Reception and Commentary of Nihon shoki, Japan's First Official History Matthieu Anthony James ...

387 Pages·2017·16.15 MB·English

Rewriting the Past: Reception and Commentary of Nihon shoki,
Japan’s First Official History

Matthieu Anthony James Felt

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2017
© 2017
Matthieu Anthony James Felt
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
Rewriting the Past: Reception and Commentary of Nihon shoki,
Japan’s First Official History

Matthieu Anthony James Felt

This study traces the diverse interpretations of Japan’s oldest official history, the 720 Nihon
shoki, from its earliest scholarly treatment in the ninth century until its enshrinement within the
canon of Japanese national literature in the modern period. Elites in the early eighth century
produced a number of texts that described the fundamental principles of the world and the
contours of the Japanese empire, such as Kojiki (712), Kaifūsō (751), Man’yōshū (late 8th c.),
and as the official court narrative, Nihon shoki. While each of these possesses its own “imperial
imagination,” Nihon shoki is distinct because it heavily incorporates historical polities across
Northeast Asia, especially on the Korean peninsula, in creating a narrative of ancient Japan in the
world. Further, Nihon shoki, while written primarily in Literary Sinitic, also includes elements of
the Japanese vernacular, and rather than delineating a single orthodox narrative, provides a
number of alternative, conflicting accounts of Japanese mythology. These characteristics
animated much of the debate surrounding the text’s proper reading and meaning as later
commentators grappled with its exegesis.

The dissertation comprises an introduction and five chapters. The first chapter analyzes the
discourse surrounding the Nihon shoki in the eighth and ninth centuries, when lectures were
periodically given on the text at court. The notes from these lectures reveal controversies over
how the text was composed and the proper method of reading it. After the lectures, courtiers
composed Japanese poetry about major figures depicted in the work, frequently creating new
mythologies that departed from the original as they sought to connect their vision of antiquity
with the present. The poems also demonstrate the use of digests and alternative texts that were
used as stand-ins for Nihon shoki. I discuss two of these in detail, Kogo shūi (807) and Sendai
kuji hongi (c. 936), and show how they took advantage of ambiguities in Nihon shoki to position
themselves as authoritative accounts.

In Chapter 2, I take up approaches that used Nihon shoki as an originary narrative from the
twelfth to fifteenth centuries. This type of treatment begins to appear to a limited degree in poetic
treatises such as Minamoto no Toshiyori’s Toshiyori zuinō (1113) and Fujiwara no Nakazane’s
Kigōshō (1116) and became widespread through the middle of the twelfth century. These same
mid-century scholars were also responsible for producing picture scrolls based on the text and
the first Nihon shoki commentary, Shinzei’s Nihongi shō (circa 1150). As the trend intensified,
citations began to go further and farther afield, often attributing stories and facts to Nihon shoki
that are not in the original text. Use of Nihon shoki as an originary narrative was also adopted in
political treatises by commentators such as Jien (1155-1225), and I discuss the methods and
acrobatic intellectual maneuvers of these agents in blending Buddhist and continental cosmology
with the Nihon shoki creation story. I focus especially on Jien’s Gukanshō (c. 1220) and Ichijō
Kaneyoshi’s (1402-1481) Nihon shoki sanso (1457).

Chapter 3 begins with the uneasy syncretism between Nihon shoki and Song Confucian
metaphysics in the seventeenth century. Works in this lineage, such as Hayashi Razan’s Jinmu
tennō ron (1618), imagine the gods as metaphors for human actors and form the mainstream of
intellectual treatment of Nihon shoki in the Edo period. Other Confucian thinkers, such as
Yamazaki Ansai, instead read the gods as factual and use Nihon shoki as evidence of universal
Confucian metaphysics; in Ansai’s case the result was an entirely new school of Shinto, and his
disciples were responsible for the first two commentaries that covered the entire text. One
response to this was a reading that prioritized continental histories over the Nihon shoki
chronicles, epitomized by the full-length commentary Shoki shukkai (c. 1785). Another arose in
the nascent discipline of national learning, exemplified by Motoori Norinaga’s (1730-1801)
criticism of Ansai. Norinaga went on to write a full commentary of the Kojiki, but his reading
relied heavily on Nihon shoki, and he cites it more than any other text in his narrative of Japan’s
divine age.

