Tsumi \-\- Offence and Retribution in Early Japan (review)

In Tsumi—Offence and Retribution in Early Japan, Yoko Williams traces the development of tsumi, which she defines as a concept of social offense, across five centuries. She sees tsumi as a social construct that developed in tandem with the institution of kingship, leading to the thesis that study of an idea and an institution together can shed new light on culture and politics. Williams's chronological focus is the late fifth through the seventh centuries. She drew inspiration from Sir George Sansom, who once proposed that early Japan lacked a concept of sin (p. 1). Legal historians such as Ishimoda Shō (1912–86) have also argued that the notions of earthly and heavenly offenses—kunitsutsumi and amatsutsumi—are the starting points for Japan's legal history.¹

Williams begins with a discussion of sources, especially the eighth-century chronicles known as the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Here lay great potential—outside Japan all too little has been added to our understanding of these texts since Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. G. Aston provided English translations in the late nineteenth century.² It is even difficult to find scholarly guidance in Japanese as to how to read and interpret these texts, particularly concerning how much historical credence should be given to these chronicles that, like the Bible, take their stories back to the Age of the Gods.³ Unfortunately, Williams does not prove helpful in this regard. Her approach is frequently and disconcertingly ahistorical. In chapter two, she provides an overview of sociopolitical development from Yayoi times (third to sixth centuries) up to the emergence of the tennō-centered polity at the turn of the eighth century. I found this section overly general and dated because it ignores recent debates and archaeological data, although it brings into English ideas of elder historians such as Mizuno Yū (1918– ) and Ishimoda Shō.

From chapter three onward, Williams analyzes the character of tsumi in the context of societal responses to such offenses through three stages of kingly development: the rise of Yamato kingship in the fifth century, the transformation from ōkimi to tennō at the turn of the seventh century, and the full emergence of the tennō in the later seventh century. Williams argues that tsumi, which she thinks developed originally as an offense against the Yayoi agricultural community, was institutionalized as an offense against the Ya-mato great king by the later fifth century, thereby helping to construct that monarch's authority. Later, as Chinese-style ritsuryō rulership took more mature form in the later seventh century, tsumi was redefined as a crime against the monarch's government. At that stage, the personal authority of the throne was compromised by the codal law and bureaucratic protocols used to structure it. Williams eventually concludes that what tennō gained in symbolic potency—by being proclaimed living deities—they lost in political power due to the constraints of law and bureaucracy. In this formulation influenced by Max Weber's ideas, the late fifth-century ruler Great King Yūryaku was personally more powerful than Great King Tenmu in the late seventh century, since the latter monarch ruled through, and was limited by, a corporate government of "legal-rational domination."

In reading this story that is more about kingship than tsumi, I found myself doubting that tsumi was as central to the construction of kingship as Williams claims. But more troubling was the thinness of evidence, and the ahistorical and uncritical treatment of sources, for kingship up to the seventh century. Williams herself is aware of the problem, and she cites the views of the historian Tsuda Sōkichi (1873–1961). Tsuda argued that compilers of the eighth-century Kojiki and Nihon shoki incorporated earlier materials written down during the sixth century. Careful readers, he thought, can tease out ideas dating back to the fifth century or even earlier (pp. 18, 42, 130). But since Tsuda's theory of sixth-century record-keeping is itself...