Nihongi

Context

The Nihongi, also known as the Nihon shoki, was presented to the Japanese court in 720. It was the culmination of a long project of history and myth compilation that began with an edict of 681. Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686) declared that the histories of the various clans were accumulating errors and ordered the commencement of an official project to consolidate and correct the true history of Japan. In fact, this was a project not to correct errors but to rewrite history. Tenmu had come to power in 673 after a bloody civil war, against a faction that supported his nephew and in which this nephew was killed. The newly produced histories would be designed to strengthen the legitimacy of Tenmu’s rule. While religious matters were likely included from the beginning—they were unavoidable, since every major clan traced its lineage back to a deity—this was a very political project.

The Nihongi was not the first work to emerge from this royal order. The preface to the Kojiki states that it was presented to the court in 712—yet no mention of the Kojiki was included in later chronicles. A renewed order for an official history went out in 714, indicating that the Kojiki might have been thought incomplete or somehow unsatisfactory for the purpose; the new history was to be compiled by Ki Kiyondo and Miyake Fujimaro. Compared with the Kojiki, the Nihongi more closely resembles Chinese models of historical writing, and it was written in a style more similar to standard literary Chinese. The Kojiki ends in the early seventh century, whereas the Nihongi continues up until the end of the seventh century.