Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800

by Herman Ooms

University of Hawai'i Press

2009

Book Review by Ross Bender

To say that Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan is a pleasure to read is not merely a hackneyed accolade but a monstrous understatement. Herman Ooms writes with a verve, intensity, sparkle and oomph that, to use another cliché, make the book hard to put down. The structure of the book, if it can be said to have a structure, is a sort of whirling Piagetian assemblage rather than a stodgy old-fashioned linear history – there’s no chapter titled “Conclusion” in which to find a coherent summary, which necessitates the sometimes exasperating task of reading the whole thing cover to cover, a thing which I accomplished in about three sittings, taking time out only to dance in the streets on election night.

I use the word “exasperating” advisedly. The work moves back and forth, up and down, fro and hither, over such a vast scope of time and space that it’s hard to keep up with, even with the punch-out scorecard that Hawai’i Press thoughtfully provides to help one identify the players. Most lucid and cogent to my mind were the chapters on ‘Mythemes’ and ‘Spirits’, while the attempts in ‘Bricolage’ and ‘Plottings’ to untangle the knots of imperial dynastic succession and kinship relations might better have utilized a simpler narrative structure.

Some minor cavils and quibbles. Ooms seems irksomely taken with his translation of “yamato neko” as “root child of Yamato”, a meaning which as far as I know not even Motoori Norinaga suggested, although it may appear somewhere in his immense commentary. Sansom didn’t attempt a translation of the term, and Herbert Zachert rendered it as “Das Liebe Kind von Yamato”, more or less what Maruyama says in his Jodaigo Jiten. In fact, the essential vocabulary of the senmyō– “akitsumikami”, “kiyoki akaki”, “kamuroki kamuromi no mikoto”, even “sumera” or “sumeroki” are far from being decoded by the new linguists working on Old Japanese and Proto-Old Japanese. Ooms’ theories on the Daoist shades of this terminology are interesting, but by no means the last word.

The book’s treatment of the Tachibana Naramaro conspiracy is on the whole much more accurate than the three sentences Piggott devotes to it, although Ooms depicts Naramaro forbidding “the drinking of sake at gatherings other than official ones” the year following his putative death, his death itself being somewhat of a mystery as it is not spelled out in the official chronicle, a puzzle which Ooms doesn’t even touch on. More astounding given his interest in signs and wonders is that Ooms neglects to mention the bizarre omen leading to calendrical change after the Naramaro affair, which is probably just as well since it leaves a bit of territory for the rest of us to explore.

Major cavils and quibbles involve bibliographical questions. While Ooms handles Rikkokushi quite masterfully, and is careful to note issues such as Kanmu’s role in editing the material in Shoku Nihongi, as well as other questions of sources, he zooms over so much turf, using works such as Nihon Ryōiki, Engi Shiki , Nihon Kiryaku and other material of obviously later and more dubious provenance that it makes one’s head spin. Even such nitty-gritty matters as the loss then reconstruction of the twentieth volume of Shoku Nihongi are almost perforce passed over in the whirlwind. He is careful to note that Engi Shiki, for example, is a prescriptive or determinative work, rather than one actually describing events of two centuries before its compilation, but refers to the Taihō code and Ritsuryō as though we possess actual documents with these titles dating from the eighth century, rather than reconstructions pieced together from early Heian commentaries.

A central question in assessing the book is whether the razzle dazzle of mystical magical Daoism that has been so in vogue since the Abe no Seimei boom has more than ephemeral importance for the study of Nara Japan. To be fair, Ooms’ discussion of “The Case of the Missing Daoism” is an important and painstaking examination of the issue –it’s just that his conclusions are somewhat overwhelmed by the flashy red dust jacket depicting the Emperor’s Coat from Tokugawa times, and this book will no doubt be superficially perceived as just another in the current wave of enthusiastic Daoist reinterpretations of Ancient Japanese history. It is instructive, by the way, to compare the accounts that both Ooms and Bialock give of the last days of Tenmu with that given by Kidder in his recent book on Himiko; Kidder manages to recount the events of Tenmu’s last days without mentioning Daoist magic even once.

In the last chapter, ‘Purity’, Ooms says that “Trying to differentiate between the various mainland practices – statist, Daoist, and Buddhist – to identify the cultural flow into Yamato or their reenactment there may ultimately be a futile exercise.” His thoughts on ‘The “Shinto” Question’ are helpful, although to my mind Breen and Teeuwen in their introduction to Shinto in History have refuted Kuroda’s splashy thesis with a vengeance. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “What is shinto, and if you know what shinto is, what is daoism.” There is still much work to be done on parsing the elements of ancient Japanese political thought – Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist, Daoist, nativist, continental, peninsular – and in fact the enterprise has only begun in earnest. Much of the most relevant work will perforce involve the religio-political thought of medieval China. Christine Mollier’s study of the “echoing” Buddhist and Daoist sutras during this period demonstrates how difficult it is to put simple labels on this material. Michel Strickmann’s Chinese Poetry and Prophecy: The Written Oracle in East Asia explores the Buddhist origins of the widespread and foundational practice of rhabdomancy.

At Penn this spring, Professor Ooms ended his powerpoint presentation of a segment of his new book with a slide picturing the popular “Where’s Waldo?” cartoon as a humorous and somewhat modest reference to the fact that ‘The Case of the Missing Daoism’ is still open and on the books. Imperial Politics and Symbolics is an energizing piece of Sherlockian detective work which is certain to challenge and be challenged for many years to come, even as the more plodding empiricist Watsons add their pieces of bric and brac to the assemblage.

From Premodern Japanese Studies listserve discussion

http://groups.google.com/group/pmjs/browse_thread/thread/78c01056bd1d5b40#