CHAPTER 9
ASUKA AND NARA CULTURE: LITERACY, LITERATURE, AND MUSIC
This chapter deals with the literature and music of Japan during the two centuries between the acceptance of Buddhism in 587 and the abandonment of the Nara capital in 784. These were years of vast and fundamental change in the island kingdom, of cultural forced feeding and vigorous new growth. In particular, they were the years when Japan became fully and for all time a participant in the high civilization of East Asia. Participation meant religious and philosophical orientations, an ideal of imperial rule, legal and administrative structures, techniques and styles of architecture, city planning, sculpture, painting, and music - all derived directly or indirectly from China and shared in one degree or another by the peoples on its periphery. Above all, it meant literacy: the mastery of the Chinese language and the eventual adaptation of its script to the writing of Japanese. From literacy came ventures in historiography - at once a definition and a redefinition of the Japanese state - and in poetry. Emulation of China led the newly literate Japanese to compose verses in Chinese modeled on the ones they found in Chinese anthologies, and it also led them to write down their own songs and to turn the native prosody into high poetic art. The myths, legends, folk and hero tales of the oral tradition were also written down in the first histories and local gazetteers, to form the beginnings of a prose literature.
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No one knows when Chinese writing first reached the Japanese islands, but the arrival of the scholar Wani from the Korean kingdom of Paekche in the late fourth or early fifth century is a convenient event from which to date the beginning of literacy.1 Wani, who arrived in the
The translations of the poems in this chapter are from the author's forthcoming book entitled The Gem-Glistening Cup, volume I of A Waka Anthology, to be published by Stanford University Press. They appear here by permission.
1 Nihonshoki, SakamotoTaro, Ienaga Saburo, Inoue Mitsusada, and Ono Susumu, eds.,Nihonko-ten bungaku taikei (hereafter cited as NKBT) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967), vol 67, pp. 371-2.
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sixteenth year of Ojin, was appointed tutor of the crown prince, supplementing or supplanting another man from Paekche, Achiki or Achi-kishi, who had accompanied a gift of a stallion and a mare from the king of Paekche in the preceding years. Achiki recommended Wani as a superior scholar, and the Japanese court promptly asked Paekche to send him. Wani is said to have arrived with eleven volumes of Chinese writings, including the Analects and the Thousand-Character Classic.2 He stayed on and became the ancestor of a specialized occupational group (be) of scribes, the fumi no obitoJ Dependence on the services of such a group suggests that literacy did not initially spread far at the Japanese court; that is, the employment of Chinese or Korean secretaries would have been an obvious answer to whatever needs for communication in writing with the continent were felt by early Japanese mon-archs. Rather, it seems likely that literacy remained at an extremely marginal level during the fifth and sixth centuries, and mostly in the hands of immigrants and their descendants. The earliest writings thought to have been produced in Japan are inscriptions on artifacts such as swords and mirrors. The longest such inscription, a Chinese text of 115 characters inlaid in gold, was discovered in 1978 under the rust of an iron sword excavated ten years earlier from the Inari-yama tumulus in Saitama Prefecture. Its alleged "Koreanisms" again point to the use of writing being in the hands of continentals, especially those from the Korean peninsula. Majority opinion assigns this sword text to a cyclical date corresponding to 471.4
Probably the Japanese people's real impulse for acquiring literacy came in the sixth century, with the introduction of Buddhism and the almost contemporaneous reunification of China under the Sui dynasty. These events - the establishment of a unified politically and culturally magnetic center on the mainland, and the extension to Japanese shores of the missionary religion then prevailing there - brought Japan into a radically different orientation toward the continent. The groundwork had been laid since the fourth century by extensive immigration from Korea, the immigrants including resident Chinese or sinified scholars
2 The anachronism has been pointed out in its references to the sixth-century Thousand Character Classic, Kojima Noriyuki speculates that the account on which the Nihon shoki narrative was based was altered to include mention of this text, considered basic to elementary training in reading Chinese. See Kojima Noriyuki, Jodai Nihon bungaku to Chugoku bungaku (Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1971), vol. 1, p. 82.
3 Obtto, basically meaning "chief," was one of the clan titles (kabane) of ancient Japan. This group of scribes was centered in Kawachi on the coast and was referred to as the "western scribes," as distinguished from the "eastern scribes" in inland Yamato.
4 See Murayama Shichiro and Roy Andrew Miller, "The Inariyama Tumulus Sword Inscription," Journal of Japanese Studies 5 (1979): 412.
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such as Wani, as well as a broad spectrum of artisans and other specialists. These people contributed materially to the evolution of insular culture; indeed, they may have altered it substantially. But the impact of continental immigration during the fourth and fifth centuries had more to do with horses and armor than with books and writing. This influx was ultimately a result of migrations in northeast Asia following the fall of the Han dynasty in the third century, and it brought about in the Japanese islands new instrumentalities of rule, perhaps by the incursion of a new ruling group, the much-discussed horse riders from beyond the Yalu River.5 However that may have been, by the late sixth century the rulers of the Yamato state faced a greatly altered situation on the continent. The centuries-old division of China was wiped away in 589 by the Sui, a dynasty replaced by the more enduring T'ang in 618. In the seventh century the Korean peninsula was unified for the first time by Silla, the rival kingdoms of Paekche and Koguryo falling in 663 and 668, respectively. Politically resurgent East Asia made the Japanese rulers keenly conscious of the vulnerability of their island kingdom. One reaction was to establish a defense headquarters at Dazai-fu in northern Kyushu to guard against incursions from the newly expansive Korean and Chinese states.6 But a far more significant and far-reaching move was the opening of formal relations with the Sui in 607 and the T'ang in 630, and the accompanying importation of elements of high Chinese civilization. For the first time in history, but not for the last, Japan faced a foreign threat by consciously opening itself to change from abroad, to the very techniques and ideologies viewed as advantages of the foreign power.
Two of the foreign advantages that the Japanese perceived were literacy and the Buddhist religion. The latter was introduced from Paekche in 552 (or perhaps 538) and, after overcoming brief but violent opposition from native conservative forces, was accepted by the Japanese court in 587.7 The Yamato state and each of the clans (uji)
5 Gari Ledyard summarizes the horse rider theory of Egami Namio and reargues the case for a fourth-century invasion of Japan, in his "Galloping Along with the Horseriders: Looking for the Founders of Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies I (1974): 217-54.
6 The area was regarded as crucial from the fourth century on, and various earlier defense establishments predated the foundation of Dazai fu at its present location in 663. The dispatch of conscript "guardians of the capes" (sakimori) is memorialized in a large number of Man'yoshu poems.
7 The Nikon shoki mentions the gift of a gilt-bronze statue of Sakyamuni, banners, and sutras from the king of Paekche to the Yamato court in the tenth month of the year corresponding 10 552; see NKBT, 68.100-1. Current scholarship seems to favor 538 as the year in which Buddhism reached Japan. The issue is discussed in Ienaga Saburo, ed., Nihon Bukkydshi (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 47-8. In accordance with the hypothesis explicated by Ienaga, King Kimmei's reign should be adjusted to date from 531, and the gift of the Buddhist
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over which it reigned were cult-centered entities that traced their descent from ancestral nature deities, whose protection was believed to be essential to their survival and well-being. Guarantor and protector of the state was thus a ready-made role for the new faith, and the Japanese energetically set about erecting temples with such purposes in mind, an activity that culminated in the dedication of the mighty Todai-ji with its gigantic gilt-bronze Vairocana in 752. With the advent of Buddhism, Japan was no longer a barbaric outland, but a part of the spiritual world of East Asia, a sharer of belief, liturgy, iconography, and language. An unbreakable link had been forged to the continent and at a level that was bound to exert a strong influence on the subsequent course of Japanese civilization. Language is particularly relevant to this discussion, for Chinese had become, and remained, the scriptural language of East Asian Buddhism. The need to read and understand the sutras and other scriptural writings was a constant urge toward the reformation of the Japanese elite into a literate class. Japan's ties with China were strengthened by devout pilgrims and students who went to learn at the holy places of the Middle Kingdom. India, the birthplace of the faith, was too remote, and so China became for Japanese Buddhists the object of their ardent and arduous quest for enlightenment.
Confucianism was probably an influence in Japan before Buddhism, however. Its introduction was gradual, not a conversion experience, as Buddhism was to a degree. Confucianism formed the framework by means of which one state in East Asia could understand and address another, providing the vocabulary of social and international hierarchy. As we noted earlier, the scholar Wani from Paekche brought the Analects, the basic Confucian text, in the sixteenth year of Ojin, that is, around the beginning of the fifth century. Throughout the sixth century Japan received from Paekche, its closest source of continental civilization, the dispatch under a rotation system of a series of "doctors of the Five Classics," as well as other learned specialists in medicine, divination, and calendrical science.8 Paekche, also the source of Japan's first contact with Buddhism, was a hard-pressed ally in the wars of the Korean peninsula, and so it was anxious to commend itself to the rulers of Yamato in its struggle with the expansive state of Silla.
icon and sutra from Paekche, to the year earth-senior/horse, corresponding to 538. If the year at issue was the seventh of Kimmei's reign, as specified by Gangoji garan engi narabi ni ruki shizaicho, however, the revised accession date would have to be 532. 8 Kojima points out that the Doctors of the Five Classics came to Japan from Paekche during the same period when Paekche was receiving similar visiting scholars from the kingdom of Liang in South China. See Kojimn, Jodai Nikon bungaku to Chugoku bungaku, vol. 1, p. 85.
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Ultimately, in the seventh century, Silla overcame its rivals, both Paekche in the west and Koguryo in the north, having driven the Japanese from their own Korean toehold in Mimana (Kaya) a century earlier in 562. But by the middle of the seventh century, Japan had already established direct relations with China and was fully embarked on its adventure in recasting itself as the newest of the sinified states of east Asia.
A rough division may be made in this period between the seventh and eighth centuries, a distinction implied in the title of this chapter. The foundation of a capital at Nara in 710 brought an experience of urban life hitherto unknown on such a scale in Japan. The eighth century marked the height of the early flourishing of Buddhist institutions and sinitic culture in general. Trends that had been gaining momentum for some centuries reached their first period of full fruition. Politically, the seventh century was more tentative, though not less creative culturally. During most of this century the court moved from one site to another within the Asuka area, a region of fields and hills several miles south of Nara. In the sense intended in this chapter, "Asuka-Nara" is roughly equivalent to "seventh-eighth century."
The earliest writing in Japan was undoubtedly in the Chinese language, with the fifth-century sword inscriptions as examples, ones that already show the use of Chinese script to spell out Japanese names. Increasing mastery of kambun (Chinese prose) and the recurrent necessity of representing Japanese words are the dual factors that led to the peculiar evolution of literary culture in Japan. The training in Chinese classics that began with Wani in the early fifth century must have been cumulative, though greatly accelerated owing to the political and cultural ramifications of seventh-century contacts with the Asian continent. When Prince Shotoku (574-622) produced his so-called Seventeen Injunctions (preserved in the Nihon shoki) in 604, he composed the text in kambun as a matter of course and displayed familiarity with fifteen different Chinese literary, historical, and philosophical works.9 As Japan's earliest scholar-statesman and the most important patron of Buddhism of his day, Shotoku represents the new directions in which he wished to lead his country. Japan was to be a land of Buddhist faith and Chinese learning, one whose polity was to embody the centralized imperial authority then newly renascent on the continent. This
9 Skih ching, Shu eking, Hsiao ching, Lun yii, Tso chuan, Li chi, Kuan tzu, Meng tzu, Mo tzu, Lao tzu, Chuang tzu, Hanfei tzu, Shih chi, Han shu, and Wen hsuan, according to Hayashi Mikiya, "Chugoku shiso," in Asuka jidai, vol. 2 of Zusetsu Nihon bunkashi taikei (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1965), p. 165.
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learned reformer seems to face forward into a new era enlightened by temples, books, and virtuous rule. And yet Prince Shotoku was also interested in the past. Indeed, it was inevitable that he would be, for among the Chinese writings he studied were histories such as the Shih chi (Records of the historian) and the Han shu (Dynastic history of the Han). In 620, according to the Nihon $hokiy Shotoku together with Shima no Oomi (Soga no Umako) compiled the first Japanese history of which we have record.10 This set of writings treated both the imperial line and the subsidiary governing and occupational groups. It is thought that this history was lost, partly in the fire that destroyed the Soga mansions in the coup d'etat of 645 and partly as a result of the disturbances of the Jinshin war of 672. In the 680s Emperor Temmu (d. 686) ordered the work to begin again, instigating dual historio-graphical projects that finally bore fruit in the earliest extant Japanese histories, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon shoki (720).
It seems strange that the oldest Japanese books are thus two histories that were completed almost simultaneously, both under official sponsorship. Both are intended to tell the entire history of the race, indeed of the cosmos as well as of the nation as such, beginning like the Old Testament at the beginning of things, the rising of form out of chaos. Both are accounts of mythology in their earlier ranges and gradually work forward toward veritable history. But only the Nihon shoki truly takes on the character of a sober Chinese chronicle before breaking off with the abdication of the Empress Jito in 697. One can see that it is a compromise between the compilers' urge to provide Japan with a counterpart of a Chinese dynastic history, or of certain aspects of the Shih chi, and the felt need to tell their own story of the world, which was a story of their gods as well as of themselves. The Kojiki is something else again, also a compromise but of a different sort. Here the proportion of myth, legend, folktale, poetry, and anecdote to the whole is overwhelmingly great. Chinese influence is by no means lacking, but it is slight compared with that in the Nihon shoki. The Kojiki is also much shorter - only three volumes as compared with thirty - and ends with the death of Empress Suiko in 628. That is, the bare chronology ends at that point; the anecdotal account goes no further than the reign of King Kenzo, who died in 487.
