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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
This article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured “as if” realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in early Japan, and by contrast in Tang China. I reexamine a number of well-known primary sources of early Japanese history in comparison with parallel Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty. Placing that comparison within the context of new developments in the historiography of China, Korea, and Japan, I argue that Confucianism's comparatively weak ritual positioning in Japan disabled its capacity to legitimate imperial rule there. The early Japanese state thus lacked one of the primary ritual tools employed in other parts of premodern East Asia to legitimate the power of new emperors and kings. I thus unpack one component in a wider process of East Asian cultural reproduction, which in the case of Japan contributed to the emergence of a state ultimately not ruled through imperial institutions or the emperor for most of its premodern history. The bifurcation of ritual and political power in sacred kingship, a seemingly geographically and temporally widespread phenomenon currently studied in various global histories, is explained in this article in terms of complex processes of cultural reproduction and transmission.
1 Nihon shoki [720 AD], in Sakamoto Tarō et al., eds., Nihon Shoki, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 67 (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 370–73. “Confucian professors” was transcribed into the Japanese of the time as “people who can read and write.” A similar passage occurs in the Kojiki (712 AD), which also mentions that Wani transmitted a ten-volume set of Confucius Analects; Kurano Kenji and Takeda Yūkichi, eds., Kojiki, Norito, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 1 (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1958), 248–49.
2 The Nihon Shoki relates a number of instances of Confucian books and teachers being given as gifts to the Japanese sovereign by the Korean kingdom of Baekje. The events of the first story quoted above are dated in the Nihon Shoki (using the traditional manner of calculating its dates) as having happened in 284. Peter F. Kornicki suggests this could possibly be recalculated to 405, in The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 278–79. Inoue Mitsusada and Delmer M. Brown instead emphasize a later reference in the same text that speaks of another gift of Confucian scholarship in 513; “The Century of Reform,” in Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 1: Ancient Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170. This reference can be found in Sakamoto Tarō, et al., eds., Nihon Shoki, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 68 (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 28–35.
3 On the politics and ideology of this period in general, see Michael I. Como, Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Herman Ooms, Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2009).
4 Kurano and Takeda, Kojiki, Norito, 248–49.
5 See, for instance, Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 186; and John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78; Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Clifford Geertz's classic characterization of the “king of chess” also referred to this phenomenon; Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 130.
6 Puett, Michael, “Critical Approaches to Religion in China,” Critical Research on Religion 1, 1 (2013): 95–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 98. A similar argument can be found in James Laidlaw, “On Theatre and Theory: Reflections on Ritual in Imperial Chinese Politics,” in Joseph P. McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 399–416.
7 Michael Puett, “Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology,” in Veena Das, et al., eds., The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 227–28.
8 Ibid., 222–28.
9 Confucius Analects 3/12, Legge translation, taken from Ba Yi: http://ctext.org/analects/ba-yi and http://ctext.org/analects (accessed 8 Mar. 2015).
10 On the significance and politics of the Zhou Li in Chinese history, see Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern, Statecraft and Classical Learning: The Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
11 Zhou Li, Tian guan zhong zai, 68, from The Rites of Zhou: http://ctext.org/rites-of-zhou (accessed 8 Mar. 2015). This is an online version of the Zhou Li edited by Lu Deming of the Tang dynasty, and appears in the Si ku quan shu. The word “sacrifice” is often used in translations like Legge's to refer to a form of worship where food is offered to the deity or ancestor. However, certainly by this period, killing was not part of the ritual, and so many writers prefer the term “offering,” or simply “worship.”
12 The ritsuryō state, or statutory state, refers in Japanese historiography to the period during which the Japanese state began to employ formal administrative and legal frameworks derived from Chinese models of lüling (criminal and administrative regulations). The Japanese reading of the two characters making up this Chinese word is ritsuryō. In the eighth century, Japan devised its own, very similar set of lüling (ritsuryō) based on Tang dynasty models. On the ritsuryō system in general, see Ooms, Imperial Politics; and Joan R. Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). This form of rule is regarded as having been adopted gradually from the end of the seventh century, formalized in the mid-eighth century, and displaced from the actual processes of governance by the tenth century.
13 Mark Teeuwen argues that the creation of imperial legitimacy rites based around a vision of Amaterasu as the sun god progenitor of the Japanese imperial line dates from the Jinshin War seventh-century period. This view is articulated in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, “Capital of the Gods: A Social History of the Ise Shrines” (book MSS forthcoming from Bloomsbury), ch. 1. See also Teeuwen, Mark, “Comparative Perspectives on the Emergence of Jindō and Shinto,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70, 2 (2007): 373–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 377.
14 Aoki Kazuo, ed., Kojiki. Nihon Shisō Taikei 1 (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 10–17, 650.
15 The archaeologist historian Gina Barnes suggests the late fifth century for Japanese state formation, while most textual historians outside Japan place it a century or two later. This depends on how one approaches the rubbery definition of a state (Gina Barnes, State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-Century Ruling Elite (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), xiv. On competing “early” and “late” historiographies of the emergence of an early Japanese state, see Breen and Teeuwen, “Capital of the Gods,” ch. 1.
