Nihongi

Impact

If the Nihongi was intended to bring consensus among various religious lineages of the court, it did not fully succeed. Members of two religious lineages, the Inbe and the Mononobe, would later bring two private histories involving the age of the gods to the court: An Inbe member submitted Kogo shui (Gleanings from Stories of Antiquity) in 807, and a Mononobe descendant referred to Sendai kuji hongi (also known as the Kujiki—Records of Ancient Matters from Previous Ages) in 936. In both cases, the members of these clans were arguing for their own traditions against the ritual dominance of others at court.

In all other respects, the Nihongi proved highly successful. From 721 to 936, court lecture series were held on the Nihongi, on average every thirty years. It was canonized as the first of six official national histories, the Rikkokushi, and thus was referred to when questions of Japan’s past came up. The Nihongi was cited as a near-absolute authority when it came to authenticating myths (concerning, for example, local shrines and deities or the divine origins of poetry) in the medieval period. Many such references to the Nihongi are in fact spurious, referring to myths and deities that do not appear in the text at all. These myths incorrectly attributed to the Nihongi are often referred to as the “medieval Nihongi.”

The reason why this strategy of misattribution was so successful was threefold. First, the population that had access to the text was very limited until the first printed edition appeared in 1599. Second, the text had become hard to read not long after its completion. This leads to the third point, that there was a well-developed tradition of esoteric interpretations of the text. These three circumstances helped spur several interpretive lineages based on the Nihongi. The earliest surviving exegesis, Nihon shoki shiki, dates to around the second half of the tenth century; the next, the Shaku Nihongi, was written between 1271 and 1301. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many religious interpretations of the text by courtiers, ritualists, and Buddhist scholars had appeared; among them was one by the Tendai Buddhist monk Ryohen, who produced his own interpretation of the text in 1419. The Urabe family’s tradition of Nihongi interpretation gave its descendant Yoshida Kanetomo the authority to develop Yoshida Shinto in the late fifteenth century, and the Nihongi became a major text of Suika Shinto, which was developed by Yamazaki Ansai in the seventeenth century. Buddhist interpretations of the Nihongi were also important to Ryobu (Buddhist) Shinto.

The Nihongi’s status as Japan’s ultimate mythological authority lasted only until the early nineteenth century. From 1790 through 1822, the Kokugaku (National Learning) philosopher Motoori Norinaga published a study of the Kojiki that simultaneously attacked the Nihongi as being inadequately Japanese. Norinaga’s rejection of the “Chinese-tainted” Nihongi has had a lasting impact on the study of Shinto since that time. The Nihongi has remained an important text for Japanese mythology, though it was placed second to the more “authentic” Kojiki.