From the historiographical point of view, the Kojiki is a fairly primitive account of ancient history and myth, whereas the Nihon shoki is intended to be a history of modern as well as ancient times, the prod-
10 Suiko 28 (620) 8, NKBT, 68.203.
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uct of thorough and up-to-date research. Except for the poems with which its text is enlivened, the Nihon shoki is written in literary Chinese, by far the longest document to be composed in Japan in that (or any other) language up until the time of its appearance. The Kojiki is different here again, being even in its prose text an unstable amalgam of Chinese and Japanese syntax, all represented in Chinese characters, to be sure, but with a unique hybrid quality. Clauses in literary Chinese and others in phonetically represented Japanese appear in the same sentence. This is the essence of its compromise: a linguistic one.
The Kojiki was an experiment, an odd and fascinating one never repeated in quite the same way, though its tension between the Chinese and Japanese languages remained a formative dynamic in the evolution of writing styles in Japan. It has been suggested that the motivation for its compilation was essentially an internal matter - an attempt to straighten out for the Japanese themselves the tangled and conflicting claims to divine or other prestigious ancestry of the various noble clans - whereas the Nihon shoki was intended to be an "official" history to show to foreigners (hence written in respectable Chinese) and to point to with pride."
Writing and learning in the form of the Chinese classics had thus been introduced to Japan by the beginning of the fifth century. Sword inscriptions in Chinese showing alleged Korean usages have been unearthed from the same century. In the sixth century the Japanese court set up a system of visiting professors in various aspects of Chinese learning, supplied by the Korean state of Paekche. At the same time, Paekche introduced its insular neighbor to Buddhism, and Buddhism in turn brought in more writings to be studied in the form of its sacred scriptures. Official interest in historiography, the compilation of codes, and the like shows up in the seventh century, especially on the parts of Prince Shotoku and Emperor Temmu. It was probably also at this time that the transition from oral to written poetry began, but this was a process that was never completed, in the sense that the oral composition of poetry never ceased, even at the highest cultural level. But it was no doubt in the seventh century that poems, both new and old, began to be written down as a normal thing. This matter of writing down poetry had important implications for the evolution of literary culture in Japan and must concern us here. But first let us note that the composition of Chinese poetry (kanshi) in Japan, a sure signal
II Donald L. Philippi, trans., "Introduction," Kojiki (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 16-17.
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of advancing sophistication, also started in the late seventh century. The compilation of poetic anthologies, another activity that the Japanese learned from the Chinese, followed in the eighth century, resulting in two works that have come down to us, the Kaifuso (751), the first anthology oikanshi by Japanese authors, and the Man'yoshu (after 759), the earliest extant anthology of Japanese verse. The historio-graphical activities commencing in the seventh century had meanwhile resulted in the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon shoki (720).
The Japanese were not among the handful of peoples that invented a writing system, so to speak, from scratch. Like most civilizations, they adapted a neighboring one. It was an accident of geography and history that the only one they encountered during the early centuries of their relations with the outside world should have been that of the Chinese. The results of this accident were as far-reaching and formative of their nascent culture as would have been the case if they had encountered Egyptian hieroglyphics and nothing else. They were inevitably drawn into the orbit of a self-contained and powerful civilization with a unique script that has always acted as an effective barrier between those who know and use it and those who do not. Like writing generally, the Chinese writing system had pictographic origins, but resisting the general trend, it neither became the relic of a dead civilization nor evolved completely into a phonetic system. It is in fact the only nonphonetic writing system remaining in use in the world today. From pictographic origins the so-called Chinese characters came to include a large repertory of "ideographs," signs denoting the abstract concepts of an advanced civilization. They also developed classes of structurally complex graphs, in which homophones are distinguished by a "radical system" of signifies combined into one sign with a common phonetic element. The signific-phonetic structure of many characters shows that the system contains the seed of a purely phonetic way of writing, as the pronunciation of such characters is predictable to the experienced reader. As it turned out, it was the Japanese who realized this potential.
The most important peculiarity of the way in which writing evolved in China that made adaptation of the resulting system take the form it did in Japan was that each graph represented a word in the Chinese language. Chinese was made up of monosyllabic words, with a number of "tones" or voice contours helping distinguish the resultant large number of homophones. One graph thus represented one syllable, the pronunciation of which was more or less fixed within a given dialect. It was therefore possible to use the graphs in a way not intended by their
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inventors, that is, phonetically, using the pronunciation and disregarding the meaning (and the tone) in order to write words in another language. This process involved making a series of rough sound equivalences, as the phonetic quality of no two languages is identical. But it was a process that could and did work. It was, in fact, a process that the Chinese themselves had invented so as to transcribe the foreign words coming in with Buddhist scriptures from India by way of Central Asia from the third century onward. Some Sanskrit words the Chinese chose to translate, in the process expanding, refining, or otherwise altering the denotations of lexical items in their own language. In other cases they adopted the Sanskrit word or name as part of their Buddhist vocabulary and spelled it out, syllable by syllable, with characters used for their phonetic value. It was this system, already in use in the Buddhist writings they obtained from China, that the Japanese employed to transcribe words in their own language, which like Sanskrit was highly polysyllabic. And so a text like the Nihon shoki could be written in Chinese, with the names of Japanese people and places represented with characters used phonetically. To the Japanese this system would have posed little problem (once they had acquired the necessary skill in Chinese), as they could readily distinguish words in their own language when reading the resulting text, easily making their way back and forth between the basically semantic expository continuum and the individual phonetic items, though the whole would have been an undifferentiated series of Chinese characters to the untrained eye.
If the Japanese had been content to go on in this way, they could have remained literate in Chinese and never bothered to write their own language at all. The most obvious alternative was to write out not only individual Japanese words but also whole Japanese texts, in the character-by-character phonetic method. As the compiler of the Kojiki observed in his preface, the result would have reached inordinate lengths. He thus devised the compromise just described, in which the text oscillates between the two languages.12 But this solution was inherently unsatisfactory, as the work produced was really neither Japanese nor Chinese. The phonetic method was, however, a reasonable answer to the other problem that was immediately presented to would-be Japanese historians, anthologists, and poets: how to record Japanese poetry. The numerous poems preserved in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki
12 The compiler, O no Yasumaro (d. 723), remarks in his Preface to the Kojiki, "To narrate everything in kun [i.e., semantically] would miss the sense, whereas to write it all down in on [i.e., phonetically] would drag out the content to even greater length. And so I have mixed on and kun in the same sentence." See Kojiki, NKBT, 1.48-9.
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are spelled out character by character, each graph used for its phonetic value, without an admixture of semantic usages. These ancient songs are thus preserved in exact phonetic notation, and it is plain that the compilers of the chronicles understood that a poem exists in its sound value and so must be represented unambiguously in its own language, whereas prose is a matter of conveying ideas and thus can be written with a greater degree of phonetic and syntactic ambiguity or even in a completely different language. Or so one would think. But the matter turns out to be much more complex than this, and the neat distinction proposed between the proper ways of writing prose and poetry was by no means uniformly observed in the largest collection of early Japanese verse, the Man'yoshu of the eighth century. Many of the over 4,500 poems in this anthology are in fact recorded in the way just described, and it is no doubt for this reason that the phonetic use of Chinese characters is referred to as man'yogana (Man'yo borrowed names), with kana (borrowed names) being the Japanese term for the character-derived phonetic writing systems that were eventually developed. But many other poems in the Man'yoshu are not written in man'yogana, at least not in their entirety. The text of the Man'yoshu in fact presents fascinating evidence of scribal preference for variety and complexity and even for deliberate obscurity over a simple and easily learned regularity. Complexity entered the system in a number of different ways. One of these was that the obvious solution of deciding on one character for each syllable of the Japanese phonetic system was deliberately avoided. Several characters with the same pronunciation were used for the same syllable. The syllable shi, for instance, was written with at least twenty-nine different graphs used for their Sino-Japanese (on) value. Another feature of the Man'yo writing system was the employment of whole phrases or clauses of Chinese syntax, in which the succession of characters would be perfectly readable as Chinese but in which a Japanese equivalent or "translation" was implied. To take a simple instance, the three graphs ta wang chih (in their modern Mandarin pronunciation) give the meaning "of the great king." The phrase is "read" by a quickly established convention as okimi no, meaning roughly the same thing in Japanese. These Japanese "readings" of characters are known as kun. A combination of on and kun readings of characters eventually came to typify Japanese prose orthography. It characterizes Man'yoshu orthography as well, but with an important difference. In the Man'yoshu (and the poetry in the early chronicles) all the on readings are "phonograms," that is, characters used for their phonetic value in the way just described, whereas in modern Japanese
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prose they are mostly Chinese loanwords, of which the language eventually adopted an enormous lexicon. Japanese poetry, however, remained free of loanwords from its beginning, except for a few Buddhist items in certain restricted types of poetry, and a range of extremely early importations not recognized as loans.^
A further refinement or complication of Man'yo orthography is the "borrowed kun" Not only were the Sino-Japanese pronunciations of the characters used for phonetic spelling, but once a kun reading had been established for a character, it too could be borrowed and used for phonetic purposes. For instance, the character chen, "shake," was "read" in Japanese as furu, a verb with the same meaning. The character could then be borrowed to write the place name Furu. Similarly, the two numeral characters for "five" and "ten" written in combination made not only wu-shih, the Chinese word for "fifty," but the Old Japanese word for the same number, namely, i. According to the principle of "borrowed kuny" "fifty" could and did also represent the word i, "sleep," as well as the first syllable in the place name Irago. There are innumerable examples of this sort of thing in the Man'yoshu. Kun- and on-based man'yogana were sometimes used in the spelling of the same word, and a single line of poetry might have semantic and phonetic components as well as "zero" elements, in which the grammar calls for a possessive particle (for instance), which is not represented ortho-graphically but is simply supplied by the reader. There also are examples of Chinese word order, which are meant to be reversed and read as Japanese syntax. As if all this were not enough, there is the phenomenon of associative transference, in which, for example, the characters "flying bird" represent the place name Asuka, because Asuka had tobu tori no ("of the flying bird") as a fixed epithet. The ultimate in orthographic word games is provided by such a rebus as "on top of the mountain there is another mountain," represented by five characters that form the verb ide, "come out." The point of this visual pun is that the character for "come out" resembles two superimposed "mountain" characters. Graphomania of this order was not only a Japanese malady. In fact, the "two mountains" rebus derives directly from a much more complicated series of conundrums in a Chinese poem included in Yii-fai hsin-yung, a sixth-century anthology well known in Japan.14
13 Among these latter are probably the words for "horse" (uma, from Chinese ma) and "plum" (ume, from Chinese mei).
14 For the Japanese use of the rebus, see MYS 9:1787. The Chinese source is the first of "Four Old Chueh-chu Poems" from chap. 10 of Yii-t'ai hsin-yung, a sixth-century Chinese anthology of love poetry. For a translation, see Anne Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 264.
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These special qualities of Man'yoshu orthography represent one of the cultural features of the age, an intoxication with the wonders of the new learning and an exploration of its various possibilities. A more sober approach to the mechanics of writing eventually led to an almost exclusive preference for the phonetic element of the methodological tangle that teased the brains of eight-century scribes. Regularization of phonogram spelling had culminated in kana syllabaries by the beginning of the tenth century. There resulted two of these syllabaries, hiragana (smooth kana) and katakana (square kana). The former developed from cursive abbreviations of whole characters, and the latter, from isolated graphic elements. Hiragana became the major vehicle for the new courtly literature of the tenth century and after, whereas katakana was more or less limited to providing glosses on Chinese texts. All of this later development is outside the scope of this chapter, but it is of interest to note that the tolerance for superfluous scriptal complexity so notable in the Man'yoshu never entirely disappeared. The hiragana system remained highly redundant until its simplification in modern times, using a variety of symbols for the same syllable. And even now, the Japanese writing system is probably the world's most complex, its mix of Chinese characters in various readings and the two kana systems making possible a playing back and forth between semantic and phonetic that is unusual if not unique. In discovering literacy, the Japanese created an enduring strand of their cultural fabric.
The oldest Japanese book to come down to us is the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters), compiled as a result of the historiographical initiatives already mentioned and presented to Empress Gemmei in 712. Its compiler was O no Yasumaro (d. 723), a scholar-official at Gemmei's court. In 711 Yasumaro was ordered to "record and present" a set of documents previously "learned" by Hieda no Are. Little is known of Hieda no Are, who was an attendant (toneri) of Emperor Temmu renowned for his apparently photographic memory. The documents were of two sorts, genealogical and anecdotal. The genealogical group, Sumera mikoto no hitsugi (Sun lineage of the sovereigns), traced the ancestry of the ruling house from its mythical origins to the reign of Empress Suiko, a sovereign who died in 628. The anecdotal documents, the Saki no yo no furugoto (Ancient accounts of former ages), leave off around 498, with the reign of King Kenzo. How to understand the respective functions of Are and Yasumaro in the compilation of the Kojiki is by no means clear, but it has been suggested that Are
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had preserved in his memory the relevant documents with their correct "readings" and that Yasumaro recorded these readings in the somewhat abbreviated amalgam of Chinese and Japanese that he defended as a compromise between the demands of clarity and concision.15
The Kojiki is made up of three books, or scrolls. The first book presents an officially approved version of the basic myths of the Japanese as they had been transmitted down to the seventh century. After an account of origins in which generations of deities come into existence spontaneously, there appear the creator gods Izanagi and Iza-nami. These are a male and female pair, and the myth describes how they marry and create the islands of Japan by means of sexual generation. A possibly significant detail is that the woman speaks first in the marriage ceremony, leading to the production of defective offspring and the necessity of repeating the rites in an order that gives the initiative to the male. A shift from matriarchal to patriarchal institutions may have found expression in this story. When Izanami gives birth to the fire deity, she is burned and dies. Izanagi mourns for her, "crawling around her head and around her feet" in a paroxysm of grief that seems to look forward to the laments of Hitomaro in the Man'yoshu. Izanagi searches for Izanami in the land of the dead, the dark realm of Yomi no Kuni; searching for the dead is also part of the ritual of grief described by Hitomaro. Izanami has already "eaten of the hearth of Yomi" and so cannot return to the land of the living. Against her wishes, Izanagi strikes fire to look at her, only to discover maggots swarming in a mass of putrefaction. This horrific scene is followed by a nightmarelike sequence in which the dead Izanami and the "hags of Yomi" chase Izanagi, who escapes and blocks with a boulder the entrance to Yomi. The primordial pair stand on opposite sides of the boulder and curse each other, thereby breaking their troth.
