Introduction to the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace

Helen McCullough translated and published the first twelve chapters of the medieval military chronicle Taiheiki, as Taiheki: A Medieval Chronicle of Great Peace, in 1979. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kyoko Selden and I, then colleagues on the faculty of Cornell University, began meeting weekly to read, discuss, and translate a broad range of Japanese historical texts, including sections of the Taiheiki through Chapter 19 (out of forty). Our short-term objective was to develop materials for an interdisciplinary seminar that would introduce more of the Taiheiki to English readers. Here, two selections from the Taiheiki—the dramatic and tragic death of Go-Daigo’s cast-off son Prince Moriyoshi (alt. Morinaga, 1308-35) from Chapter 13 and an account of the critical battle at Hakone Takenoshita from Chapter 14, both events of 1335—are paired with linked verse by the basara (flamboyant) warrior Sasaki Dōyo, and the Edo-period Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers’ Chronicle of Peace. All were originally translated and annotated for our Taiheiki course, first taught in 1992, a class that I continue to teach at the University of Southern California.

By way of brief introduction to the Taiheiki, we know neither its authors’ names nor its completion date. Criticisms of the Taiheiki (Nantaiheiki, 1402) by Imagawa Ryōshun (active 1370s-1440s) suggests that an initial account took form between 1338 and 1350, but editing and expansion continued long after, into the era of the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1358-1408; reign 1368-94). Literary historian Hyōdo Hiromi thinks that an early text of thirty chapters was expanded by an additional ten chapters.¹ The journal of the well known courtier Tōin Kinsada (1340-99) names the monk Kojima as one author, while Imagawa’s Criticisms of the Taiheiki mentions two other monks, Echin and Gen’e, as compilers. Gen’e was an intimate of Ashikaga Takauji’s younger brother and lieutenant Tadayoshi (1306-52), as well as a prominent scholar of China’s Sung dynasty (960-1279). Since both Echin and Gen’e died in the 1350s, they would have been early contributors to the manuscript.² As for the issue of how the early story was written, historian Satō Kazuhiko thinks that, at least for battle narratives, the authors used records made by Ji-Sect monks, who followed armies of the day and tended to funerary rites on the battlefield. In some cases we also have reports of battle service called gunchūjō submitted by warriors to claim rewards.³

The Taiheiki can be divided into three chronological sections: the first twelve chapters provide the narrative up to the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1333—this was the section translated by McCullough. The next nine chapters (13-21) tell the story of the monarch Go-Daigo’s restoration, its failure, and Go-Daigo’s subsequent death in Yoshino in 1339. And the final nineteen chapters (22-40) narrate the fortunes of the newly established Ashikaga Shogunate up to 1367, including battles between adherents of the northern and southern courts, the fracturing and inner struggles within the shogunate between supporters of Takauji and Tadayoshi in the 1350s, and the back story for the reign of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu that began in 1368. While the Selden-Piggott translation does not yet include many parts of this third section, we have translated the titles of each subsection and written abstracts for them, which provide readers with a good sense of the contents of each subsection. The plan is to put all this work on the Japan Historical Text Initiative (JHTI) website in the near future,⁴ providing a platform where multiple translators can work on sections simultaneously to advance the ongoing translation project more quickly.

As for historical context, the knowledge of which greatly enriches a reading of the Taiheiki, English readers can find useful material in Andrew Goble’s The Kenmu Revolution (1997), Kenneth Grossberg’s Japan’s Renaissance (1981; reprinted in 2010), and Thomas Conlan’s two studies, State of War (2004) and Sovereign and Symbol (2011).⁵ Fortunately, in these books Conlan has begun to...