Chapter 4 introduces a diversity of approaches that attempt to reconcile Nihon shoki with the
ideal of a modern national history at the end of the nineteenth century. I begin outlining an 1888
debate that continued for nearly a year over the chronology of Nihon shoki; producing an
accurate chronology of Japanese history was considered critical to measuring Japan’s societal
progression in comparison to other civilizations. I then discuss historical and linguistic study of
the divine age from 1890-1912. Contemporary scholarship often misreads these accounts as
being based in positivist historicism, but I show that they are actually rooted in original
reinterpretations of Nihon shoki that mix-and-match variant pieces to create a new imperial
narrative. Particular attention is given to how such readings were used to justify colonial
expansion to Korea.
Chapter 5 addresses Nihon shoki’s shifting position in national literature by analyzing several
histories of Japanese literature written from 1890 to 1912, especially Takatsu Kuwasaburō and
Mikami Sanji’s Nihon bungaku shi and Haga Yaichi’s Kokubungakushi jikkō. The variety of
interpretations applied to Nihon shoki illustrate major shifts in ideas about what constituted
literature, how literary periods should be divided, the role of academics in creating a national
canon, and whether literature should focus on universal characteristics of civilization or
particular attributes of national culture. By the end of this period, emphasis on the idea of a
shared national language led scholars to sideline Nihon shoki in favor of texts written in
something more closely resembling the Japanese vernacular like Kojiki and Man’yōshū. It also
cemented the eighth-century as “Ancient Japanese Literature” (jōdai bungaku), a field
periodization still in place today.
Rewriting the Past: Reception and Commentary of Nihon shoki,
Japan’s First Official History

Matthieu Anthony James Felt

Table of Contents

List of Figures iii

Conventions iv

Acknowledgements v

Introduction: Quandaries of Reading the Nihon shoki 1

Chapter 1: Heian Reception: Nihon shoki Lectures, Waka, and Derivative Texts 13

Discourse on the Nihon shoki at Court – New Mythologies in Completion
Derivatives in Conclusion Banquet Poetry – Kogo shūi and a New Mythology –
Sendai kuji hongi and Faking Source Material in the Heian

Chapter 2: The Medieval Chronicles and Nihon shoki Syncretism 76

Nihon shoki after the Lectures – Nihon shoki as Honsetsu in Poetic Commentaries
– Setsuwa and the mid-12th Century Nihon shoki Boom – From Jien to Heike –
Rise of the Urabe – A Totalized Theory: Ichijō Kaneyoshi

Chapter 3: Edo Period Approaches 157

Early Modern Confucian Historiography – Yamazaki Ansai and Suika Shintō –
The Kawamura School – Nihon shoki in Norinaga’s Kojikiden – Hirata Atsutane
and Divine-age Script

i
Chapter 4: Meiji Readings of Nihon shoki: History, Linguistics, and Mythology 205

The Diversity of Meiji Readings – Naka Michiyo and the Foundation Year Debate
– Kume Kunitake and the Metaphorical Reading of the Divine Age – Ōkubo
Yoshiharu and the kokugaku Response to Kume – Hoshino Hisashi and the
Korean Peninsula – Inoue Testsujirō’s Inconsistent Approach – The Misgivings of
Shiratori Kurakichi – Tsuda Sōkichi and the Beginning of ki-ki Mythology

Chapter 5: Nihon shoki and Creation of National Canon 265

Nihon shoki in Mikami and Takatsu’s History of Japanese Literature – Script,
Literature, and fubun no bungaku – Making the Spoken Word into Literature
Proper – Incorporating Mythology – Expanding the Ancient Period – Nihon shoki
and the Late Meiji National Literature Movement

Afterword 310

Bibliography 316

Appendix A: Translation of Excerpts from Record of the Western Palace 329

Appendix B: Translation of Nihongi kyōen waka 332

ii
List of Figures

Figure 1. From Ōkubo Yoshiharu’s Shinten giwaku mondō, 1888. 240

Figure 2. Map of Korea from Hoshino Hisashi’s “Honpō no jinshu gengo ni 245
tsuite hikō o nobete yo no shinshin aikokusha ni shissu,” 1890.

Figure 3. Jindai moji chart, from Mikami and Takatsu’s Nihon bungaku shi, 1890 271

iii
Conventions

Translations by the author when not otherwise attributed.
Premodern sources are cited by the name of the text in the footnotes. In the bibliography, they
are organized according to the name of the author. When the author is not known, they are listed
in the biography according to the name of the editor; works by unknown authors without named
editors are organized by title. Japanese publication location in the bibliography is Tokyo when
not otherwise indicated.
Romanization is in Pinyin, McCune-Reischauer, and Hepburn. Poetry in Classical Japanese has
been romanized to reflect modern kana usage.
Japanese sovereigns are referred to as “Emperor” or “Empress,” although it should be noted that
the term “tennō” that these translate did not exist prior to the late seventh century. I also use the
Chinese-style names for these figures, though they did not exist before the mid-eighth century.
Ranks for court officials and names of offices follow the usage in Helen Craig and William H.
McCullough’s A Tale of Flowering Fortunes.

iv