This climax to the second and most dramatic phase of the creation myth leads into a bridge passage in which Izanagi, cleansing himself in a river from the foulness of Yomi, gives birth to various deities from different parts of his body. The most important of these deities are Amaterasu (the Sun Goddess), born from his left eye, and from his nose a kami variously associated with the sea, the wind, the earth, and the underworld. This kami, Susa no O, becomes the enemy of his sister Amaterasu in the next sequence of Kojiki myth. Quarrelsome, he confronts Amaterasu in her realm of heaven, where he defeats her in a
15 Philippi, Kojiki, pp. 7-8.
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contest of progenitive power and "rages in victory." The several offenses committed by Susa no O in heaven include mischief directed against the settled patterns of an agricultural society (breaking down the ridges between the rice paddies) and other deeds of a possible magical significance (flaying the heavenly piebald colt with a backward flaying). They so alarm and offend Amaterasu that she hides in a cave, thus depriving the world of light. Once she has been lured out again by a mirror and a sexually arousing dance, Susa no O is punished by expulsion from heaven. That the mythology is dealing with two distinct cults is made evident by what happens next. Once Susa no O returns to earth, he changes from a disruptive force to a culture hero. By killing the food goddess he makes possible the sprouting of food grains from her corpse. Next he rescues a maiden by slaying a dragon and builds a palace for himself and his bride. His descendant Okuni Nushi (great country master) becomes in due course the deity of the major cultic center of Izumo on the Japan Sea, as Amaterasu was at Ise, facing out toward the Pacific. The collision of two cults and two peoples thus seems to lie under the surface of the mythic narrative. It is apparent that a compromise was worked out, for when Amaterasu sends down her own grandson to take possession of earth, the land has to be ceded by Okuni Nushi and his progeny. In return for giving up earthly domain, Okuni Nushi is guaranteed eternal worship at the Grand Shrine of Izumo, second in prestige only to that of the Sun Goddess herself at Ise. The way is then cleared for the sun lineage to extend its rule over Japan, and accounts of the reigns of the successive sovereigns occupy the second and third books of the Kojiki.
The Kojiki is thus a book of grand theme and majestic sweep. But it is also very close to the primitive earthiness of the animistic mythology on which its earlier strata are based. Anecdote and description are of a specific physicality that contributes strongly to the quality of the book as literature. The value of the Kojiki is in fact literary more than historiographical. Not only are the major myths recounted in a highly dramatic and vivid fashion, but the narrative also is laced through with folktales and poems. The 112 ancient songs of the Kojiki are a precious corpus of early oral verse, often giving evidence of an existence independent of the narrative in which they are embedded. Formally, they divide into prototypes of the tonka (short poem) and choka (long poem), the two principal varieties of early Japanese verse. Many are without the precise five-seven syllabic structure realized probably during the seventh century, thus bespeaking a putative antiquity. The
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very first poem in the book, however, is in form a perfect thirty-one-syllable tanka, a fact that suggests a breadth of time in the poetic component, or perhaps the later revision of early materials. The matter of the songs is often amorous, sometimes expressed in imagery of latent sexual content, occasionally martial, and characteristically traditional or "folk" in type. The traditional reciters of the long songs, which may have been danced or enacted in some manner, are occasionally named in the text, though the usual convention is that the person in the story makes up the poem on the spur of the moment. Structurally, many of the songs show the typical expository order of early Japanese verse, in which preposited phrases of a metaphorical or analogical nature lead, often by means of word play, into the main statement of the poem.
Song and story thus constitute much of the appeal of this earliest Japanese book. Even the accounts of the sovereigns concentrate as much or more on their backstage lives - their amorous entanglements or minor incidents of their reigns - as on matters of state. The many amours of the emperors Nintoku and Yuryaku are cases in point. The high incidence of poetry in these passages makes them into poem-tales foreshadowing a major genre of semifiction that developed in the tenth century. And yet the Kojiki is not purely anecdotal; it is a heady brew of history, myth, folktale, and poetry, in which the historical narrative asserts itself as the main organizational thrust, dragging along a great accumulation of traditions, all of which are treated with equal credence. It is as if George Washington's chopping down his father's cherry tree received equal billing with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or King Arthur and the Round Table were treated as historical in the same sense as King John and Magna Carta. A story such as that of Yamato Takeru no Mikoto, "the brave of Yamato," contains the elements of heroic saga and points to the value of the Kojiki for an understanding of the formative ideals of the race. Yamato Takeru is wily, bloody, and bold but also loyal and naive. His wiliness is toward his enemies, his naivete toward received authority. In the process of conquering his father's enemies, he incurs a curse for going too far - overstepping the boundary of human limitations and offending a kami. Sickening to death as a result of this act of hubris, Yamato Takeru becomes melancholy and sings of his longing for home. He dies, and his spirit turns into a great white bird and flies away. A particularly Japanese sense of tragedy emerges from this hero-tale, a tragedy of a failed hero and a major theme in later legend, literature,
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and historical event. The feeling conveyed is one of pathos, an awareness of the fragility of glory.16
The Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan) is written in Chinese, its compilers having apparently disdained the linguistic compromise worked out for the Kojiki. It too is an outgrowth of the historiographi-cal work ordered by Emperor Temmu in 681. In thirty books, it covers Japanese history from its beginning to the abdication of Empress Jito in 697. It was completed and presented to Empress Gensho in 720 by Prince Toneri (677-735), a son of Emperor Temmu. Others involved in the project at its inception in the 680s included imperial princes Kawashima (657-691) and Osakabe (d. 705), heading up a staff of ten. The result of their labors was adopted as the official history, the first of a series that ultimately extended to six (the Rikkokushi or Six national histories), inspired by and partially modeled on the Chinese dynastic histories. It seems probable that the Kojiki was relegated to a subsidiary status and was soon the victim of neglect.
In a sense, the Nihon shoki is everything the Kojiki is and more. The same mythology is recounted in the early books, and other versions of many of the same songs and stories can be found. The mythological portion of the narrative is in fact longer and more elaborate than that of the Kojiki, because the compilers quote a number of often conflicting accounts for each of the major myths, indicating that the sources available were much more numerous than might be supposed from a reading of the earlier work. In one version, for instance, Izanagi and Izanami create the Sun Goddess by means of sexual reproduction, rather than her being born from the ablutions of the estranged male parent. It is interesting to note that the heroic and amorous exploits of the deity Okuni Nushi are missing from the Nihon shoki, evidence perhaps of a further downgrading of the Izumo cult. In addition to its plethora of material on most of the other myths, the Nihon shoki presents a chronicle of historical events that simply dwarfs what is to be found in the Kojiki. As it approaches the time of the chroniclers, the narrative becomes increasingly prosaic, detailed, focused on public rather than private matters, and, presumably, reliable. In other words, the Nihon shoki is somewhat more valuable as history than as literature, whereas the reverse is true of the Kojiki. Nevertheless, the Nihon shoki is by no means to be accepted uncritically as a historical source,
16 Takagi Ichinosuke treated the Yamato Takeru story in "Yamato Takeru no Mikoto to roman seishin," one of the essays in his book Yoshino no ayu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1943). The theme was also explored by Ivan Morris in The Nobility of Failure (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 1—13.
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even in its nonmythological sections. The parts dealing with relations between Japan and Korea in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries are a good case in point. Especially in the earlier ranges of this period, the account is almost impossible to follow, much less to credit, in its description of Japanese campaigns on the peninsula and the relations among Yamato, Paekche, and Silla. The tendentious nature of Japanese claims on their Korean neighbors, accepted totally by the authors, is obvious, but how to untangle the resulting web of distortion and self-glorification is by no means clear.1? These limitations on the value of the Nihon shoki as history by no means differentiate it from the Kojiki. The latter is simply less copious and more naive in its tendentiousness. In this very naivete in fact resides much of the appeal of the earlier and shorter book: The Kojiki has not been as thoroughly sinicized as has the Nihon shoki. This fact is obvious from the linguistic medium employed by each, but the difference strongly colors even the characterization of certain semihistorical figures. For instance, the story of Yamato Takeru in the Kojiki concentrates on the guile, violence, loyalty, and hubris of the hero - he emerges strongly as a simple and tragic figure, sketched in with a few strokes in a spare and telling narrative. In the Nihon shoki, however, the same character spouts reams of high Confucian sentiment, and his death with songs on his lips is replaced by a long speech in which he takes his parting in phrases conned from Chinese sources. The effect is noble but remote from the unpretentious lyricism of the Japanese.
Another set of writings from the eighth century are the fudoki, or local gazetteers. In 713 Empress Gemmei ordered each province to compile a record of its topography, products, and local lore. Only the Izumo fudoki survives intact; the gazetteers of Harima, Bungo, Hitachi, and Hizen are partially preserved, and fragments of a number of others have come down thanks to being quoted in various works. The language of the fudoki is basically Chinese, with the exception of certain passages that give verbatim accounts of local tradition, in which phonetic representations of Japanese grammatical elements intrude on the Chinese syntax. The poems are represented phonetically as in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and the same is of course true of Japanese names. The initiative for compiling the fudoki was part of the same general effort to conform to Chinese practices that led to the histories and poetic anthologies. Descriptions of the topographical,
17 For a discussion and analysis of historical accounts of insular-peninsular relations at this period, see Ledyard, "Galloping Away with the Horseriders," pp. 238-42.
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botanical, zoological, and legendary features of local areas date back at least to the Shan-hai ching (Classic of mountains and seas) in China, and local gazetteers flourished particularly in the Six Dynasties, the period in China so influential on the early Japanese.18 Local information of a similar nature was also incorporated in dynastic histories. It seems that the Japanese fudoki were the victims of official neglect, however, in view of the fragmentary state of their preservation. The portions that remain are of semiliterary interest, for along with the statistics of distances and numbers of shrines and villages are included a scattering of local legends and myths. The myths of Izumo, for instance, show yet other versions of the material edited in the Kojiki and Nikon shoki. It is apparent that the compilers of the national histories picked and chose from abundant local material. In this respect, study of the remaining fudoki is important to understanding early Japan, and it is unfortunate that the entire set of these documents no longer exists.
Another feature of the fudoki is the prominence given to explanations of the origins of place names. This seems to have been among the principal preoccupations of the compilers. Some explanations are straightforward and plausible, for example, a place is called Kuroda (black field) because its soil is black. Others contain references to mythology, as in the case of a community named Tatenuhi (shield sewing), alleged to refer to the place where "[the god] Futsunushi stitched up a rip in his sturdy shield of heaven."19 This interest in etymology was no accident: The edict ordering the compilation of the fudoki directed the compilers to record the "origins of the names of mountains, rivers, plains and fields," as well as to give "good characters" to the names of the administrative units.20 An interest in origins as well as in the auspicious and "correct" is everywhere present in ancient Japanese writings, evidence of parallel antiquarian and "civilizing" tendencies. The fudoki also contain anecdotes that belong to setsuwa literature, the genre of tales, often of a supernatural character, that began with the chronicles but flourished most notably in the great collections of the twelfth century and later. Such a story is that of the shark that kills a young girl and then is escorted to her bereaved father
18 The Shan-hai-ching is attributed to Po I, assistant of the legendary ruler Yii who tamed the fioodwaters in Chinese antiquity. The core of the work is probably late Chou with later additions. Like the Japanese fudoki, it combines geographical information with fantastic stories.
19 Michiko Yamaguchi Aoki, trans., Izumo fudoki (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1971), p. 84.
20 Kuroita Katsumi, ed., Shoku Nihongi, Shintei zoho kokushi taikei (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1935), vol. 2, p. 52.
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for punishment by a hundred other sharks in answer to the father's prayers to the gods.
