Nihon Shoki

The Nihon Shoki, also called the Nihongi, gives two books to the age of the gods and then twenty-eight to the sovereigns, from Jimmu to the abdication of Empress Jito in 697. The later reigns are dense with datable material: edicts, embassies, appointments, omens, the arrival of Buddhism, the Taika reforms, the Jinshin succession war of 672. The format is annalistic, entries dated by reign year, month and day in the manner of a Chinese court history, and the last books read as something close to documentary record.

The chronicle's most valuable feature is editorial rather than narrative. Where traditions disagreed, the compilers did not choose. They set out a main version and then appended alternatives with a phrase conventionally translated as in one writing it says. The account of Izanagi and Izanami, of the birth of the sun deity, of the descent to earth, each arrives in several forms, sometimes as many as eleven for a single episode, differing in names, sequence and moral weight.

This is unusual for a text with an official purpose, and it makes the Nihon Shoki the richer source of the two chronicles for anyone studying how the myths varied between regions and priestly houses. The Kojiki tells one story cleanly. The Nihon Shoki shows the seams.

The two divine books, known as the volumes of the age of the gods, were treated as a distinct unit in later centuries and copied, lectured on and commented upon separately from the rest. Scattered through the whole work are more than a hundred songs, transcribed phonetically rather than translated into Chinese, which preserve early Japanese verse and language that the surrounding prose does not.

The two chronicles were produced within eight years of each other for different audiences. The Kojiki used Chinese characters bent to record Japanese sounds and syntax, which made it difficult even for Japanese readers. The Nihon Shoki was written in classical Chinese that a scholar in Chang'an or in the Korean kingdoms could read, and it was written to be read that way. Japan in the early eighth century was a new polity, freshly equipped with a legal code and a Chinese-style capital, making a case for its standing in a Chinese world order. A dynastic history in the correct language was part of that case.

The compilers drew on a wide range of material and, unusually, they named some of it. Korean sources are cited by title, including the Paekche annals and other Paekche records now lost except as quoted here, along with Chinese histories and older Japanese compilations, court and clan genealogies, and provincial gazetteers. Prince Toneri, a son of Emperor Temmu, presented the finished work in 720; the project itself is usually traced back to Temmu's reign in the 680s.

The Chinese is not uniform. Analysis of the language across the thirty books shows different hands, some writing correct continental Chinese and some writing a Japanised version, which is one of the main tools scholars use to sort out how the work was assembled and in what order. Whole phrases are lifted from Chinese literary and historical models and applied to Japanese events, which means a striking sentence in the chronicle may be a borrowed formula rather than a record of anything.

The relationship between the two chronicles is not that of draft and revision. They share material but neither is derived from the other, and they diverge on names, sequence and emphasis often enough that both are assumed to draw on a common pool of earlier written and oral sources, now lost.

The chronology of the early books cannot be taken as it stands. The Nihon Shoki dates the accession of Jimmu, the first sovereign, to 660 BCE, and gives the early emperors reigns and lifespans of well over a hundred years. The standard explanation is that the founding date was chosen for its position in the sexagenary cycle: 660 BCE falls 1,260 years, twenty-one cycles of sixty, before 601 CE, a year that continental prognostication marked as one of great revolution. Having fixed that starting point, the compilers had to fill the gap, and the early reigns were stretched and sovereigns probably added to cover it. Eight early emperors carry names and genealogies but no events at all, and are widely regarded as later insertions. The chronicle becomes reasonably reliable only from the fifth or sixth century, and firm from the seventh.

None of that reduced its standing at court. The Nihon Shoki, not the Kojiki, was the text the aristocracy studied. Formal lecture series on it were convened at the imperial court, six of them across the Heian period, running for years at a time and concluding in banquets at which courtiers composed poems on the deities and heroes of the text. Later chronicles were commissioned to continue it, producing the sequence known as the six national histories.

Its later career ran with the Kojiki's. It supplied the same imperial descent narrative to State Shinto and to nationalist teaching until 1945, and is now read as a compiled historical source whose value lies in what it recorded, and in what it shows about the recording.