ABSTRACT
The birth of Japanese historiography is shrouded in a fog that is difficult to pierce. This chapter argues that historiography in Japan was centered on genealogy and family history. The desire to have one’s genealogy connect to a distant ancestor was an attempt to create a precedent for the authority of the current chieftain, and later families leveraged these distant ancestors, morphing some into deities. The chapter also argues that Tenmu’s edict lamenting the fabrication and manipulation that appeared in some histories in possession of certain families may have also been a lamentation about the lack of unity, cohesion, or organization of these histories. It also argues that much of the evidence needed to trace steps back to the beginnings of historiography in Japan has been erased or obscured by several layers of textual manipulation. There was the penchant the Bureau of History had over time to imitate events from the history of Paekche, and then later that of China.
