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Notes Chapter1:Bricolage Epigraphs: Kaifūsō, 81; SNG 1: 121. 1. In Chinese records, the archipelago is referred to as the land of Wo (Japanese pronunciation, Wa), written with one of the graphs adopted by the islanders themselvestorefertoYamato(today’sNaraprefecture),thesiteofthefirstYamato kingdom in the fourth century. The earliest reference to the land of Wo (meaning “dwarfs,” although arguably the graph had only a phonetic and no semantic value) is found in Shanhai jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas; compiled between300BCEand250CE ).Woislistedthereamong“mountains,deities,mythical creatures and foreign peoples and lands,” which include “the cosmic Kunlun Mountains and the Queen Mother of the West,” two Daoist icons that predate Daoism; see Nakagawa, “The Shan-hai ching and Wo,” 46, 48. It is debated to what extent the Kyushu chiefdoms mentioned in the third-century Wei zhi (Annals of the Kingdom of Wei, 220–265) shared cultural traits with counterparts in the coastal regions of south China, especially the states of Wu and Yue. Over time, the term Wa became limited to the archipelago, and by the seventh century it referred to Japan as a whole; see Hudson, “Ethnicity in East Asian Archaeology,” 46–63, esp. 54, 58. For information regarding Japan in the early Chinese dynastic histories,seedeBaryetal.,SourcesofJapaneseTradition(2nded.),1:6–13.ForadiscussionofChinese records in the light of archeologicalfindings, seeFarris,Sacred Texts, chap. 1. Zhenping Wang treats many of these issues in his Ambassadors. 2.FortherecentviewthattheearlyeighthcenturyconsideredTenjiratherthan Tenmu as the founder of the lineage, see Kimoto, Nara-chō seiji to kōi keishō, chap. 1; Inoue Wataru, Nihon kodai no tennō to saigi, 46–48; Fujidō, “Ritsuryō kokka no koki,” 17, 24; Mizubayashi, “Ritsuryō tennōsei (1),” 150–158. 3. Yoshie Akiko has demonstrated that before the end of the seventh century, a sovereign’s consorts enjoyed an independent status in a society that was bilateral ; they often maintained their own residence, as did Jitō before she succeeded Tenmu.SeeYoshie,“GenderinEarlyClassicalJapan,”438(status),439(bilateral), 467 (Jitō); see also Farris, Sacred Texts, 227–228. 4. On the historiographical controversy surrounding the Taika Reform, see Farris, Sacred Texts, 203–209. 5. The titles for rulers changed over time. Even tennō fell in disuse between 1200 and 1840 (Watanabe Hiroshi, Higashi Ajia no ōken, 7). Ancient Japan’s rulers were kimi, kings among other kings (uji leaders), until the second half of the fifthcentury,whenYūryaku(456–479),thetwenty-firstintheSunline,seemingly adopted the title of ōkimi (great king) to signal preeminence over other warrior kings (Kumagai, Ōkimi), 13, 123; Piggott, Emergence, 54. Under Tenmu, tennō (heavenly sovereign) replaced “great king.” I shall translate tennō as heavenly sov- 270 | notes to pages 4–7 ereign for the beginning of the Tenmu dynasty when the connotation of heavenly rulershipwasnew.Otherwise,whenreferringtoparticularrulers,Ishalladoptthe conventional “emperor” or omit the title altogether. 6.TheTaihōCodeisnolongerextant,butitsslightlymodifiedversion,theYōrō Code, compiled two decades later (promulgated in 757), has been reconstructed almost completely from a number of later legal commentaries, which also remark on differences between the Taihō and Yōrō codes. Hence, we have a fairly trustworthy understanding of the minor differences between the two codes. References to the Taihō Code in this study, in the narrow documentary sense, are thus to the Yōrō Code. Chronologically, the year 701, when its draft was completed, is meant, or 702, the year of its promulgation. 7. The Yamato basin consists of a few provinces around Yamato province, later called the Kinai or Home Provinces, an area that includes Asuka, Nara, and the Osaka-Kyoto regions. 8. “Nonroyal” here means non-Yamato royal, because Kanmu’s mother hailed from the Paekche (Korea) royal family, which had sought refuge in Japan in the late seventh century. 9. Mizubayashi Takeshi has calculated that the comparative number of pages per year for each of the last thirteen rulers (539–697) minus Tenmu in the Nihon shoki (in a modern edition) varies between 0.4 and 2.67 (1 being the value given to Tenji’s yearly average), compared to Tenmu, whose average was 9.33. In this computation, the chapter on the Jinshin War, which lasted only one month, was counted as one year. See Mizubayashi, “Ritsuryō tennōsei (2),” 107. 10. The Rikkokushi (Six National Histories) covers Japanese history up to 887 in six volumes, starting with the Nihon shoki and Shoku Nihongi. For an in-depth analysis of the historiographical aspects of these chronicles, see Sakamoto, Six National Histories. On the Sawara question, see 116–117. 11. Some ten pages of...

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