Sendai Kuji Hongi : Authentic Myths or Forged History?

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, Sendai kuji hongi (also known as Kuji hongi or Kujiki) was considered to be Japan's oldest record. It was presented as such for the first time in a so-called Nihongi kō, one of the lecture-cum-poetry sessions on the Nihon shoki (720) that were held once every thirty years or so in the ninth and tenth centuries. At such a gathering in 936, the scholar-bureaucrat Yatabe no Kinmochi informed the assembled nobles that the Nihon shoki was based on an earlier work compiled by Shōtoku Taishi called Kuji hongi. As if this were not startling enough, he demonstrated that he had access to this very text by quoting from it (in spite of the fact that Nihon shoki relates that Shōtoku's work had been lost to fire in the 645 coup overthrowing the Soga ). Kinmochi's quotations can be traced in Sendai kuji hongi as we know it today.

Kinmochi's claim was based on an entry in the Nihon shoki. The chapter on the reign of Empress Suiko states:

This year [twenty-eighth year, 620], the Prince Imperial [Shōtoku], in concert with Shima no Ōomi , drew up a record of the emperors, a record of the land, and chronicles of the omi and the muraji [heads of lineages associated with the Yamato court], the tomo no miyatsuko [court retainers], the one hundred eighty be [occupational groups], and the ōmitakara [public subjects].

At some stage, the identification of Sendai kuji hongi with the compilation alluded to in the Nihon shoki was made explicit in a preface that accompanies almost all surviving manuscripts of Sendai kuji hongi. According to this preface, Shōtoku and Soga no Umako completed ten volumes of records and chronicles, but were unable to finish the project due to Shōtoku's death in 622. Fittingly, Sendai kuji hongi (book 9) ends with Shōtoku's funeral.

There are many good reasons, however, why Sendai kuji hongi cannot be dated to the 620s. The first and most obvious problem, raised already by early Mito scholars in the seventeenth century, is that the text contains Chinese-style posthumous names for the successive emperors (kanpū shigō). By the Edo period, it was known that these names had been created in retrospect by Ōmi no Mifune (722-785). This was enough to brand the text as suspect. Soon, it was relegated to the rapidly growing pile of "forgeries" (gisho), meaning that it was deleted from the canon of "true" national histories. In more recent times, scholars have also lost faith in the 620 compilation of records and chronicles, and even in the historicity of the figure of Shōtoku.¹

The book by John R. Bentley under review here contains a full and richly annotated translation of Sendai kuji hongi (based primarily on the 1980 Shintō taikei edition), with a lengthy introduction that challenges the text's lasting status as an alleged forgery. Already in his title, Bentley reveals that he regards Sendai kuji hongi as "authentic." This word has to be understood in terms of the debates on historiographical, literary, and religious canonization that transformed Japanese scholarship in the Edo period and that continue to exert a profound influence to this day. Gisho, as the implied opposite of Bentley's "authenticity," refers primarily to the authorship of a text, rather than its contents. Gisho are books that are falsely attributed to a famous figure from the past and that seek to give legitimacy to a particular claim by fraudulent means. From a detached point of view, this is a problematic category. It could easily be expanded far beyond the scope that most scholars would be willing to accept: in fact, the entire Buddhist canon and even the "official" national histories Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki might be termed, in this sense, gisho. Moreover, the branding of texts as gisho has...