The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, the oldest Japanese histories, 712–720

The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, the oldest Japanese histories

On 9 March 712 Ō no Yasumaro presented Empress Genmei with the Kojiki, the ‘Records of Ancient Matters’, and on 1 July 720 Prince Toneri presented the court with the thirty books of the Nihon shoki, the ‘Chronicles of Japan’. Tracing the imperial line back to the age of the gods, they are the two oldest surviving books of Japanese history.

Date

9 March 712 – 1 July 720exact date · duration: ≈ 8 yearsDate in the Julian calendar

Place

Heijō Palace, Heijō-kyōtoday: Nara, Nara Prefecture, Japan · East Asia

Participants

Empress Genmei

Threads

East Asia (6th–10th c.)

Also known as

Kojiki; Nihon shoki; Nihongi; Records of Ancient Matters; Chronicles of Japan; Кодзики; Нихон сёки; Нихонги; Записи о деяниях древности; Анналы Японии; 古事記; 日本書紀; 日本紀

According to its preface, the Kojiki goes back to Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686), who ordered the genealogies and old traditions of the court to be examined and had the courtier Hieda no Are commit them to memory. On 3 November 711 Empress Genmei commanded Ō no Yasumaro to write down what Hieda no Are had learnt, and four months later he presented three books: the myths of the age of the gods, the legends of the first sovereigns, and the reigns down to Empress Suiko, who died in 628. The text uses Chinese characters, mostly in Chinese syntax, while its songs are spelled out phonetically in Old Japanese (man’yōgana). In 713 the empress also ordered the provinces to compile gazetteers, the Fudoki.

The Nihon shoki was an official history on the model of the Chinese dynastic histories, written in classical Chinese. The Shoku Nihongi records that on 1 July 720 Prince Toneri, who had compiled it on imperial command, presented ‘thirty books of annals and one book of genealogy’. It runs from the creation of the world to Empress Jitō, who abdicated in 697, and draws on court records and on Korean sources such as the records of Baekje. Most scholars regard its early chronology, including the founding of the state in 660 BC, and the first emperors as legendary, while its later books are considered far more reliable.

The Nihon shoki became the first of the Six National Histories; the next, the Shoku Nihongi, was completed in 797. The Kojiki survives in manuscripts, the oldest being the Shinpukuji copy of 1371–1372, and its standing was raised by Motoori Norinaga’s great commentary, the Kojiki-den (1764–1798). W. G. Aston published the first English translation of the Nihon shoki in 1896; a Russian translation by L. M. Ermakova and A. N. Meshcheryakov appeared in 1997.

The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, the oldest Japanese histories

Connections

Related events

Same place

Adjacent events in the thread

Meanwhile in the world

Western and Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Balkans and Anatolia

Middle East and Egypt

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

North America

Latin America

The same period

Sources