Sakamoto et al. 1965, 1967).
Books i–ii comprises the ‘Age of the Gods’, presenting the ancient Japanese
cosmology and creation myths. Each of the earthly imperial chronicles
(Books ii–xxx), which provide the basis for the traditional Japanese list of
sovereigns (Table 1.3), details the reign of an individual ruler, except for
Temmu who is allocated two books. The first sixteen books (Volume I)
cover almost as much as the entire Kojiki, and the rest (Volume II) is
devoted to the period between the 26th sovereign Keitai and the 41st
sovereign Jith (see Table 1.3). The content of the Nihon Shoki ends in the
year AD 697, 23 years before it was submitted to the Nara Court as the
official history of Japan.
As in the cases of the founding dates of the early Korean states
[SFK, ch. 1: 3], the succession date of Jinmu was fixed intentionally by later
scholars. In assigning it to 660 BC (see Chapter 4), approximately 1,000 years
were added to the imperial history of Japan; most scholars agree that the
3rd century AD is a more likely starting date for whatever imperial line can be
reconstructed. To fill this extra time period, the existing historical documents
and anecdotal evidence of the early kings was telescoped to pad out these
reigns, including the possible partitioning of domestic and international information,
and the arbitrary parcelling out of information into the various kingly
chronicles. This is one of the many reasons why the Nihon Shoki is considered
chronologically unreliable before AD 461, when outside sources attest accuracy.
The standard presentation of the Nihon Shoki original text in kanbun,
its translation into modern Japanese, and its scholarly annotations are
published by Iwanami in the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei
series (Sakamoto et al. 1965, 1967). The Nihon Shoki is the first of the
Appendix Two
203
so-called Six National Histories (see Sakamoto 1991), none of the others of
which have been translated into English. Aston’s work (1896) is the
standard English translation for the Nihon Shoki though it is now over a
century old. Five successive publishers have reprinted his two-volume 1896
original in a single volume (Aston 1924, 1956, 1972, 1997 and 2005); since
these are all photographic reproductions, they all have the same page
numbering and chapter divisions, so any one of them can be used to find
the citations in this volume. The archaic typography, moreover, helps take
one back in time.
Fudoki
After the establishment of the new capital at Heijh in the northern Nara
Basin, the Ritsuryh government promulgated an edict in AD 713 for
provinces to collect information on their climate, geography, customs,
legends, beliefs, lifestyles and placenames and submit it to the Nara Court.
Aoki (1997: 2) notes that some of this material was probably used for the
compilation of the Nihon Shoki, but materials which were kept by the
provincial offices were never subjected to chroniclers’ heavy-handed editing
for political purposes. The extant materials in the provinces were collected
by the Heian Court in 925 as Fudoki (Records of Local Customs). Of those
submitted at that time, five remain extant; named after their provinces,
these records were all compiled in the 8th century: Hitachi Fudoki
(713–26), Izumo Fudoki (733), Harima Fudoki (715) and the Bungo
Fudoki and Hizen Fudoki (both thought to have been compiled between
729 and 739) (Aoki 1997: 2–4). Postdating the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki by
just a few decades if that, the fudoki collectively provide interesting local
material for comparison with the court chronicles. All five have been translated
into English (Aoki 1971, 1997). The original texts in kanbun, their
modern Japanese translations, and annotations are available in the Iwanami
Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei series (Akimoto 1958), with
material from other provinces included as appendices to round out the
geographical resources for entire archipelago.
Appendix Two
204