16 In addition to the issue of violence against “barbarians,” the process of proto-historic state formation also brings the members of that state into new systems of domination and subordination, as discussed by Koji Mizoguchi, An Archaeological History of Japan 30,000 B.C. to A.D. 700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 29.
17 Como, Shōtoku; Kevin Gray Carr, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu, University of Hawaìi Press, 2012); Robert Borgen, “A Record of Seven Generations,” Nihon kanbun kenkyū 1 (Mar. 2006): 1–16.
18 For instance, the current Prime Minister of Japan, Abe Shinzō, has referred to it as part of his campaign to promote revision of the current, postwar Japanese Constitution.
19 One of the most famous valorizations of the idea of harmony in Japanese culture came from Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), an important mid-twentieth-century Japanese philosopher and ethicist. The revision of approach can be traced generationally through the work of his students, including Sagara Tōru (1921–2000). For a thought-provoking critical discussion of the idea of harmony in Japanese history and historiography, see the work of Sagara's student, Kurozumi, Makoto, Fukusūsei No Nihon Shisō [Japanese thought as pluralism] (Tōkyō: Perikansha, 2006), 494–96.
20 Saburō Ienaga, ed., Shōtoku Taishi shū, Nihon shisō taikei 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1975), 12–13; Wm. Theodore De Bary et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 51.
21 Kojima Tsuyoshi, Higashi Ajia no jukyō to rei [East Asian Confucianism and ritual] (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 2013), 25–30; Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
22 Ienaga, Shōtoku Taishi shū, 15.
23 Ibid.: 17–18.
24 Ibid.: 21–22.
25 It is also important to note, however, that these points about relationships and trust, although presented primarily through Confucian terminology related to the sovereign-vassal relationship, are also backed up by reference to Buddhist ideas. For instance, in injunction fourteen, Buddhist ideas of trust are quoted to back up the points made in other injunctions (Ienaga, Shōtoku Taishi shū, 21). The position of Buddhism in Japanese society is also asserted in the second injunction, which emphasizes the place of the Buddhist clergy and the role of Buddhist dharma as the underpinnings of all states (ibid., 13). This is indeed the section of the Shōtoku's Seventeen Article Constitution often quoted to demonstrate that early Japan by this stage was to some degree a “Buddhist state.”
26 A repetition of the phrasing from the Liji [Book of rites] (book 3, section 3, par. 14 in Legge's translation; http://ctext.org/liji [accessed 8 Mar. 2015]) occurs in Book 5 of the Nihon Shoki; Sakamoto, Nihon Shoki, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 67, 248–49. Other examples linking military expeditions against emishi “barbarians” and culture can be found throughout Nihon Shoki, including in Book 26 (Sakamoto 1965, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 68, 330–31). This last example is actually an interesting combination of both use of force and mediation between the state forces and the “barbarians.”
27 Ooms, Imperial Politics, 168; Kōjirō Naoki, ed., Shoku Nihongi, Tōyō Bunko 489 (Tōkyō: Heibonsha, 1988), 27.
28 For more discussion of these issues, see Bruce Loyd Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions (Honolulu: University of Hawaìi Press, 2003).
29 On the role of ideas of culture and civilization in official “Japanese” court depictions of their campaign against the emishi “barbarians,” see Friday, Karl. “Pushing Beyond the Pale: The Yamato Conquest of the Emishi and Northern Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 23, 1 (1997): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 3–4.
30 See, for instance, the series edited by Amino Yoshihiko: Mori Kōichi, Umi to rettō bunka (Tōkyō: Shōgakkan, 1992). For a general treatment of this problem, see his “Nihon” to Wa Nani Ka (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 2000), 25–39.
31 Anthony C. Yu, State and Religion in China: Historical and Textual Perspectives (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 21–22.
32 Norman Harry Rotschild, Rhetoric, Ritual, and Support Constituencies in the Political Authority of Wu Zhao, Woman Emperor of China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 54–56.
33 Livia Kohn, Daoism Handbook (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 339.
34 Ibid.
35 Richard McBride, State and Society in Middle and Late Silla (Cambridge: Korea Institute, Harvard University, 2010), 3.
36 On the importance of the Bohai state's relationship with Japan in the development of Japanese approaches to Chinese civilization, see Robert Borgen, Sugawara No Michizane and the Early Heian Court (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), 230–31. I use the Chinese term “Bohai” to identify this state rather than the Korean term “Balhae” simply because the former is more widely recognized. This does not indicate my taking a position in the current political debate between China and Korea over how the name of this historical state should be Romanized. Currently, there is no agreed standard in English.
37 Ooms, Imperial Politics, xviii. On Daoist influence, see also Tim Barrett, “Shinto and Taoism in Early Japan,” in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, eds., Shinto in History (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 13–31.
38 James McMullen, “The Worship of Confucius in Ancient Japan,” in Peter F. Kornicki and I. James McMullen, eds., Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75.
