Confucian Ritual and Sacred Kingship: Why the Emperors Did not Rule Japan

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured “as if” realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in early Japan, and by contrast in Tang China. I reexamine a number of well-known primary sources of early Japanese history in comparison with parallel Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty. Placing that comparison within the context of new developments in the historiography of China, Korea, and Japan, I argue that Confucianism's comparatively weak ritual positioning in Japan disabled its capacity to legitimate imperial rule there. The early Japanese state thus lacked one of the primary ritual tools employed in other parts of premodern East Asia to legitimate the power of new emperors and kings. I thus unpack one component in a wider process of East Asian cultural reproduction, which in the case of Japan contributed to the emergence of a state ultimately not ruled through imperial institutions or the emperor for most of its premodern history. The bifurcation of ritual and political power in sacred kingship, a seemingly geographically and temporally widespread phenomenon currently studied in various global histories, is explained in this article in terms of complex processes of cultural reproduction and transmission.