The compilation of history, local tradition, and topographical data was a literate activity that the Japanese learned from Chinese example. So also were the composition and compilation of poems. We have already noted the poetic content of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, where men and women, emperors and gods often speak in verse. The verse is native, linguistically the most stubbornly native matrix with which the compilers had to work. But by the late seventh century, Chinese-style education among Japanese aristrocrats and Buddhist clergy had led to participation in another Chinese cultural activity, the composition of kanshi, or Chinese poetry. Poetry to the Chinese was both a high art and something of a social necessity. In both respects it had much to teach the Japanese, and it is hardly fortuitous that Japanese poetry, too, came to be characterized by a similar dual nature. The loftier reaches of Chinese poetic accomplishment were from the beginning something toward which the Japanese might strive but which in the nature of things they were unlikely to attain. And why indeed as newly literate foreigners should they have attempted to master a highly complex thousand-year-old art when they had, as the early chronicles testify, a living poetic tradition of their own? The answer must be twofold: The evidence is overwhelming that the Japanese found certain aspects of Chinese civilization extremely attractive and that among these were those that impressed by visual splendor or dazzling verbal intricacy. Buddhist sculpture, painting, and architecture, and the artifice of Six Dynasties poetry attracted Japanese attention and emulation and began, in the Asuka-Nara period, traditions of mastery that lasted almost into our own time. Technical difficulties have always been a challenge, not a deterrent, to the Japanese. The other part of the answer is that once they had entered the Chinese cultural sphere, the Japanese came to participate in the social necessity referred to earlier. The Japanese began sending embassies to China in 600. Diplomatic and cultural exchange among East Asian countries involved certain niceties, among which was the composition of suitably felicitous or regretful poems at state banquets and farewell dinners. In order to hold up their heads before their hosts, the Japanese at some point had to learn how to create Chinese verses. They themselves served as hosts to Korean embassies, where the same niceties had to be observed. Chinese was the language of diplomacy as well as of learning and religion. Furthermore, as the Japanese increasingly reformed their state along the Chinese model in the seventh and eighth centuries, they wished to
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appear civilized even among themselves, with no foreigners looking on. "No foreigners" is a delicate point, however, inasmuch as Japanese society at this time contained a large element of recent continental immigrants, largely from the Korean states. These so-called kikajin were influential, indeed indispensable, to fostering arts, crafts, and learning in Asuka-Nara Japan. Kikajin families became fully Japanese in due course, and their skills spread throughout Japanese society.
Needless to say, it is not known when the first Chinese poem was written in Japan. But it seems certain that the activity had taken hold by the reign of Emperor Tenji (661-71), as there are references to both the emperor and his courtiers taking part in literary banquets. "No mere hundred were their compositions" according to the preface of the Kaifusd. An elegant Chinese-style literary atmosphere at the Omi court is also evidenced in the Man'ydshu in a famous choka debating the relative merits of spring and fall.21 It seems that by the 670s, thanks to the Chinese influence, literature was a recognized avocation existing apart from myth, ritual, and history. But almost none of the Chinese poetic works of the Omi court have survived; presumably they were destroyed in the Jinshin war of 672 in which the capital at Omi was burned and power violently transferred from Tenji's son Prince Otomo to his brother Prince Oama (Emperor Temmu). There are, to be sure, two surviving poems written by the unfortunate Prince Otomo (648-72) himself. These two chiieh-chii, or four-line stanzas, are thus the oldest Chinese verses written by a Japanese to come down to us. One is a felicitous banquet poem on the brilliance of his father's reign, and the other is a meditation on his own unfitness to rule. This latter has a pathetic irony, as Otomo died in the fall of the Omi capital in 672 after no more than a few months on the throne. Another early poet in the Chinese mode is Prince Otsu (663-86), who likewise came to a bad end, becoming involved in an abortive coup d'etat and being condemned to obligatory suicide in 686. He left touching farewell poems in both Chinese and Japanese.22
The principal corpus of Chinese verse (kanshi) composed in Japan during the Asuka-Nara period is to be found in the Kaifusd (Fond recollections of poetry), a collection of 120 poems compiled in 751 by an unknown anthologist. Sixty-four named poets are represented.
21 The poem is MYS 1:16, by Princess Nukata, who lived from the 630s to the 690s. Her poem apparently was composed on a formal literary occasion at court in the 660s.
22 See MYS 3:416, Kaifusd 7. Kojima suggests that Prince Otsu's Chinese farewell poem is likely to have been modeled closely on a Six Dynasties antecedent. See Kojima, Jodai Nihon bungaku to Ckugoku bungaku, vol. 3 (1971), p. 1262.
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There are nobles, monks, and a number of princes, including Otomo and Otsu, and Emperor Mommu (683-707) as well. All the poems are in the Chinese poetic shih form, with rhymes at the ends of the even-numbered lines. One rhyme runs through an entire poem. The line length is determined for each poem as either five or seven syllables (unlike waka, in which the fives and sevens alternate). Four and eight lines are the most common poem lengths. The poems in the Kaifuso are of the "old shin" type; that is, they do not observe the strict rules of tonal parallelism and antithesis that were mandatory in the "regulated shih" that flourished in China starting with the T'ang period. The verses in the Kaifuso, and all the Japanese kanshi of its time, are oriented not toward the contemporary masterworks of T'ang but toward the earlier Six Dynasties, specifically the decadent late Six Dynasties poetry of the sixth century. In this poetry, artifice often became artificiality, and a determined divorcement had been effected from any sort of straightforward statement and from anything but the most refined attitudes and aristocratic content. This kind of poetry, learned from anthologies such as the Wen-hsiian and Yu-t'ai hsin-yung, remained highly admired in Japan long after it passed out of favor in China, with results that were far-reaching in the formation of Japanese taste and that ultimately found their way into waka and a new prose literature. Banquet poems, predictably of little depth, make up a large proportion of the content of the Kaifuso. The verse is in any case preponderantly imitative and perhaps does not deserve a high place in the history of Japanese literature, of which it nevertheless - despite its linguistic distinctiveness - forms a part. Culturally, however, it represents an important pole of Japanese orientation, not only in the Asuka-Nara period but later as well. Partially through efforts like those seen in the Kaifuso, the Japanese ultimately became not imitators of China but participants in China-centered East Asian civilization. The content of the Kaifuso represents some of their proudest early school exercises. And in any case it would be unfair to dismiss all these verses as devoid of literary merit. In some at least, the voice of the poet comes through the alien conventions to good effect.
A certain number of kanshi (Chinese poems), as well as kambun (Chinese prose) passages, are also preserved in the Man'yoshu. The Man'yoshii is unquestionably the great literary monument of the Asuka-Nara period, the culmination and repository of all that Japanese poetic culture had become up until that time. It is the earliest extant waka anthology, and its enormous bulk includes over 4,500 poems, dating from the year 759 backward for an indeterminate span,
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but surely well over a century. The earliest attributions are a set of four tanka ascribed to Iwanohime, a consort of the fourth- or fifth-century monarch Nintoku. A healthy skepticism is recommended in regard to all such extremely early attributions. Even the infinitely more "primitive" songs associated with Iwanohime in the Kojiki are thought to have been placed in her mouth by the compilers. The four Man'ydshu tanka are perfectly realized and quite lovely examples of a waka style that one might guess was not achieved earlier than the seventh century. Most of the content of the Man'ydshu dates from after the Jinshin war of 672, an event that seems echoed in the strains of some of the more majestic chdka or long poems that are an outstanding feature of the collection.
There are various ways of periodizing the Man'ydshu. One meaningful division of the content would be into a scattering of poems, some perhaps very old, before Jinshin; the poetry of the period from 672 to the foundation of the Nara in 710, dominated politically by the victors in the Jinshin war and their heirs and poetically by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro; and the Nara period up to the terminal date in the Man'ydshu of 759, a period when urban sophistication began to produce a new and in some ways radically different attitude toward literary creativity. It is in this last period in which the Chinese content of the Man'ydshu comes to the fore and when the compilation of the anthology probably began. Both the Chinese content and the compilation are associated with the Otomo clan and its literary adherents. Book 5 of the Man'ydshu, made up of compositions of the circle of Otomo no Tabito (665-731) and his crony Yamanoue no Okura (660-ca. 733), bulks large in this regard. Both Tabito and Okura (himself an anthologist) were practitioners of the new skills in Chinese literary prose and poetry, as well as of waka, and Tabito is represented by a shih in the Kaifusd. Tabito's son Yakamochi (718-85) was the probable main compiler of the Man'ydshu, and along with being the most extensively preserved (over four hundred poems) waka poet in the collection, he recorded several interesting exchanges in Chinese with his cousin Otomo no Ikenushi. These, from a period in the 740s when Yakamochi was governor of Etchu Province, show him and Ikenushi in the roles of Chinese-style literary gentlemen, complimenting each other on their verses and celebrating the joys of male companionship. Both the verse and the prose are highly flowery, representing in this regard standards of taste appropriate to their Six Dynasties inspiration. But the theme of friendship is one more broadly based in the ethos of Chinese poetry, and it is apparent that it provided these early
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Japanese poets with an option not available in the tradition of their own poetry. Waka remained oriented toward romantic love between the sexes; friendship between men for some reason continued to be embedded in the poetic conventions of the Chinese verse that had developed it as a primary concern. In this respect a Nara poet like Yakamochi was operating in dual personae, able to switch at will from his Japanese to his Chinese self. It was during the Nara period that this characteristic of Japanese high culture reached its early maturity.
The Man'yoshu is thus an anthology of poetry in the two languages, a fact usually overlooked because the Japanese content looms much larger. In the traditional way of editing the Man'yoshu, the Chinese poems were not even given numbers, as if they were mere appendages to the waka, and the several long Chinese prose passages were not numbered either. This approach unfortunately obscures what the Man'yoshu really is - a collection of waka, kanshi, and kambun, of literary efforts in both languages in use at the time of its compilation. It is a true product of the developing hybrid culture out of which it came.
Nevertheless, the Man'yoshu's primary significance is as the great compendium of early Japanese poetry. Because the time period that its content covers is so long and the content itself is so large, it would be difficult to characterize the anthology in simple terms. The inspiration for its compilation was ultimately Chinese - perhaps it was to be the Japanese answer to the Wen-hsiian, which also contains both prose and poetry. Unfortunately, however, the Man'yoshu has no preface to state the compilers' aims, and so we can only deduce from the book itself and our knowledge of its time. Several poems and all of the prose - headnotes, footnotes, correspondence, and experiments in essay and story form - are in Chinese. And the modal categories that form part of the complex (never a fully rationalized organizational scheme) are also Chinese. The book, as a book, is a product of a sinicized culture. But within this "foreign" framework is found the heart of a linguistically unadulterated native ethos, the largest concentration of what is most purely "Japanese" on the level of artistic expression to come down from these early centuries. It is this aspect of the Man'yoshu - its role as the repository of the living voices of all levels of society and as the embodiment of a semimystical nativist "Japanese spirit" - that has been stressed at least since the work of the national scholars in the Tokugawa period.
The Japanese content of the Man'yoshu consists of round numbers of approximately 260 chbka, 60 sedoka, and 4,200 tanka, the three
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main poetic forms existing at the time of its compilation. All three forms are based on syllable count, alternating lines of five and seven syllables constituting the basic rhythm. A tanka (short poem) is defined as five such lines in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7. Tanka are numerically by far the dominant form and remained as the staple of waka poetry after the disappearance of the choka and sedoka. The seddka (head-repeated poem) consists of two tercets: 5-7-7-5-7-7. The choka (long poem) has no set length and, as it came to be defined in the seventh century, usually took the form of a regular alternation of five-and seven-syllable lines, with an extra seven-syllable line at the end, and was often followed by one or more envoys in tanka form. Although numerically inferior to tanka, the choka provided the major Man'yo poets with some of their choicest opportunities, ones that were not to be found again in Japanese poetry for a long while.
About 530 named poets are represented in the Man'yoshu, ranging socially from monarchs to peasants and geographically from the eastland frontier to the islands of Tsushima between Japan and Korea. There is also an exceptionally large body of anonymous poetry. Most of the named poets are men and women of the court, but the broad interest and sympathy of the compilers are evident in the inclusion of verses by outlanders and the common people. The Man'yoshu is often praised by the Japanese for the straightforwardness and wholehearted-ness of its poetry, and indeed those qualities form an essential part of its appeal. Expressions of loyalty, admiration for nature, and amorous intent are effective partially because of their open intensity. Both nature and emotions are represented in the large in much of the most characteristic poetry. A morning-of-the-world freshness does hover about the anthology. But there is an artfulness, that is, an art, a use of conventions implying that verse after all carries expectations different from those of prose, about even simple and naive poetry, about even the generally more "primitive" poems in the chronicles. The use of preposited modifying structures - the jo (preface) and the makura-kotoba (pillow word) - is a prominent example of such artfulness. Not all poems embody such structures, but many of the apparently earliest ones do. Deliberate refraining from rhetorical adornment may itself be a sign of artistry in such a tradition: The classic repose of an apparently "simple" poem can imply conscious sophistication. Much of the best Man'yo poetry is not simple by any definition, however. The choka of Hitomaro are magnificent patterns of interlocking parallelism, with a prosody heightened by skillfully used rhetorical devices, and an inner life made complex with ironies. And then there is the
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sinified or actually Chinese content referred to earlier, the works of the Okura-Tabito-Yakamochi circle in the urbanized atmosphere of the Nara period. Complexity and plentitude describe the Man'yoshu more accurately than does simplicity or artlessness.
