The Kojiki

Old Book, Late Scripture

First attested
1371The oldest surviving witness is the Shinpukuji-bon (真福寺本), copied by the monk Ken'yu in 1371–72. Nothing from the eighth century survives, and the Shoku Nihongi, which reports the Nihon Shoki's presentation in 720, records neither its commission nor its presentation; the earliest mention of it by name is a century later, in the Kōnin shiki lecture notes of 813. That grounds a long argument over the preface's authenticity, pressed hardest by Ōwa Iwao in Kojiki seiritsu kō (1975) and rejected by most philologists. The 1979 epitaph from Yasumaro's grave spells his name as the preface signs it, 安萬侶 rather than the ordinary 麻呂 — the strongest evidence the other way. The rank differs as eleven years of promotion would: Senior Fifth Upper in 712, Junior Fourth Lower in 723.
Claimed
712 CEasserted by The Kojiki's own preface, signed by Ō no Yasumaro and dated to the twenty-eighth day of the first month of Wadō 5 (9 March 712). It states that Emperor Tenmu ordered the court attendant Hieda no Are to commit the imperial genealogies and old accounts to memory, and that Empress Genmei ordered Yasumaro to set them down in the ninth month of Wadō 4 (711). No independent eighth-century record corroborates either order.

The claim runs about 700 years ahead of the evidence.

The oldest copy of the Kojiki in existence is a monk's transcription of 1371–72; the Nihon Shoki, not the Kojiki, was the chronicle the Heian court lectured on, and the Kojiki's standing as scripture dates from Motoori Norinaga's commentary of 1798, not from 712.

Japan's oldest chronicle, and scripture only since the 1790s — a status conferred, not inherited.

Ō no Yasumaro presented three scrolls to Empress Genmei on 9 March 712, saying in his preface that he set down what the court attendant Hieda no Are held in memory at Emperor Tenmu's command. No manuscript survives from near that date: the oldest is the Shinpukuji-bon, copied by the monk Ken'yu in 1371–72, and the Shoku Nihongi, which records the Nihon Shoki's presentation in 720, says nothing of the Kojiki at all. The Shoki drew six Heian court lecture series; the Kojiki drew none. Motoori Norinaga's forty-four-volume Kojiki-den, 1764 to 1798, is what lifted it to equal standing with the Shoki and made it the text his school read as sacred. Kōnoshi Takamitsu argues the two chronicles set out different worlds, and that the composite "Japanese mythology" of retelling belongs to neither.

Light

In January 1979 workers replanting a tea field near Nara broke into a grave holding a copper epitaph: Ō no Yasumaro, dead on the sixth day of the seventh month of 723. The preface's author turned out to be a real man in the ground.

Shadow

The Meiji state made the emperors' descent from Amaterasu public doctrine, taught in schools as history until the Shinto Directive of December 1945. Tsuda Sōkichi, who called the age-of-the-gods chapters a court construction, had four books banned in 1940 and a suspended sentence in 1942 that lapsed in 1944.

Sources and verification6 sources · 6 links

Primary source

  • Ō no Yasumaro, trans. Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki, 1968, University of Tokyo Press; the preface, and Philippi's introduction on transmission and manuscriptsThe preface's own account — Tenmu's order to Hieda no Are, Genmei's order to Yasumaro, and the presentation of three scrolls in Wadō 5 (712) — and the scholarly apparatus for the text's manuscript descent.

Scholarship

  • Kōnoshi Takamitsu, Constructing Imperial Mythology: Kojiki and Nihon shoki, 2000, in Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (eds), Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford University Press), 51–68That the Nihon Shoki was privileged over the Kojiki through most of Japanese history; that the Kojiki's standing as a national classic is modern; and that the two texts set out distinct mythic worlds rather than one shared 'Japanese mythology'.
  • Isomae Jun'ichi, trans. Sarah E. Thal, Reappropriating the Japanese Myths: Motoori Norinaga and the Creation Myths of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, 2000, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 27/1–2, 15–39; open in the Nanzan JJRS archiveThat Norinaga's reading, and his preference for the Kojiki over the Nihon Shoki, still governs how these myths are interpreted and evaluated.
  • Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (eds), Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm, 2003, RoutledgeCurzon; editors' introductionThat kami worship was inseparable from Buddhism through the medieval period, and that 'Shinto' as a separate indigenous religion — the frame in which the Kojiki is now read as scripture — was largely a Meiji-era state project.
  • Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History, 2017, Oxford University PressThe Meiji and later state's construction of imperial descent from Amaterasu as public doctrine, its transmission through state schooling, and the constraints that placed on historical scholarship until 1945.

Further reading

  • Gustav Heldt (trans.), The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters, 2014, Columbia University PressA current complete English translation, and the route by which a general reader can check any episode named here against the text.

Linked entries

  • Set againstPseudo-Dionysius the AreopagiteAttested

    Two texts whose authority came from outside themselves — the Dionysian corpus from an apostolic name it did not own, the Kojiki from Motoori Norinaga's commentary and the school that read it after him, eleven centuries downstream.

  • Set againstThe Popol VuhAttested

    Both set a ruling line's descent from the gods in writing long after the fact, but the K'iche' lords wrote in the 1550s under a power that had already conquered them, while the Kojiki was made for a court still on the throne.

  • Set againstThe GāthāsAttested

    Both survive only in fourteenth-century copies: the oldest securely dated Avestan manuscripts, J2 and K5, were written by Mihrābān Kay Khusraw in 1323, half a century before Ken'yu copied the Kojiki.

  • Set againstYggdrasilAttested

    The Kojiki was compiled by Ō no Yasumaro in 712 and Gylfaginning by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, and in both the orderly system later readers quote as ancient belief is the compiler's arrangement of older material.

  • Set againstThe Trial of Anders PoulsenAttested

    Both are a state writing down an indigenous religion, and the purpose decides what the text becomes: the Kojiki was compiled at imperial command in 712 to legitimate a dynasty; Poulsen's drum was written down in 1692 by a Danish-Norwegian court trying him for sorcery.

  • Set againstThe Descent of InannaAttested

    Izanagi goes down to Yomi to bring Izanami back and fails, fleeing when he sees what she has become; the Kojiki was presented in 712 CE, some two and a half thousand years after these tablets were copied, and nothing links the two but the shape of the story.

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