I. POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE KOJIKI

What one might call the standard ‘snapshot’ view of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712 AD) is that it was compiled by order of the early Nara imperial court, the ritsuryō state, with one central political purpose in mind: to legitimize the Yamato clan's hegemony – that is, to support the claim of the Yamato clan chiefs, ancestors of the Japanese emperors, to a ‘divine right’ to rule over all other Japanese clans. This view has been constructed mainly by historians and political scientists who naturally seek to place this, the oldest extant Japanese text, in the context of the early development of the Japanese nation state. Since the kokugakusha or ‘national scholars’ of the eighteenth century, this has also been basically the view of the Kojiki promulgated by emperorcentered Japanese nationalism – and as such it still has great popular currency, perhaps especially among people who have never actually read the work. And, as we have already seen, emperor-centered nationalism still shapes the worldview of Japan's ruling political establishment.

But the question I would like to raise here is: to what extent does the Kojiki, the real text as opposed to the ‘snapshot’ version of the political historians or the religio-mythic canonical version of the nationalists, actually support this belief system?

II. THE FULL COMPLEXITY OF THE WORK

Reading the Kojiki one finds abundant evidence that, in the several centuries which preceded its compilation, Japan underwent a momentous transformation. This oldest of Japanese books embodies the great ‘ juncture’ or ‘rupture’ between the old and the new ways of thinking and living, one preliterate, prehistorical and prenational, a world of clans and chieftains, shamans and sorcerers, gods and heroes – a mythological world – the other literate and historical, a world of nations and emperors, imperial courtiers and bureaucrats, monks and scholars, a recognizably modern world which, because it now included T’ang dynasty China, included the most sophisticated art, science, medicine, technology and philosophy found anywhere on earth at that time. This was a massive transformation, a transformation more meaningfully from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern’ than even the transformation Japan underwent in the late nineteenth century. (And the Kojiki compilers themselves were fully conscious of living in ‘new times’ – thus their title's self-conscious reference to ‘ancient’ – that is, ‘pre-modern’ – matters.)