Among the major Man'yo poets, two define the boundaries of their tradition. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro is a bardic figure in his treatment of traditional themes of celebration and desolation,23 the first and ultimate public poet of the Asuka period. Hitomaro is close to the past, and in him the archaic ethos of land and sovereignty finds its fullest and most powerful statement. His known poetic career spans the eleven years from 689 through 700, though no doubt he was active somewhat longer. The world of which he sings is that of the aftermath of the Jinshin war of 672. The generation between Jinshin and the move to Nara in 710 experienced one of the high points of imperial prestige in Japan under Temmu and his successors, and the image of the kami sovereign is central to Hitomaro's vision. Hitomaro's choka on public themes are often laments, however, for dead princes and princesses and for the fallen capital at Omi. Hence the image of triumphant glory is made somber by the realization that time and death are more powerful than even the living kami in the palaces built to last myriad ages. A tension between life and death informs Hitomaro's work, ultimately resolved in compassionate irony. Hitomaro is not a nature poet. Though he employs natural imagery with great skill and beauty, he treats nature as a metaphor and as the home of humanity. Hitomaro's view is global. His universality is nowhere better exemplified than in a choka {Man'yoshu [MYS] 2.220-2) he composed on finding the body of a man on Samine Island in the Inland Sea. The anonymous drowned man becomes Everyman in Hitomaro's poem. Hitomaro speaks elsewhere of his own experience of love and sorrow in elegies and private poems of parting. But although these poems are undoubtedly based on his life, he blends into them as a typical rather than an individual voice. There is no denying their intense emotional conviction, but they are universal rather than anecdotal. In the end Hitomaro is almost a mythic figure, an enunciator of the deepest feelings of his culture - not a man whom we can know, but a teacher of what it means to be a man, to be human.
In these regards Hitomaro stands in useful contrast with the great figure at the other end of the Man'yo tradition. Hitomaro was the
23 These terms are used as basic polarities in Japanese court poetry by Earl Miner in Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 11 ff.
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creator of the grand choka manner, and later poets learned from and emulated his style. Among the many who did so was Otomo no Yaka-mochi, the putative compiler of the Manyoshu itself, or at least of large parts of it. Yakamochi was born after the days of Hitomaro, after the foundation of the capital at Nara. He was a man of Nara and the scion of a proud and ancient family, one with a strong literary tradition from his father's day. Yakamochi was a man of literature, a man of the written word. He looked out on what seems a modern instead of a mythic world. Preserved through his own efforts, his many waka, kanshi, and kambun letters allow us to see a person passionate about poetry, his family honor, and his favorite hawk and ardent in his pursuit of a number of women. We also see him as host at official banquets and as friend of his cousin Ikenushi. Yakamochi is moody, many faceted: an individual, a modern man. He suffered from a specific and situational anxiety over his political career. It is possible to know him, or to feel that one does, in a way that is totally out of the question with Hitomaro. Thus in the simplest terms Hitomaro and Yakamochi stand for the old and the new in an age of rapid transition.
Yakamochi was aware of the past in a modern way. He looked back on it as a time of lost virtue and glory. The virtue that he particularly cherished and that he wished to revive in his own day was masuraoburi, the manliness of the warrior. He belonged to an ancient warrior family that was losing its way in a complex and no-longer heroic modern world. Yakamochi's idealization of the past as a time of sturdy and simple loyalty is the counterpart of his anxiety over the present and future. These attitudes give his work a restlessness and a melancholy that are alien to Hitomaro. Hitomaro seems to be discovering the world and expressing it fully for the first time; Yakamochi seems to be looking back with envy and regret. Yakamochi was a self-conscious artist. That he was aware of the debt of his tradition to Hitomaro is indicated by a remark in one of his letters that he had never passed through the gates of Yama and Kaki. "Kaki" is supposed to refer to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, and the self-deprecatory comment is a polite salute to the long-dead singer who had set the standards of his art.2*
"Yama" in Yakamochi's remark may refer to either Yamabe no Akahito or Yamanoue no Okura, poets of a generation intermediate between Hitomaro's and Yakamochi's own. Akahito is best known as a
24 The remark comes in a letter (written in Chinese) prefatory to MYS 17: 3969-72 and is part of an extended series of exchanges between Yakamochi and his cousin Ikenushi on the occasion of Yakamochi's illness in the second and third months of 747.
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nature poet, an observer who celebrated natural beauty for its own sake. His poetry is part of a trend toward pictorializing the numinous quality of the land. Okura was a crony of Yakamochi's father Tabito and is notable as the most distinctly individual voice in the Man'yoshu. He created a poetry of Confucian indignation and of sympathy with the poor and the helpless. His prosody is angular and defiantly indifferent to Hitomaro's supple yet tensile periods. Okura was the most deeply sinified of the Man'yoshu poets, having gone to China for study in 702 with one of the recurrent official embassies. He internalized the social attitudes of Confucian propriety and of Confucian invective and incorporated them into some of the most memorable verse in the Man'yoshu. It is thought that Okura was of kikajin descent.25
Yakamochi seems to have thought of himself as heir to the poetic tradition and to have deliberately worked in all the styles and modes that were available to him. He is certainly the most versatile writer in the Man'yoshu. As a choka poet he owes much to Hitomaro. He celebrated mountain scenery and local legend in the tradition of Akahito and Takahashi no Mushimaro. His amorous exchanges show him a master of the conventions of love poetry. He wrote kanshi and kambun in the style of a Chinese literatus and assumed on occasion the cloak of Confucian morality in the manner of Okura. He celebrated the companionship of friend and friend. He wrote of matters of state and of his private life. At banquets he was the genial and poetic host, as his father had been in the days of Yakamochi's boyhood at Dazai-fu in Kyushu. Yakamochi was interested in poetry in all its forms and especially in collecting the poems of the provincial commoners who served as conscript soldiers in the military system of his day. He himself experimented with the topic of the sorrows of the frontier guard. And in addition to all this, Yakamochi brought into poetry a new note of self-conscious melancholy reflection that was a sign that the tradition was expending its forces but that also was a foretaste of the aesthetic of aware (wistful awareness of perishable beauty) that imbued much of the courtly literature of the succeeding age. As an anthologist Yakamochi was the first of a series of literary men - Ki no Tsurayuki and Fujiwara no Teika played similar roles later - into whose hands the poetic tradition came and who passed it on with their own stamp on it.
The last poem in the Man'yoshu was written on New Year's Day of the year corresponding to 759; it is a felicitous banquet poem in which
25 The case for Okura as a Korean born in Paekche and brought to Japan soon after birth is argued by Nakanishi Susumu in Yamanoue no Okura (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, 1973), pp.23-45.
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Yakamochi, then serving as governor of Inaba Province, wishes his subordinates endless good fortune. Ironically, the poetic tradition itself was about to undergo the most drastic curtailment in its entire history. The eighth century, despite the imposing achievements and implied stability of the imperial institution in its first "permanent" capital, was a time of recurrent political crisis. By mid-century the long-standing rivalry between the Fujiwara and the Tachibana was creating an atmosphere of continual tension. In 756 the ex-emperor Shomu died, removing the last restraint on the ambitions of Fujiwara no Nakamaro (706-64), the adviser to Empress Koken, Shomu's daughter, and on the resentment of Tachibana no Naramaro (d. 757), the son of the chief minister, Tachibana no Moroe (684-757). Naramaro attemped a coup d'etat against Koken and Nakamaro the following year but failed. He and other members of the Tachibana party were put to death. The Otomo were allies of the Tachibana and suffered devastating losses as a result of the abortive coup. Yakamochi had refused to join the plotters, remaining loyal to his ideal of masurao fidelity, but as head of the Otomo clan he was suspect and out of favor at court. In 758 he was sent off to be governor of Inaba. This was a comedown for Yakamochi, who had already served as governor of Etchu, a superior province, ten years earlier. The rest of his career was beset by vicissitudes, and even after he died in 785 he was posthumously linked to the assassination of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu, the official in charge of building a new capital to replace Nara at Nagaoka. The murder was carried out by two members of the Otomo clan, and Yakamochi suffered in the general disgrace by being posthumously stripped of rank and having his ashes sent into exile with his son to the Oki Islands. His titles and rank were restored in an amnesty granted in 806.
All of these events affected Japanese poetry in various and sometimes unexpected ways. The political turmoil surrounding Yakamochi after his return to the capital from his governorship of Etchu in 751 seems to have distracted him from poetry and to have led to deepening melancholy. It is possible that he felt poetry to be no longer relevant to his own life or to the events of the times. In any case, his productivity seems to have fallen off, and from 759 until his death in 785 nothing remains. It is possible that much has been lost, or he may simply have fallen silent. In any case, the history of Man'yo poetry ends long before the death of its last great exponent. The increasing popularity of composition in Chinese may also have led to the decline of interest and skill in writing choka, a form that never revived significantly after
LITERACY AND LITERATURE
the eighth century. The first three imperial anthologies of poetry, commissioned early in the ninth century, were of kanshi, not zvaka.
Ironically, Yakamochi's posthumous disgrace may have preserved the Man'ydshu and with it the whole pre-Heian tradition of Japanese poetry. As part of the decree against the Otomo, Yakamochi's property was sequestered in 785, and his papers taken into government custody. It seems likely that the Man'ydshu was among these and thus was under official seal until after the transfer of the capital to Heian in 794. It may then have become available for scholars after the punitive edicts were rescinded in 806, surviving as the sole relic of what may have been a much larger corpus of Asuka-Nara poetry.
The major written works that have come down from the Nara period are those just described: the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, the fudoki, the Kaifusd, and the Man'ydshu. They will certainly serve more than adequately to represent Asuka-Nara poetry and historiography, the two principal kinds of writing. They are not the only works that were written in the period, however. There is evidence of some that did not survive, the historiographical projects of Prince Shotoku, for instance, or the poetic collections referred to in the Man'ydshu and only partially incorporated into that work. Yamanoue no Okura we know was the compiler of the Ruiju karin (Classified forest of poetry), which has not come down to us intact.
A work that did survive and that is of some interest for a study of the poetry of the period is the Kakyo hydshiki, by Fujiwara no Ha-manari (724-90). Kakyo hydshiki (Standard rules for the classic of songs) was written in 772 and presented to Emperor Konin (709-81), apparently as an authoritative statement on Japanese poetry. Ha-manari, an official at the Nara court, shows more acquaintance with Chinese poetic theory than understanding of Japanese poetic practice as found in the Man'ydshu. He elaborates a complex theory of rhyme for waka and discriminates seven "poetic ills" {kabyd) derived from Six Dynasties criticism, setting up as well several stylistic categories.26 Because several poems quoted in the Kakyo hydshiki appear in the Man'ydshu with different attributions, it is quite plausible that the great anthology was unknown to Hamanari and was in fact still a
26 Hamanari's "seven ills" are certain types of phonetic repetition; his list is inspired by the "eight poetic ills" of Six Dynasties criticism first enunciated by Shen Yueh (441-513) in Shih p'in. His Chinese orientation leads him to prescribe rhyme for waka. He allows only vowel correspondence, however, and proscribes full consonant-vowel duplication. The best study of this subject is Judith N. Rabinovitch, "Wasp Waists and Monkey Tails: A Translation and Study of uta no shiki {Kakyo hydshiki) [772] by Fujiwara no Hamanari," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51 (1991).
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private possession of his contemporary Otomo no Yakamochi. Ha-manari, working during a period from which nothing by Yakamochi remains, shows the increasing focus on Chinese literary culture already dominating the court. The Kakyo hydshiki, the earliest Japanese document in poetic criticism, is a curious product of those times. Although seriously misconceived, it has value in the history of thought as an attempt to understand one's own culture through foreign eyes. And the theory of the "poetic ills" was by no means laid to rest with Hamanari; it was still being discussed four hundred years later.2?
The prose text of the Kakyo hydshiki is in Chinese, and the poems are spelled out in phonogram (man'ydgana) orthography. Another kambun document with phonetic usages for poems, proper nouns, and the like that has come down from Asuka-Nara times is the Jogu Shotoku Hod teisetsu (Anecdotes of the sovereign dharma King Shotoku of the Upper Palace), a collection of records concerning Prince Shotoku probably dating from the early eight century. It is the source of several anecdotes, often of a miraculous character, about the revered scholar-statesman-sage. In this respect it is not unlike the accounts incorported into the Nihon shoki itself; both provide early evidence of what became a Prince Shotoku cult that endured until modern times. One pious anecdote recounts how the prince, studying Buddhist texts with a Korean master, was stumped by a difficult passage in the Lotus Sutra. A golden man came to the prince in a dream and revealed the meaning of the passage. The Korean master returned to Korea with the interpretation and, on later hearing of the prince's death, prayed to die on its anniversary and meet him in the Pure Land. According to the account, this wish was granted. This Buddhist setsuwa is precisely the sort of narrative found in large numbers in Heian and later collections. Thus the Jogu Shotoku Hod teisetsu, together with the Kojiki and Nihonshoki, stands at the beginning of a major strand of Japanese literature that is known to modern scholarship as setsuwa bungaku. It also incorporates three poems by one Kose no Mitsue on the prince's death, in this respect, too, being similar to the chronicles in exemplifying at its outset the literature's fondness for juxtaposing prose and verse. The Jogu Shotoku Hod teisetsu consists of five textual layers, the earliest of which, genealogical in nature, probably stem from the traditions of the H6ryu-ji, Gango-ji, and other ancient temples and date from the first
27 Fujiwara no Toshiyori (?I057-H29) discusses the concept in Shunrai zuind (ca. 1115). Fuji-wara no Shunzei (1114-1204) also mentions it in Korai futeisho (1197). Both writers are critical of using these negative categories as guides in composition. Hashimoto Fumio, ed., Karonshit, Nihon koten bungaku zenshit (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1975), vol. 20, pp. 57, 357-8.
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decade of the eighth century. The anecdotal strata are probably slightly later, perhaps recorded in their present form after the compilation of the Nihon shoki in 720. The identity of the compiler of these materials is not known.
