Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800

2 Mythemes

2 MYTHEMES The Gods took council together: The Plain-of-Reeds Should be For the August God Who was sent down to earth: The High-Illumining Sun Prince, At his palace Kiyomigahara In Asuka, He established firm his reign In all his godhead. —689. About Tenmu in a lament for Kusakabe. Manyōshū. Before identifying divine emperorship too readily as a singularly Japanese mytheme, one should remind oneself that, as a rule, power becomesacceptedonlywhensacralized .Rulershipwithoutreligioussanction is power without legitimacy. As Gilbert Dagron remarks, “Tout pouvoir de fait ne devient pouvoir de droit qu’en se sacralisant: l’État est sacré, l’Église est pouvoir.”1 It is not that some cultures sacralize authority and others don’t; all do somehow and often in similar ways. In the fifth century, for instance, Koguryŏ kings appealed to Heaven and the Sun, as Yamato kings did later.2 The differences between traditions called upon for conjuring up an enchanted world for political power can be reduced to a question of modality, as a matter of what sort of symbolics is put to the task of such a world-making enterprise. This modality is never monological, although we customarily label it Buddhist, Daoist, Shinto, because all traditions are composites. The symbolicinactionisalwayspromiscuous ,withinandamongtraditions.Robert Heine-Geldern speaks of a “plural symbolism” as being common in Buddhist Southeast Asia,3 but a multilayered borrowing is shared throughout Asia and China, and in Japan as well. We are confronted with a web of superimposedmodalitiesratherthanwithacoherenceofsingle -strandideas.4 The operating logic of this symbolics is one that groups together tangles of mythemes | 29 meanings rather than a discriminating one that separates through argumentation acceptable and unacceptable alternatives. For political power, the sacred is fungible. CosmogonicGroundings Kōnoshi Takamitsu has demonstrated that what we unreflectingly refer to as the Shinto mythology, recorded in the texts of the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, did not, at the time of their compilation, exist as such. Rather, these two works present two separate cosmologies that ground Yamato rulership in significantly different ways.5 Moreover, to further complicate textual interpretation, the inclusion of numerous original commentaries, annotations and alternate versions (aru fumi ni iwaku) to the main text, indented and written in small type in the oldest manuscripts, have produced the Nihonshoki asalaminatedtext.Forinstance,scholarshavechartedsixvariants (the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki’s main text, and four different versions) regarding the details of the descent of the Heavenly Grandchild Ninigi to the Central Land. The variations concern the identity of who ordered the descent, the nature of the regalia, Ninigi’s companions, and the site where they landed.6 Kōnoshi’s interpretation constitutes a radical break with a centuries-old hermeneuticsguidedbytheunquestionedaimtoclarify“the”Japanesemythology ,thoughttoberetrievableasasingle-strandideologyfromanumber ofvariants,somecontradictory,othersalmostrepetitious.Omissionsinthe “Age of the kami” chapters of the Kojiki (the first of three) and the Nihon shoki(thefirsttwoofthirty)werefilledin,andvariationsglossedoverasinsignificant . Working within a chronological framework of a discourse that would have evolved from earlier and simpler oral tales to later and more complex texts, scholars developed, as early as the ninth century, a hermeneutics that collapsed the differences into an evolving but single narrative. Thus, according to Kōnoshi, not one but at least two mythologies were at work in the seventh and eighth centuries, and side by side. Amaterasu, whom the monological version of Japan’s origins puts forth as the divine ancestor, protector, and guarantor of the Yamato house, is mainly a product of the Kojiki, and even there that role has to be qualified. In the Nihon shoki’s mythological chapters, Amaterasu plays no part in the important episode of the descent to earth by the divine grandchild Ninigi, and Amaterasu does not function as founding ancestor. For the compilers oftheNihonshoki,thatimportantfunctionisreservedforthekamiTakamimusuhi , whose daughter married Amaterasu’s son and produced Ninigi. 30 | mythemes Takamimusuhi is the one who wants to send his grandson down to the Central Land of the Reed Plains, which, however, was in chaos. Several dispatches of kami were needed, each time preceded by a meeting where Takamimusuhi consulted with Amaterasu and all the gods, before Ninigi could be sent and the Central Land pacified. No mention is made of the mirror, sword, or jewel, regalia that tradition has always considered the sacred emblems for the legitimate rule over Yamato. According to the Kojiki, however, Ninigi received these indispensable guarantees of rulership from Amaterasu, who, in this version, is in charge of the whole affair.7 The numerous parallelisms...