39 Marian Ury, “Chinese Learning and Intellectual Life,” in John Whitney Hall, Donald H. Shively, and William H. MaCullough, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 2: Heian Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 342.
40 Inoue Mitsusada et al., eds., Ritsuryō, Nihon shisō taikei3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976), 764–66.
41 Niida Noboru, Tōrei shūi ho: tsuketari Tō-Nichi ryorei taishō ichiran (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1997).
42 On the translation of “worship,” see note 11.
43 Niida, Tōrei shūi ho, 971–75.
44 Rites of Zhou, Xiaguan sima, 101: ctext.org/rites-of-zhou/xia-guan-si-ma (accessed 16 Mar. 2015); Kongzi Jiayu, jiaowen, 1: ctext.org/kongzi-jiayu/jiao-wen (accessed 16 Mar. 2015). Note that in these references jiao is often marked as separate from miao, particularly through the association of the worship of Tian with jiao, indicated through the term jiaosi 郊祀, a compound that never occurs in earlier texts like the Book of Rites. This marks this division between the two as a defining element in the post-Later Han system of Chinese imperial ritual. See also Kojima, Higashi Ajia no jukyō to rei, 18–21.
45 Niida, Tōrei shūi ho, 971–75.
46 Ibid., 971.
47 The Rites of Zhou, Chunguan Zongbo, 101: http://ctext.org/rites-of-zhou (accessed 8 Mar. 2015).
48 Niida, Tōrei shūi ho, 971; Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 211–24. There is also a Buddhist clergy chapter in the Japanese code that parallels the chapter on the officers of the Gods. This is not present in the Tang codes, and is actually taken from a Chinese monastic code of rules (Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 541, 529).
49 Ibid., 721.
50 Teeuwen, “Comparative Perspectives,” 379.
51 Niida, Tōrei shūi ho, 971.
52 Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 211–13. “The Office of Heavenly and Earthly Gods” is here my translation of jingikan, the officers who carry out the rituals articulated in this chapter. John Breen and Mark Teeuwen translate this as “The Council of the Heavenly and Earthly Kami” or “The Council of Kami Affairs,” in A New History of Shinto (Chichester: Wiley and Blackwell, 2010), 32. Ross Bender has explained the jingikan as a “Council of Divinities, charged with oversight of native (Shintō) institutions and clergy.” He continues, “Theoretically an equal counterpart to the Council of State, this institution had no parallel in the Chinese bureaucratic structure”; “Emperor, Aristocracy, and the Ritsuryō State: Court Politics in Nara,” in Karl F. Friday, Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850 (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012), 113. This chapter in the ritsuryō code, however, did have a parallel chapter in the Tang code.
53 Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 721–22.
54 The alternate gloss referring specifically to categories of Shinto Shrine thus demonstrates that these terms, although plucked out of the Tang code and arranged to resemble it, refer not to the Confucian rites and deities of the Book of Rites and Rites of Zhou referred to in the Tang code, and underlying Confucian imperial ritual, but rather to Shinto Shrines, graded into these two categories in the Kojiki. Even these Confucian terms from the Rites of Zhou seem not to have been derived on the Japanese codes directly from the Rites of Zhou, but rather were likely extracted from their original place of Japanese appropriation in the Kojiki, a work predating the Japanese Yōrō Codes by about half a century (Aoki, Kojiki, 150). So the Yōrō Codes' use of this terminology could in this case be read not as a bungled attempt to quote from the Tang Codes, but instead as a direct quote from the Kojiki, which only happens to match the Tang Codes because both texts were lifting from the Rites of Zhou.
55 Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 211, 532.
56 Piggot, Emergence of Japanese Kingship, 168.
57 Breen and Teeuwen, “Capital of the Gods,” ch. 1. Teeuwen has also related this to earlier arguments by Mori Mizue (“Comparative Perspectives,” 377).
58 This aspect of difference is also discussed in McMullen, “Worship of Confucius,” 39–77.
59 Niida, Tōrei shūi ho, 971.
60 Mitsusada, Ritsuryō, 262.
61 McMullen gives examples of several important exceptions; “Worship of Confucius,” 71–73.
62 Ivo Smits, The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca. 1050–1150 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995), 103.
63 All the state buildings that burnt down in this fire were reconstructed with the exception of the Confucian Academy. Many of the objects necessary for conducting the shidian (Jp. sekiten) ceremony had already been stolen in the tenth century. Minamoto Ryōen, Shisō (Tōkyō: Taishūkan Shoten, 1995), 77.
64 McMullen, “Worship of Confucius,” 70.
65 Breen and Teeuwen. “Capital of the Gods,” ch. 1.
66 Puett, “Critical Approaches,” 99.
67 Alan Strathern has recently labeled this kind of bifurcation of ritual and politics in sacred kingship as “the ritualization trap” (personal communication, 12 Apr. 2015). In my view, this idea goes further than Geertz's concept of a “king of chess” in that it explains the process of how so-called icon kings were brought into being. See also Strathern's “Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 2: 358–83Google Scholar.