Another minor eighth-century text of considerable interest has been preserved in a stone inscription. It consists of twenty-one devotional verses carved on a stele at the Yakushi-ji in Nara, verses that are known as the bussokuseki no uta after the incised representation of the Buddha's footprint (bussokuseki) that they accompany. They are in the syllabic form 5-7-5-7-7-7, of which they constitute the chief remaining corpus and which hence is called the "Buddha's footprint stone poem form." It consists of a tanka plus an extra seven-syllable line serving as a refrain. These poems are a liturgy of the circumambula-tion of the footprint icon and therefore of the worship of Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha, but also of Bhaisajya-guru or Yakushi, the healing Buddha. They are arranged in intricate patterns of association and progression stemming partially from their sources in the "twelve great vows of Bhaisajya-guru" as set forth in three Buddhist canonical texts. The twenty-one poems are engraved in phonogram orthography, a fact that makes them important to the study of Japanese phonology. Their date and author or authors are unknown, but the accompanying footprint stone has a kambun inscription dated in correspondence with 753. It has been argued that the poems are by various unknown hands, later arranged into a sequence (also by an unknown person) for artistic and doctrinal effect. The traditional attribution was to Fun'ya no Chinu (693-770), the donor of the icon stone.28
The Nihon shoki covers the history of Japan to 697. It is the first of a group of official annals known as the Rikkokushi (Six national histories). All are in kambun, and together they chronicle events from earliest times to the year 887. It is the second of these histories, the Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan continued), that deals with the Nara period, covering the years 697-791. It was completed and presented to Emperor Kammu (737-806) in 797, just after the move to the new Heian capital. The compilation took place in several stages during the eighth century and involved at least eight scholars.29 The Shoku Nihongi is principally of value as history, being (like the later
28 The most commanding study of this subject is by Roy Andrew Miller, "The Footprints of the Buddha": An Eighth-Century Old Japanese Poetic Sequence (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1975).
29 Imperial commissions for this work were issued in the reigns of Junnin (758-64), Konin (770-81), and Kammu (781-806). The final stages of the project were under the direction of Fujiwara no Tsugutada (727-96) and Sugano no Mamichi (ca. 738-ca. 811).
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chapters of the Nihon shoki) a chronicle of political events seen from the viewpoint of the court. Its annals are distant from the rich matrix of myth and song out of which the compilers of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki wove the fabrics of their early narratives. But it has its own linguistic and semiliterary interest as the chief repository of the semmyd, a form of imperial proclamation in native Yamato speech, recorded in a unique style known as semmydtai. This consists of an attempt to write Japanese with a combination of semantic and phonetic uses of characters and with the occasional intrusion of Chinese grammar meant to be reinterpreted as Japanese constructions. In these respects semmyd resemble some of the orthography of the Man'yoshu. The unique feature of semmydtai, however, is that particles and inflections are written small, in phonogram orthography, so that they stand out from the rest of the text and facilitate its reading. Semmyd were read aloud - proclaimed - in public by officials, and the quality of oral delivery apparently was considered of some importance. There are sixty-two of these proclamations preserved in the Shoku Nihongi. Their subjects include the elevation of a consort to the rank of empress, the dedication of the Great Buddha at the Todai-ji, and the announcement of the discovery of gold in Michinoku. The texts sometimes have a formal and rhetorical splendor that qualifies them for consideration as literature. Otomo no Yakamochi seems to have adapted Emperor Shomu's proclamation on the discovery of gold, issued in 749, into his choka on the same subject (MYS 18.4094). The text of this poem bears a close resemblance to the proclamation with its recounting of the emperor's ambition to serve his people by erecting a great Vairocana, his worry about insufficient gold for the gilding, his relief at the report of new mines, his appeal for unity among his subjects, and his hortatory account of the loyalty of the Otomo. Both poem and proclamation incorporate an ancient Otomo song:
If we go on the sea, Our dead are sodden in water;
If we go on the mountains, Our dead are grown over with grass.
We shall die By the side of our lord, We shall not die in peaces0
30 Mikanagi Kiyotake, ed., Semmyd shoshaku (Tokyo: Yubun shoin, 1936), p. 138. Yakamochi alters the last line of the song to Kaerimi wa i seji to kotodate, "They vowed they would never look back."
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The periodic, oratorical quality of the semmyd of the Shoku Nihongi is attenuated in examples found scattered in later Rikkokushi, in which the linguistic purity of the semmyd is compromised by Chinese loanwords and the influence of kambun syntax. Earlier proclamations, in the Nihon shoki, are translated into kambun by the compilers, and no proclamations of this nature are to be found in the Kojiki. Thus the Shoku Nihongi remains the main repository of a significant form of literary Japanese and of Japanese literature.
Still another group of official texts should be mentioned at this point. These are the Shinto ritual prayers known as norito, twenty-seven of which are preserved in Book 8 of the Engishiki. The Engishiki is a collection of procedures (shiki) compiled in the Engi era (901-23) and completed in 927. The older among the norito probably date to the seventh and eighth centuries. Their texts are linguistically and ortho-graphically similar to the semmyd, employing a hybrid Sino-Japanese style, with particles written small. The result is intended to be read in pure Japanese, though as with all texts discussed in this chapter, the orthographic vehicle is made up exclusively of Chinese characters, whether used semantically or phonetically. The norito also resemble the semmyd in their rhetoric, which is that of the incantation, based on the repetition of formulaic phraseology. The norito are prayers addressed to various kami and recited on special occasions of cultic significance. There are prayers for rich harvest, prayers to the kami of important shrines, invocations of protective kami such as those of gates, and liturgies of exorcism. A norito typically specifies the blessings desired and details the offerings to be made to obtain them. Norito also sometimes contain passages of myth. The officiant often begins by addressing the assembled priests and worshipers before taking up the burden of his petition to the kami. The language of the norito, solemn and designed to create a feeling of numinous awe, resembles certain passages of Manydshu poetry, particularly the chdka of Hitomaro. It is apparent that the author of the Minazuki tsugomori no dharae (Great exorcism of the last day of the sixth month) either drew on the same source of ritual phraseology as Hitomaro did in his lament on the death of Prince Hinamishi (MYS 2.167) °r that one author was familiar with the other's work. The style of the norito of the Toshigoi no matsuri (Grain-petitioning festival) is particularly evocative of the grand chdka manner. It is not known who composed these norito, but they might have been created by members of the sacerdotal Imibe and Nakatomi families or by officials of the Council of Kami Affairs
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(Jingikan). In their older strata they probably took form during that fertile period when the language perfected its potential as a vehicle for ritual and, out of that, made poetry, the period of which Hitomaro was the ultimate expression.
MUSIC AND DANCE
The pervasive role of song in ancient Japanese society has already been touched on in the discussion of literature. The chronicles provide evidence of several named kinds of singing, such as "kami words" (kamigatari)^ "country measures" (hinaburi), "songs of yearning for the homeland" (kunishinohiuta), "drinking songs" (sakagura no uta), and "quiet songs" (shizuuta). A "winecup song" {ukiuta) accompanies the offering of a flagon to the emperor. There were also ageuta and shirageuta, in which the voice was apparently to be raised either throughout or at the end of the song, and "responses to quiet songs" {shizuuta no utaigaishi), thought to have been sung at a fast tempo. "Country measures" had their counterpart in "courtly measures" (miyahitoburi); both were named after particular songs and apparently could refer to other songs sung to those tunes. The notation "lowered part" (kataoroshi) presumably referred to the lowering of the voice or relaxing of the tempo in a two-part song. A more detailed notation in the Nihon shoki gives further insight into manner of performance: "Even now when this song is sung in the music bureau, the tempo of the hand clapping and the rise and fall of the vocal part are preserved. "31 The song in question is described as a Kumeuta, that is, a song traditional to the Kume clan of ancient warriors serving Yamato kings. It accompanied the Kumemai or "Kume dance." A primitive victory song of the Kumebe tells how enemy warriors were killed by a ruse (Nihon shoki 10):
When our troops heard the song, they all drew their mallet-headed swords and killed the enemy at once. There were no enemy left. The Royal forces were overjoyed and turned their faces to the heavens and laughed. Thus they sang:
Now at last! Now at last! Those fools, oh, Would they even now,
My boys, Would they even now,
My boys?
31 Tsuchihashi Yutaka and Konishi Jin'ichi, eds., Kodai kaydshu, NKBT, 3.128.
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It is because of this that the Kumebe nowadays give a great laugh after singing.
The Kuzu were another group known for their songs as well as for customs regarded as quaint by the Yamato court. Living in a remote mountain area of the Kii peninsula, they came annually to court to present offerings of their native products. The presentation was accompanied by a performance similar to that of the Kumebe {Nihon shoki 39):
In the winter of the nineteenth year, in the tenth month, on the first day . . . the king [Ojin] went to the palace at Yoshino. At this time the Kuzu came to court. They presented thick sake, singing:
In the white-oak grove We fashion a long mortar;
In the long mortar We have brewed the fine great liquor:
See how good it is -Come, partake, down it with joy,
Our father.
After they had finished singing, they beat on their mouths, threw back their heads, and laughed. Thus when nowadays on the day the Kuzu present their local products, they finish singing, beat on their mouths, throw back their heads, and laugh, it would seem they are following an ancient custom.
Several of the early songs from the chronicles are attributed to still another group, the ama or "seafolk," people who made their living from the sea, by fishing, diving, gathering seaweed, and making salt. Their songs, among the longest and most impressive, are narrative in nature and include variations of the customary formula:
The bottom swimmers, The seafolk couriers,
Have told the story: The words of the story
Are these words.
Some of the long narrative songs contain, in their very wording, evidence of how they were acted out. Thus when the kami Eight Thousand Spears grows tired of his wife and is about to leave her, he boastfully enacts a series of scenes in which he dresses himself in various finery (Kojiki 4):
Dressed and about to leave, he stood, with one hand on his horse's saddle and one foot in the stirrup, and sang:
Jet-berry black Is the raiment that I take
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To adorn myself
In my full array;
Bird of the offing Peering down at its breast,
Flapping its wings: These clothes do not become me -
I cast them away, Waves that draw down the shore.
This pattern is repeated with "kingfisher-green raiment," until finally the kami is satisfied with garments "indigo . . . pounded dye plant juice-stained." The song is rich in possibilities for mime. So too is a banquet song (Kojiki 42) attributed to King Ojin in which a crab has a dialogue with a man. The crab's actions - "scuttling sideways . . . diving and gasping" - are vividly described. Highly suggestive of dance movements are these words of a song: "The Kuzu of Yoshino, seeing the sword Osazaki no Mikoto was wearing, sang (Kojiki 47):
Child of the sun From Homuta, Osazaki, Osazaki,
The sword you wear Strung from the hilt, Swinging at the tip: Swaying underbrush In the bare-stemmed winter wood -Say a! Say a!"
Specific references to dance as a command performance are found in passages such as the following (Kojiki 96):
Once when King Yuryaku went to Yoshino Palace there was a maiden beside the Yoshino River, and her figure was lovely. And so he wed this maiden and returned to the palace. Later when he visited Yoshino again he stopped at the place where he had met the maiden, set up a great royal camp-chair, seated himself . . . and had the young lady dance while he played on the zither. And because the lady danced well, he composed a song:
To the hand of a kami Seated on a camp-chair
Playing the zither She dances, this woman - oh that This were the eternal land!
Elsewhere we see guests at a party rising one by one to dance around a fire at night:
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When Yamabe no Muraji Odate was appointed governor of Harima Province, he arrived at the new residence of a commoner of that province, Shijimu by name, and gave a feast. When the feast was in full swing and the liquor was flowing freely, each guest danced in order of precedence. Now, there were two boys to tend the fire, seated by the hearth. When these boys were urged to dance, one of them said, "You, younger brother, dance first." They thus deferred to each other, and the people there assembled laughed.*2
The songfest, utagaki or kagai, provided an occasion for singing and dancing that was part ritual, part revel, and part performance. Unmarried young men and women met and exchanged challenges in song, with sexual pairing the object. Several passages in the chronicles and the Man'yoshu refer to this custom either directly or obliquely. A poem by Takahashi no Mushimaro in the Man'yoshu (9-I759) suggests that the sexual license he observed in the annual rites at Mt. Tsukuha in Hitachi Province be extended to married couples as well:
To where eagles dwell On the mountain of Tsukuha,
Up to the haven, The haven of Mohaki,
Urging each other With shouts, the youths and the maidens
Thronging together, Go to match songs in the song match.
Because with others' wives I shall be keeping company,
So with my own wife Let others banter as they will.
The kami that keep This mountain from of old
Have never interposed Their ban against these usages.
This one day alone, Sweeding, do not look at me, Do not question what I do.
The utagaki as a theater of conflict between rivals in love is presented in a passage from the Kojiki:
The progenitor of the Omi of Heguri, Shibi by name, stood up at a songfest and took the hand of the fair maid whom Wake no Mikoto was going to wed. This maiden was the daughter of the Obito of Uda, and her name was Ouo [great fish]. And so Wake no Mikoto also stood up at the songfest.&
32 Ibid., p 104.    33 Ibid., p. 105.
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The rivals insult each other in song, building to a climax complete with taunting plays on the interloper's name (Kojiki iio-ii):
And so Shibi no Omi, more and more enraged, sang:
My great lord My prince's brushwood fence,
With eight-knot fastening You may fasten it round about -It will cut, that brushwood fence, It will burn, that brushwood fence.
Oh the great fish, Tuna-spearing fisherman -
If she gets away How you'll hanker after her, Tuna-spearing tunaman.
Thus singing, they contended until dawn and then withdrew and went their separate ways.
