Basic Information
Host
KAKENHI Program “Development of the Next Generation of East Asian Classical Studies through International Collaboration: From the Perspective of the Frontier of the Realm of Chinese Characters”
Reports
An online seminar was held for the second time for the undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Japanese Language and Culture at the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University. On this occasion, Professor Makoto Tokumori delivered a lecture entitled “The Nihon Shoki as a Transfiguring Text – On Cases Up to the Fifteenth Century.”
Professor Makoto began the lecture by showing how the Nihon Shoki has, since its compilation, been the subject of numerous commentaries, and how its interpretation has undergone various transformations depending on the era and the commentators. Prof. Makoto then confirmed that the Nihon Shoki is indeed an annotated text written in literary Sinitic. According to Prof. Makoto, these annotations serve two functions: one is to convey the nuances of the Japanese language, and the other is to show how Japanese expressions were translated into Chinese.
The lecture then explored several key commentaries and the forms they took, including book-lectures from the Heian period (ninth to tenth centuries), Urabe no Kanekata’s Shaku nihongi from the late twelfth century, Ichijō Kaneyoshi’s Nihon shoki sanso from the mid-fifteenth century, as well as commentaries by Yoshida Kanetomo and Kiyohara no Nobukata from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries.
Specifically, each set of commentaries was discussed in terms of its approach. First, in the Heian period book-lectures, the entire Nihon shoki text was first translated through kundoku, with efforts made to reconstruct native Japanese expressions that may have existed prior to the literary Sinitic text and to determine appropriate wakun. Then, in Shaku nihongi, discussions centered on the evaluation of Japanese and Sinitic linguistic elements. Later, in Nihon shoki sanso, the Nihon shoki was interpreted strictly as a literary Sinitic text, while the interpretations by Kanetomo and Nobukata saw a reintroduction of wakun, treating Japanese readings as being of equal value to the words of Sinitic texts.
This seminar continued and deepened the discussion from the previous session on the relationship between the Nihon shoki and the Japanese language, allowing participants to further explore the interplay between literary Sinitic and Japanese writing in Japan from ancient through medieval times.
(Tobita Hidenobu, Doctoral Student, University of Tokyo)
