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Governing in Prose: Written Style in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki

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Governing in Prose: Written Style in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki FIVE Governing in Prose: Written Style in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. —E. H. Carr The first question confronting anyone who studies the Kojiki is how the text was written down. —Donald Keene The various methods of inscription in use by the late seventh century were bound together by kundoku techniques of associating character- texts with the Japanese language, but this does not mean that these methods were homogenous, linguistically or otherwise. This and the following chapter examine in greater detail the range of possibilities for writing that existed in early Japan, and more importantly, consider the meaning of the differences among those possibilities. In so doing we turn from the focus of the previous chapter on ephemeral, excavated ma- terials of the seventh and eighth centuries—whose survival is a co- incidence of water tables and soil composition—to a consideration of writing committed to durable materials or actively preserved by gen- erations of scholars and scribes. These are the central works of the early 214 Governing in Prose Japanese canon: in this chapter, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki; in the follow- ing one, the Man’yōshū. The different circumstances of writing prose and poetry are one reason for this division, but it is also motivated by the combination of close parallels and stark contrasts demonstrated by the two eighth-century histories. The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki overlap considerably in their inclusion of mythic and legendary materials about early sovereigns and the gods from whom they claimed descent. But these two works are different in fundamental ways, most prominently their written styles. The sig- nificance of this difference is clearest when these two works are not considered alone, but in conjunction with other materials that present similar problems. Accordingly, this chapter begins with an examination of stylistic differences in two dedicatory inscriptions juxtaposed in the main hall of a prominent early temple, and concludes with a brief look at the distinctive style of vernacular royal proclamations (senmyō 宣命) of the eighth century. My basic theme is the power of ‘Chinese’ models of writing and their role, mediated by kundoku, in the creation of new styles that project different kinds of royal authority. The dominant contrast is not a simple opposition between texts in different languages, but a more complex one among texts in a variety of styles. An examination of the nature of written style, which combines visible patterns of graphs and linguistic patterns in their readings, requires taking into account both the ‘content’ and the ‘context’ of inscription. In early Japan, writing took on new signifi- cance as it was manipulated in projects to legitimate the new state and its royal institutions. The welling-up of technical innovations in everyday writing (such as that seen in mokkan) seems to have been largely spon- taneous, driven by practical considerations: the nature of the intended communication and the abilities of the scribes. By contrast, deliberate engineering of new styles, often highly systematized and sophisticated ones, was integral to several projects dedicated to the legitimacy of the line of sovereigns and the new state whose apex they occupied. Parallel Inscriptions in the Main Hall of Hōryūji The temple of Hōryūji is a complex of wooden buildings about 10.5 kilometers southwest of the old capital city of Nara. It is renowned for its holdings of sculptures and other early Buddhist art, and also for its .
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