Utagaki songs undoubtedly were adapted to other uses by the compilers of the chronicles, given the contextual readings in the love dramas in which those works abound. Plausibly among these are the songs placed in the mouth of Prince Kinashi no Karu, the son of King Ingyo who lusted for his sister Karu no Oiratsume {Kojiki 79, 80, 84):
Hail comes pelting down On the leaves of bamboo grass
With might and main Once I've taken her to bed Let her go where she wants.
That beauty so fine, If I can bed her, just bed her,
Like sickled rushes Let the tangle tangle then, If I can bed her, just bed her.
Sky-flying
Karu maiden,
Softly, softly so Come to me and sleep and go, You Karu maidens.
The existence of musical instruments to accompany songs and dances is attested to in the chronicles in such a passage as that already cited in which King Yuryaku plays on the zither. This "horizontal plucked chordophone,"34 known as a koto in Japanese and called a
34 William P. Malm, Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1959), p. 165.
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ch'in in China, existed in various forms throughout east Asia. A stringed instrument of the koto type dating from Yayoi times has been discovered at the Toro archaeological site in Shizuoka. This early example of the yamatogoto or native Japanese zither apparently had six strings. An eight-stringed zither is referred to in a Kojiki song (no. 105). Five-stringed varieties are represented in early haniwa excavated at Maebashi in Gumma Prefecture. One of these shows the player holding the instrument across his lap, plucking the strings. The Chinese variety had seven strings. A much larger zither, called a cheng (so in Japanese), had thirteen strings. Both Chinese zithers were introduced into Japan with the influx of continental music in the seventh century or earlier.
It is thought that the koto in ancient Japan had a significance beyond entertainment or aesthetic pleasure. The account in the Kojiki of the death of King Chuai suggests that the instrument was used to induce a state of divine possession. Chuai, the husband of Queen Jingu, who is famous in the tendentious accounts in the Japanese chronicles for her conquest of the Korean kingdom of Silla in the fourth century, was playing the koto when a divine voice commanded Chuai to cross the sea on a mission of conquest. He scoffed at the command and was cursed to death on the spot for his impiety. The narrative makes clear that the queen is possessed by a kami, which speaks through her mouth, and that the koto is played to achieve this effect. The king accuses the voice of belonging to a "lying kami," pushes away the zither, and stops playing. The curse immediately follows: "Go down one road." A minister of court desperately urges the king to resume playing, and he does so, though only reluctantly. But it is too late. The playing stops. Torches are brought, and it is seen that the king is dead.35 It is clear from this account that the rite of inducing possession was conducted in the dark. Other evidence of the use of the koto in shamanistic spirit possession is found in the pillow word kotogami ni in Song 92 from the Nihon shoki:
To the koto-head
Comes, abides Kagehime . . .
The word kage in Princess Kage's name is thought to refer to the "shadow" of a kami or spirit that is drawn to the plucking of the strings. The following anonymous poem from the Man'yoshu seems to refer to something similar (MYS 7.1129, "On a Japanese zither"):
35 Kojiki, vol. 2, NKBT, 1.229.
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Taking the zither, Before all else a sigh escapes -
Can it really be That deep down in the zither's pipe My wife has hidden herself?
The poem suggests that not only the kami but also the spirits of dead or absent loved ones could be called forth by this instrument.
The koto appears elsewhere in early Japanese myth and fiction in a different formulation. In the Kojiki, in the second passage on descent to the underworld, the hero Onamuchi no Kami steals the ama no norigoto (heavenly speaking zither) from Susa no O, now the ruler of Ne no Katasukuni (another name for Yomi no Kuni), the Japanese Hades. As the hero flees, the zither strikes against a timber, and the resulting sound causes the earth to shake.36 The Utsuho monogatari, a major work of Heian literature, later used the same motif of the zither of divine efficacy as the central unifying theme of its narrative. There, too, the playing of such an instrument causes earthquakes, wind, hail, snow, movements of stars and moon, and the appearance of supernatural beings.37 The references in the Kojiki and Man'ydshu are to the yamatogoto or wagon, the native Japanese version of the instrument, whereas those in the Utsuho monogatari are to the Chinese ch'in. That there was a special mystique attached to this instrument in China as well as in Japan is suggested by the Ch'in fu (Rhyme-prose on the zither) by Chi Shu-yeh (223-62), one of the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove." This long evocation of the excellence of the instrument, in typically florid fu style, contains a version of a giant tree legend that is echoed in both the Man'ydshu and the Kojiki. The Chinese poem tells of a paulownia tree that grows on a remote mountaintop, stretching up to the North Star, drawing sustenance from the light of the sun and moon, lush, shedding blossoms in the sky, plunging its shadow into the gulf in the evening, bathing its trunk in the rising sun in the morning, standing for a thousand years. An offshoot of this tree is cut down and made into a zither, whose excellent qualities are then explained in detail.38 This work underlies the prose texts and accompanying waka exchanged between Otomo no Tabito and Fujiwara no Fusasaki (682-738) in Man'yoshu 5.810-12. The first composition is sent by Tabito to Fusasaki with the gift of a yamatogoto and takes the form of a fantasy in
36 Kojiki, vol. 1, NKBT, 1.105.
37 Kono Tama, ed., Utsuho monogatari, vol. 1, NKBT, 85.379-80.
38 Kokumin bunko kankokai, ed.,Monzen, vol. 1, in Kokuyaku kambun taisei: bungakubu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kokumin kankokai, 1921), pp. 620-35.
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which the koto becomes a maiden and speaks to the author in a dream, recounting how she was once a paulownia tree in the mountains of Tsushima, shone upon by the sun and clothed in the smoky haze. She was chopped down and fashioned into a zither and now begs only that she may have a cultivated master to play on her strings. The prose piece is accompanied by a waka in which the maiden asks to be allowed to pillow on the knees of a man who knows music. Tabito replies to her in a waka and concludes his experiment in poem-tale fiction with another kambun passage. The whole composition is sent off to Fusasaki, who replies in like manner. The fascination with the zither as a "speaking" instrument is clearly implied in this fantasy. A curious passage in the Kojiki also parallels the Ch'in fu description. In the reign of Nintoku an extraordinarily tall tree, whose shadow "cast by the morning sun reached Awaji Island and in the evening sun crossed Takayasu Mountain," was cut down and its lumber made into the ship Karano. Eventually the ship grew old in service, and its hulk was burned for salt. From the leftover timbers was fashioned a koto whose notes "resounded over seven leagues."39
Also among the instruments of archaic Japan were flutes and drums, rattles, bells, and so forth. The percussion group is supposed to be the most ancient. Bronze ceremonial bells (dotaku) are familiar from late Yayoi excavations, and bell rattles (suzu, nuride) are referred to in the Kojiki and Nikon shoki as early as the fifth century. A haniwa from the same site in Gumma Prefecture as that in which the koto player was discovered is modeled into the shape of a drummer striking a jar-shaped hip drum with a stick. This jar-shaped drum is different in configuration from the tsuzumi of the later musical tradition, in which the drum head projects beyond and is laced over a narrower, sometimes hourglass-shaped, core. (The Shosoin preserves such a core in T'ang three-color glazed ceramic ware.) The haniwa drum may represent the sort of drum referred to in a Kojiki drinking song (no. 40):
He who brewed This fine liquor - was it because
He took his drum And standing it up like a mortar,
Singing while he brewed, Did the brewing of the beer,
Dancing while he brewed, Did the brewing of the beer,
That this fine liquor,
39 NKBT, 1.283.
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Fine liquor Makes me feel so extra good? Sa! Sa!
This passage from the account of the reign of the fourth-century queen Jingu is the earliest textual reference to a tsuzumi. Drums were used in the rituals of war as well as in the celebrations of peace. The longest poems in the Man'yoshu (2.199), a lament by Hitomaro on the death of the imperial prince Takechi in 696, mentions a tsuzumi in one of the series of extended similies in which the poem describes the climactic battle of the Jinshin war of 672:
The crash of drums Signaling the soldiers to draw up
Resounded till it seemed The sound of thunder fell upon men's ears.
The same poem also speaks of a horn called a kuda:
The bray of horns Blown in blasts upon the air
Was like the snarling Of a tiger when it spots its foe,
And the enemy In all his multitude was seized with fear.
The word kuda is written with characters meaning "small horn," and the instrument was originally in fact made of animal horn, though later of bamboo. There were also "large horns" or Kara no fue. Fue is the general term for a wind instrument, and an alternative reading of this above passage has fue instead of kuda. The six-holed kagurabue or kagura flute used in Shinto religious ceremonies is thought to date from the Burial Mound period.
To the ancient songs and dances, both sacred and secular, performed to the accompaniment of strings, flutes, and percussion instruments, was added an influx of music from the continent during the Asuka-Nara period. The arrival of musicians from the continent in Japan began much earlier, with the Nihon shoki recording the attendance of eighty musicians from Silla at the funeral ceremonies of King Ingyo in 453. These eighty musicians are said to have brought stringed instruments and to have taken part in the mourning ceremonies, singing, wailing, and dancing.4° A century later the same chronicle mentions the inclusion of musicians among the learned men of Paekche
40 Ingyo 42/1, NKBT, 67.448-9. The passage states that the musicians "strung their various instruments." The character for "strung" has also been given the interpretation of "prepared."
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sent in 554 as part of the "visiting professor" system.41 Although we cannot know precisely the nature of the music they taught, any more than that of the "singing, wailing, and dancing" at Ingyo's funeral, it seems reasonable to suppose that some of the continental music was connected with Confucian ritual, as Chinese learning was the principal subject of instruction.
The year 612 provides a point of reference for the early history of music and dance in Japan, as it was then that gigaku was introduced by Mimashi from Paekche. Mimashi may have been of Chinese origin. In any case, it was understood that he had studied the music that he brought with him in the south Chinese kingdom of Wu. It is recorded that Mimashi set up a school at Sakurai and taught youths to dance.42 Gigaku continued to be performed until the seventeenth century, but it eventually died out and apparently remained confined to the environs of Nara. It never became as widespread as its rival dance form, bugaku.
Gigaku was performed by dancers wearing large wooden or dry lacquer masks, of which 171 have been preserved in the Shoso-in. Many of the remaining masks were worn at the grand dedication ceremony for the Great Buddha statue of the Todai-ji in 752. A long procession of costumed performers paraded about the temple precincts as part of the celebration. One aspect of gigaku lives on in the lion dances (shishimai) that are still performed in Japan. The Shoso-in has eight gigaku lion masks, of which one is particularly well preserved. It has large eyes and snout and movable jaws and tongue. It measures thirty-eight by thirty-seven by thirty-three centimeters and, like other gigaku masks, is large enough to fit over the performer's head. Made of paulownia wood, it was originally brightly colored in various shades of red.
A more naturalistically rendered horse's head is also among the remaining gigaku masks. Carved from one piece of paulownia wood, it was gilded with gold leaf and decorated with patterns drawn in black ink. The piece measures 31.5 by 11.5 centimeters and has great presence with its bold eyes and flaring nostrils. Originally it had a mane and was provided with reins. Little is known about the use to which this object was put in the now-extinct art form that utilized it, but it remains a striking piece of Nara sculpture.
That other of the masks were made in Japan is evident from the names and dates inscribed on them. Six or seven are ascribed to an Ota
41 Kimmei 15/2, NKBT, 68.109.
42 Suiko 20 (612), KNBT, 68.198-9.
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Wamaro. One of these is a mask of Goko, the duke of Wu, a principal role in the ancient dance-drama. The most prominent feature of this mask is a long, pointed nose, which combines with close-set eyes and red, smiling lips to create a lively but grotesque effect. This mask measures 27.3 by 23 centimeters, is made of paulownia wood, and was painted with verdigris (rokusho) over white lead (gofun). The association with the state of Wu in southern China is traditional, and gigaku is sometimes referred to as "the music of Wu" {Kuregaku or Gogaku), but Persian or Central Asian elements are suggested by the physiognomy of a mask such as this.
The mask known as the "woman of Wu" (Kureotome or Gojo), however, is of a distinctly oriental cast. Measuring 34.5 by 23.5 centimeters, it is one of the five masks attributed to Master Kiei, who is known to have been active at the time of the dedication of the Great Buddha statue of the Todai-ji in 752. It is probable that this mask was produced for that occasion. The face is handsomely carved in the style of the T'ang beauty, with dark eyebrows reminiscent of the Kichijoten at the Yakushi-ji; narrow, well-defined eyes under a delicately rendered epicanthic fold; a finely chiseled nose and rosebud mouth, on the latter of which the red coloring remains; and a rounded chin harmonizing the overall full but not plump proportions. Small ears are partially hidden under the black lacquer hairdo that defines the outline of the face and is crowned by twin topknots with trailing tufts. The olive-greenish cast of the complexion is similar to that of the male mask, but the absence of grotesque elements results in a very different effect. Here too the material is paulownia, and the mask can justly be ranked with the fine products of Nara woodcarving. The scene in which the character wearing this mask was wooed by the barbarian Konron apparently provided one of the high points in a gigaku performance, and it has been suggested that its risque nature led to disfavor for gigaku as a court or temple entertainment.
Another of the standard roles was that of the "drunken barbarian king," and a mask representing this personage has been preserved. Apparently this character and his followers came out at the finale of a performance. The king wears a Phrygian cap with floral designs in verdigris, red, purple, white, and gold leaf. Deep-set eyes peer out from under knitted brows, and a pendulous nose protrudes from between prominent cheekbones. The thick lips are drawn up in a smile half-fierce and half-libidinous. A beard along the jawbone and a thin mustache, glued on with lacquer but now largely fallen out, completed this caricature of a "Western" barbarian. The paulownia wood has
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been painted red, no doubt to indicate the flush of wine. There is a rhythmical force to the carving that goes beyond mere grotesquerie. The mask measures 37.7 by 22.5 centimeters.
