Imperial Rule: Essays on Ancient Japan - Kindle Version

[Ross Bender]

Table of Contents

Foreword and Acknowledgments	1
Introduction	2
Himiko: Archaic Shamanistic Charisma	7
Female Rule in Ancient Japan	21
Changing the Capitals: Imperial Cities in the Eighth Century	37
Imperial Assumptions: Japan’s Relations with Silla and Balhae in the Eighth Century	56
Changing the Calendar: The Suppression of the Tachibana Naramaro Conspiracy of 757	92
Auspicious Omens in the Reign of the Last Female Emperor of Nara Japan	115
Research Note: A Japanese Curriculum of 757	150
The Hachiman Cult and the Dokyo Incident	156
Shinto in Nara Japan, 749-770: Deities, Priests, Offerings, Prayers, and Edicts in Shoku Nihongi	189
Response to Helen Hardacre’s Shinto: A History	212
Metamorphosis of a Deity: Hachiman in the Ninth Century	217
Ranking the Gods: Promotions in Court Rank for Shinto Deities in the Ninth Century	229
Performative Loci of the Imperial Edicts in Shoku Nihongi	247
Shinto in Ninth-Century Imperial Edicts	269
Ross Bender Bibliography	284

 

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The present volume begins with the third century and concludes at the end of the ninth. The majority of the pieces center on the Nara and early Heian periods, when the imperial capitals were established at Heijōkyō and Heiankyō. Aside from the first chapter, the source of the material is the Six National Histories, or Rikkokushi. Beginning with Nihon Shoki, these are chronicles commissioned by emperors, which take the story from the Age of the Gods to 887. The narrative of the text is classical Chinese of the early Tang dynasty interspersed with poems and edicts in Old Japanese. While I have subtitled the volume “Essays on Ancient Japan,” the chapters are of greatly varied length, with some as short as five pages. About half the material is previously unpublished; the rest comprises revised versions of journal articles or book chapters.

Some chapters deal with political history. I discuss the origins and development of female rule in the remarkable series of women sovereigns during the roughly two centuries from Suiko to Shōtoku. Another emphasis is the pattern of development of imperial cities – primary, secondary, and tertiary capitals—in the eighth century. A major essay focuses on foreign relations, Japan’s diplomatic intercourse with Silla and Balhae, when the court demonstrated its self-awareness as an imperium on the Chinese model. Several chapters cover the turbulent period of the reign of the last female emperor of Nara, Kōken/Shōtoku Tennō, who faced and triumphed over challenges to her rule by three men – Tachibana Naramaro, Fujiwara Nakamaro, and the Buddhist priest Dōkyō.

Imperial Ideology
But much of my concern is with imperial ideology. This might better be termed ‘political theology,’ since the thought of the time concerning the legitimacy of the imperial institution almost always concerned the actions of the gods in supporting the emperorship. The gods range from native kami to buddhas and bodhisattvas to Indian devas imported with the Buddhist package. Some of the ideology was certainly of Confucian origin, as the sovereigns and their scholars interwove Chinese ideas about heaven’s actions with other notions of the divine basis of human rule.
My emphasis here is clearly on what I call Shinto political theology. This is in contradistinction to the prevailing tendency to focus on Buddhist concepts of imperial legitimation. Shinto is a term with a great deal of baggage, with much recent back and forth about its utility before the medieval period. Here I agree with Helen Hardacre, whose recent tome Shinto: A History has done much to clear the air. Unlike earlier scholars who quibbled with the use of the word or used it only in scare quotes, she states definitively “I argue that although the term Shinto hardly appears, we can identify Shinto’s institutional origins in the late seventh- and early eighth-century coordination of Kami worship, regarded as embodying indigenous tradition, by a government ministry following legal mandates.” This notion is the basis for work by recent scholars trained at Kokugakuin University, for whose work see my chapter on “Ranking the Gods.”

Ross Bender