Nihongi

Audience

It is difficult to be certain about the audience of a work written some thirteen hundred years ago. As the Nihongi was presented only eight years after the Kojiki, one prominent theory is that they were intended for different audiences: The Kojiki was to be read at the Japanese court, while the Nihongi was to be shown to a continental audience. However, there is no evidence that the Nihongi was used in diplomatic relations, so it seems that it was intended for a domestic audience.

The appearance of the Nihongi shortly after the Kojiki may instead indicate some domestic unhappiness with the latter work—an argument that can be supported by the prominence of variant tales in the Nihongi. Where the Kojiki insists on one version of royal origins, the Nihongi allows for some (slightly) different tales. On the other hand, the Kojiki includes more clan names and histories than the Nihongi does and is more expansive geographically, indicating that the audience that prompted the Nihongi was centered on the court itself or very close to it. As most of the variant texts are found in the two scrolls dedicated to the age of the gods, the Nihongi may have been an attempt at appeasing ritual and scholarly lineages at court. In the modern era, scholars have been interested in the Nihongi for the light it can shed on the emergence of the Japanese state, particularly as its authority was reinforced by State Shinto, which established a patriarchal, imperial, and race-based origin for the modern Japanese state.