One of the most striking gigaku masks is made not of wood but of dry lacquer. A creation of Shori no Uonari, it depicts one of the eight equally drunken followers of the drunken king. Measuring 26.1 by 22.3 centimeters, the physiognomy of this mask with its almost equilateral dimensions captures with demonic force the spirit of intoxication in a smooth-cheeked youth. The surface of the dry lacquer has been painted with a bright, yellowish red, against which the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth stand out in black. Hair was originally pasted on the crown of the head and was extended downward in a still-remaining indication of sparse, uneven bangs rendered in black ink along the forehead. The eyebrows are bold, composed of numerous fine ink lines along the fully modeled brow. They swirl upward with lively rhythmic force, and beneath them the almond-shaped eyes are also slanted sharply upward. The mouth is rendered in a matching bow-shaped grimace, and the planes of the broad face - its width is emphasized by the large, thick ears - rise to high, prominent cheekbones. The black at the nostril openings of the squat nose with its slightly pendulous tip provides the final counterpoint to the red surface of this powerfully modeled expression of dionysian mischief. One of the thirty-six dry lacquer masks in the collection, this item is considered one of Uonari's outstanding creations. It obviously takes full advantage of the plasticity of its medium. Comparison with similar dated masks suggests that it was made for the Eye-opening Ceremony of 752.
Little can now be said about gigaku music or the manner in which its dances were performed, but they must have provided a colorful spectacle in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Nara culture. Gigaku was taught at Buddhist temples, being brought under the sponsorship of the Tachibana-dera, Uzumasa-dera, and Shitenno-ji soon after its introduction. The association of the foreign musical and dance form with the foreign religion is no doubt relevant to the role that Buddhism played as a cultural force in the Asuka-Nara period. Music and dance as entertainment and spectacle remained associated with temples and gave rise to the noh drama in medieval times. Music was also an essential part of the services themselves: as rituals of comfort for the souls of the deceased, as a way to create an atmosphere of reverence and mystery, and as an earthly enactment) of the divine music depicted in Buddhist art. Shomyo, a liturgical Buddhist chant, was introduced in 736 and was influential in the development of Japanese musical styles.
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That the importation of musical forms was part of the general influx of continental culture during the seventh and eighth centuries is indicated by other early references, such as to the introduction of Toragaku (Tora may refer to a state in present Burma; another theory holds that it refers to Cheju Island off the south coast of Korea), a form of unknown origin, in 661. Toragaku was being included in court concerts as late as 763 but had died out by the ninth century. Of more lasting importance was gagaku, being performed at court by 702. Gagaku (elegant music) became the designation of the standard varieties of court music as they were developed and survived through the centuries to modern times. Like gigaku it accompanied performances of masked dancers (bugaku), but it developed as a purely instrumental ensemble art (kangen) as well. Although gagaku means "elegant music" and has remained associated with the court aristocracy, its origins are in the popular music of China during the T'ang dynasty. T'ang music itself was strongly influenced by central Asian traditions and instruments, so that the "classical" court music of Japan is, in its origins, a composite of many musical cultures. The visual impact of central Asian music is still vividly present at Buddhist sites in Sinkiang and western China. Cave temples such as those at Kizil north of Kucha in the T'ien Shan and at Tunhuang in Kansu preserve wall paintings of paradise scenes in which heavenly musicians perform on four and five-stringed p'i-p'a, zithers, yuan-hsien, hand-held harps, panpipes, transverse and vertical flutes, and various percussion instruments. Dancers sway, swirl, spin, and cavort, and apsaras fly through the air, trailing scarves and strumming on p'i-p'a. These scenes are glorifications of the actual musical culture of the Western Regions, a culture that revolutionized T'ang music, whose own tradition had been soberly Confucian. The oasis culture of central Asia was in fact the fountainhead of much of the subsequent music of east Asia. Its distant descendants are the vigorous dance music of present-day Sinkiang and the sedate sonorities of Japanese gagaku and related forms preserved in Korea. Certain characteristics of gagaku style, however, such as the importance of time units marked off by the scheduled entrance of stereotyped passages in the strings, suggest a connection even with southeast Asian music.
One significant difference between present-day gagaku and the music heard at the Nara court lies in the richer variety of instrumentation then available. In addition to the double-reed flute known as the hichiriki, the mouth organ (sho), transverse flutes, the thirteen-stringed koto, the four stringed biwa, the small barrel drum (kakko),
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the bronze gong (shoko or daishoko), the hanging drum (tsuridaiko), and the large frame drum (dadaiko) in the present gagaku ensemble, there were a number of no-longer used wind, string, and percussion instruments, some capable of playing in a lower register than is now characteristic of this high-pitched musical art.
Both the hichiriki, a short double-reed flute producing an astonishing volume of high-pitched sound, and the mouth organ existed in larger versions in the Nara gagaku orchestra as well as in the forms known today, and these larger instruments played an octave or more lower than the types now in use. An ancient harp known as the kugo also produced pleasingly dulcet notes. The ancient biwa (Ch: p'i-p'a), a member of the lute family of Persian origins, spread through central Asia and China, reaching Japan as part of the gagaku orchestra, and has undergone various subsequent modifications during its long history in Japanese music. One highly ornate example preserved in the Shoso-in is the five-stringed variety orginating in India. This instrument, of which the Shoso-in has the sole surviving example, has a straight rather than a bent neck, and a somewhat narrower sound box than that of the four-stringed type.
Also among the Nara instruments was the four-stringed genkan (Ch: yuan-hsien, named after one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove) with its long neck and circular sound box.43 The genkan, like the biwa, belongs to the lute family and is widely distributed in East Asia. Of the kugo, a vertical harp of Sassanian origins, only a fragment remains in the Shoso-in collection, though it, like the other ancient instruments described here, has recently been reconstructed and played in ensemble.44 Its twenty-three strings were attached diagonally between a vertical upright and a projecting horizontal arm. The instrument was placed between the legs of a seated player, supported on one shoulder, and played with both hands on opposite sides in the manner of the widely distributed varieties of harp to which it is related in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. The stringed instruments also included the seven-stringed Chinese ch'in and the shiragigoto from the Korean state of Silla, both being types of zither. All stringed instruments were played by plucking.
43 The so-called Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a troupe of aesthetes who withdrew from the troubles afflicting China in the third century into the consolations of music, drink, and philosophical speculation. Yuan Hsien was famous as a musician and maker of musical instruments. He is reported to have invented the instrument named after him.
44 Such a recital took place at the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka on February 15, 1986. Much valuable information on the music and instruments is available in the concert program, "Reigaku: Kodai gakki no fukugen to enso."
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Among the wind instruments, the mouth organ or sho (Ch: sheng) has remained important to the gagaku orchestra. This visually striking instrument consists of a bowl-shaped mouthpiece attached to seventeen bamboo pipes of varied lengths. The pipes have finger holes, and the instrument is played by selectively covering them while drawing air in and out of the mouth, producing chords of a reedy quality. The larger variety of sho, called the u, could be up to 92 centimeters in length and produced truly organlike tones an octave lower than those of the sho. The mouth organs had their origins in Indochina and, like other continental instruments, reached Japan by way of China.
One of the most interesting and melodious of the ancient wind instruments is the haisho, a set of eighteen bamboo panpipes reconstructed from a fragment in the Shoso-in. This is closely analogous to the instrument known in ancient Greece and widely distributed throughout the world. The player blows into the pipes while moving the instrument back and forth to produce high or lower notes.
The modern gagaku transverse flute, the ryuteki, like its ancient analogue preserved in the Shoso-in, is a reedless bamboo cylinder of Indian origin, widely distributed in various forms throughout east Asia.
The Nara orchestra also included the vertical dosho, a larger version of which, the shakuhachi, is still extensively played outside the gagaku tradition. This reedless end-blown bamboo flute exists in many parts of the world. The ancient Japanese variety used in gagaku may be of Indian origin. Unlike the modern shakuhachi, it has one of its six finger holes on the underside.
In addition to the percussion instruments of the modern gagaku orchestra, the Shoso-in preserves, as we noted earlier, the hourglass-shaped ceramic core of a drum. This drum was known as the jiko (ceramic drum) and was placed horizontally on a drum stand and played with sticks on its hide-covered ends. The extremely ancient Chinese bell rack was also part of Nara gagaku. Sixteen metal bells of graduated sizes were suspended in two tiers and struck with a hard instrument to produce pure and resonant chimes tones. This musical device is known as the henshd (Ch: pien-chung). A similar arrangement, known variously as the hokyo (Ch: fang-hsiang) or hokei (Ch: fang-ch'ing), used suspended rectangular metal pieces instead of bells. The notes produced when struck are sharp and short.
The continental music played at the Nara court was part of an international idiom, maintained by frequent contacts with China. Many aspects dropped out as the art became isolated from its countries
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of origin in the Heian period and then fossilized with the later decline of imperial sponsorship. In its eighth-century heyday, gagaku must have provided an auditory experience as rich and exotic as the paintings and statuary in Buddhist temples were overpowering in visual terms. In 701 a Gagakuryo (Bureau of court music) was set up on the T'ang model. In the new Chinese-style administration, music was to serve the state in addition to cult and community. In a determined gesture toward self-conscious cultural improvement, the Taiho code of 702 recommended the private study of koto music as an act of personal cultivation. In this, too, the beginning of the eighth century marks a major hinge of time, for such a thought would have been far from the archaic cultural matrix in which music served its traditional unexamined social function.
In a broad sense, the term gagaku is used to refer to the whole cluster of musical arts sponsored by the court, including those of native origin such as kagura and azuma-asobi. But in the strict sense, gagaku refers to the group of continental musical forms that reached Japan during the Asuka-Nara period. Those of Chinese and southeast Asian origin are referred to as Togaku (T'ang music), and those stemming from Korea and northeast Asia are referred to as Komagaku (Korean music). These categories are also known respectively as "music of the left" and "music of the right." These musics were based on a modal structure in which there were two types, called ryo and ritsu. Each of these divisions subsumes three of the six twelve-tone Chinese scales that came into Japan with gagaku itself. The ordering of tones within the scale determined the mode based on it and underwent considerable modification in Japan during the Heian period.
In present-day gagaku the modal complexity of the different categories of music varies. Kagura is the simplest, with one modal structure, whereas Komagaku uses three modes, and Togaku, five. The situation in the Nara period is difficult to assess because of the lack of surviving musical notation. Presumably the structural symmetry that is such a prominent feature of gagaku as it exists today also characterized it then. The symmetry takes the form of a fourfold repetition of dance movement in bugaku. The bugaku performance is oriented to the four directions, not to a stage "front." It is very likely that the present pace of performance, as in noh drama, is considerably slower than was the case when the art was a living part of the cultural scene of its day. Nevertheless, gagaku has no doubt always been characterized by a sense of deliberate majesty, with large and colorful dance costumes, along with hand-held properties and masks, exploited to the full for a
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complementary visual effect in the dance. As in gigaku, the stories enacted in the dance are of exotic continental origin. They are classified as "civil dances" (bun no mai), "military dances" (bu no mai), "running dances" (hashirimai), and "child dances" (dobu), as well as dances of the left or right. The performance of gagaku music and dance was taken up by the aristocracy as private entertainment, and Heian works such as The Tale of Genji are replete with colorful descriptions. It is not known to what extent this practice of private performance existed in pre-Heian times.
An official entertainment participated in by the men and women of the Nara court was a form of group dance known as toka. Introduced from China in 693, its Japanese version incorporated elements of the native utagaki, the rustic song-matches that now, like much else in the urban atmosphere of the Nara period, became the object of cultural curiosity and pastoral condescension. The customs of the countryside were suddenly perceived as different from those of the city and ripe for aristocratic patronage or experiment. Performances of toka were held during the first month as part of the New Year ceremonials and continued to be popular from Tempyo to early Heian times. Also during this period the court was entertained by performances of sangaku, theatricals of Chinese origin that included acrobatics and juggling. Sangaku was excluded from court patronage in 782, perhaps because of the earthy nature of some of its skits, and its performers led a wandering existence until they attached themselves to Buddhist temples. Sangaku is the remote ancestor of sarugaku and, through it, of the noh drama.
By the time of the Eye-opening Ceremony at the T6dai-ji in 752, musical life at the Nara court was a complex of native and imported forms. Among the former were kagura, saibara, azuma-asobi, Kuzuuta, Kumeuta, duta, and tatebushi. Alongside these were the music and dance from abroad - gigaku, sangaku, Tdgaku, Komagaku, shdmyd, and such presumably exotic but now obscure musical forms as Rin'yugaku, Toragaku, and Bokkaigaku. The Gagakuryo was in charge of them all. The imported forms were eventually either consolidated under the aegis of gagaku, or left the court for a wandering existence (sangaku), or died out (gigaku). The native forms entered a dual existence, as village shrine music (sato-kagura) became distinguished from the official mikagura of court or as folksongs like saibara and azuma-asobi were formalized and solemnized as part of gagaku in the broad sense. This subsuming of popular culture into high culture is one of the most persistent motifs of Japanese history. It was already well under way in the Nara period, partially owing to the massive infusions
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from advanced civilizations that helped create an instant elite in the capital, and a concomitant penchant for cultural primitivism that has persisted in one guise or another to our own day. The Kuzu might come to court and sing their quaint songs, but by the eighth century, scholars and professional musicians had begun to understand that such local products were of essentially anthropological interest.