Performative Loci of the Imperial Edicts in Nara Japan, 749-70

The naiki presented the text to the Minister, the Minister submitted it to the Emperor. This being over, the Minister selected a capable man to read it, who received it and went back to his proper place. The Prince Imperial rose in the Eastern side of his seat and faced the West. Then everybody present from the princes downward rose and did likewise. The senmyō no taifu (herald) went to his appointed place and read the senmyō. Its contents were…. Then he said: Everybody obey this. The Prince Imperial first of all said "Aye." Then everybody from the princes downward said likewise "Aye." The Prince Imperial made obeisance. Then everybody present from the princes downward did the same. This was repeated as many times as senmyō were read. The ceremonial was always the same (Jōganshiki, c. 871; trans. Snellen 1934:166).

This description of the reading of an Imperial edict (senmyō) from the Jōganshiki, a late ninth-century compendium of court procedures, provides an image of the formal declamation of the Emperor's words in an orderly, routinized setting. The nobility are seated in their appointed places, the ritual is predetermined, and indeed, as the text notes: "The ceremonial was always the same."

But this illustration is deceptively static and misleading. The contemporary performative context of imperial edicts may in fact be accurately reflected in this late ninth-century handbook of court ritual, but the senmyō texts that we know from the official court histories, the Rikkokushi (Six National Histories, Sakamoto 1991) date back to the end of the seventh century. The official history Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan, Continued, Aoki et al. 1989-98) is the locus classicus for these texts and covers the years 697-791. The actual historical circumstances of these 62 senmyō, written in a peculiar form of Old Japanese, and some 900 other royal decrees inscribed in the Chinese of the chronicle, illuminate far more vivid and dynamic settings for imperial proclamations than is suggested by later sources such as the Jōganshiki.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performative loci of the imperial edicts during the reign of the "Last Empress," Kōken-Shōtoku (r. 749-70)—their historical setting, geographical locale, and sometimes even the audiences for these royal pronouncements. This is the era in which fully half of the senmyō were recorded in Shoku Nihongi, and during which the production of the edicts inscribed in Chinese were also at their peak. The court annals of this period depict the reign of a powerful woman in a tumultuous epoch, as the Last Empress staved off challenges to her power from her royal cousins, and, in the famous dénouement of her reign, attempted to hand the throne to a Buddhist priest, not of imperial lineage, who may or may not have been her lover.

Imperial Edicts—Senmyō, Choku, and Shō

The senmyō were introduced to the world of Western scholarship in Sir George Sansom's pioneering but unfinished translation, "The Imperial Edicts in the Shoku Nihongi" (1924). Since that time what little attention has been paid to them in the West has often taken the terms "senmyō" and "imperial edicts" as synonymous.¹ This ignores the fact that Shoku Nihongi also contains a much larger number of imperial edicts called "choku" and "shō." These latter are inscribed in the Chinese of the body of the chronicle. The senmyō, however, are written in a unique form of "Old Japanese" or "Western Old Japanese" (Miller 1967:34; Vovin 2005:15) that was famously deciphered in a lengthy commentary by the eminent eighteenth-century philologist Motoori Norinaga (Ōno S. 1971:185-482).

It was the linguistic peculiarity of the senmyō, akin to that of the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712) and Man'yōshū (Ten Thousand Leaves Collection, c. 757), which accounted for Norinaga's special interest. As a Japanese nationalist, he had very little concern for the Chinese text itself. Norinaga's interpretations of the Old Japanese senmyō have been so influential as to form the foundation for the study of these texts to...