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Introduction to the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Helen McCullough translated and published the first twelve chapters of the medieval military chronicle Taiheiki, The Chronicle of Great Peace, in 1979. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kyoko Selden and I, then colleagues on the faculty of Cornell University, began meeting weekly to read, discuss, and translate a broad range of Japanese historical texts, including sections of the Taiheiki through Chapter 19 (out of forty). Our short-term objective was to develop materials for an interdisciplinary seminar that would introduce more of the Taiheiki to English readers. In this special issue, two selections from the Taiheiki—the dramatic and tragic death of Go-Daigo's cast-off son Prince Moriyoshi (alt. Morinaga, 1308-35) from Chapter 13 and an account of the critical battle at Hakone Takenoshita from Chapter 14, both events of 1335—are paired with linked verse by the basara (flamboyant) warrior Sasaki Dōyo, and the Edo-period Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace. All were originally translated and annotated for our Taiheiki course, first taught in 1992, a class that I continue to teach at the University of Southern California.
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References
Notes
1 Hyōdō Hiromi, Taiheiki yomi no kanōsei: rekishi to iu monogatari (Reading the Taiheiki, History as Narrative) (Tokyo: Kodansha Sensho Mechie, 1995), 1-43, esp. 27.
2 See Paul Varley's discussion in Steven D. Carter ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 203: Medieval Japanese Writers (New York: Gale Group, 1999), 283-86.
3 Satō Kazuhiko, “The Society of the Taiheiki,” in Okutomi Takayuki et al., Nihon no chūsei, sono shakai to bunka (Medieval in Japan, Society, and Culture) (Chiba: Azusa Shuppansha, 1983), 105-28. Recent research that adds many new insights to this discussion is Kitamura Masayuki, Taiheiki sekai no keishō (Images of the World of the Taiheiki) (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 2010). Ji Sect is a branch of Pure Land Buddhism that formed around itinerant preacher Ippen Shōnin in the thirteenth century.
4 The Japan Historical Text Initiative website.
5 Andrew Goble, The Kenmu Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1997); Kenneth Grossberg, Japan's Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1981; republished by Cornell East Asia Program, 2010); Thomas Conlan's State of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2004); and Sovereign and Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also useful is Paul Varley, “Cultural Life in Medieval Japan,” in Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3 (Medieval), especially 458-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); G. Cameron Hurst, “Warrior as Ideal for a New Age,” in Jeffrey Mass, ed., The Origins of Japan's Medieval World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 209-36; Thomas Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2001); Lorraine Harrington, “Regional Administration under the Ashikaga Bakufu,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1983); Karl Friday, Samurai, Warfare, and the State in Medieval Japan (Oxford: Routledge, 2004); and Andrew Goble, “GoDaigo, Takauji, and the Muromachi Shogunate,” in Karl Friday, ed., Japan Emerging (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012), 213-23. Other chronicles of the same era that have been translated into English are Shuzo Uenaka, A Study of Baishōron (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1978) and George Perkins, The Clear Mirror, Masukagami (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1998).
6 See his entry for the Taiheiki in the Kokushi daijiten (Great Dictionary of National History) (accessed through Japan Knowledge, accessed February 16, 2014.
7 For instance, dates for the battle of Takenoshita in the Baishōron, also compiled in the mid-fourteenth century, differ from those in the Taiheiki, and those in the former have been determined to be correct. See “Taiheiki, Baishōron kara mita Hakone, Takenoshita no tatakai” (accessed January 12, 2014).
8 See Satō Kazuhiko, Taiheiki no sekai (The World of the Taiheiki) (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1990). For class use, Piggott and Selden translated Satō's essay, “Taiheiki as Nanbokuchō-era Literature” (Taiheiki, Nanbokuchōki no bungaku toshite), which is a rich introduction to his reading of the Taiheiki. See Okutomi, Takayuki et al., 1983, 105-28.
9 Ōsumi Kazuo, Chūsei rekishi to bungaku to no aida (Between History and Literature in Medieval Times) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1993), esp. 198-216.
10 Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Anthology of Japanese Classical Literature), vols. 1-3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1960-62).
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