Kibi no Otodo nittō emaki
(An Illustrated Scroll of Minister Kibi’s Trip to China), a scroll from the
late twelfth or early thirteenth century, in which Chinese officials search
through Minister Kibi’s feces in an ultimately fruitless effort to prove that
Kibi has cheated at Go.
154
By and large, however, the narratives of China from this time con-
stitute a more complicated set. Rather than a single imagined China, there
is a tendency toward a bifurcation. On the one hand, the China suitable
for cultural appropriation was carefully and thoroughly cleansed of any-
thing that tied it to the sociopolitical entity across the sea, as in the case
of the court-oriented
Notable Tales Old and New
and those tales in
Ten
Teachings
that, despite featuring things known to be Chinese, did not
mark them in any way as such. On the other hand, accounts that were
specifically grounded in China hewed to a narrative of decline, as in the
episodes in
Ten Teachings
that were explicitly marked as Chinese and
the overarching narrative of
The China Mirror
. Unpacking the China of
The
China Mirror
and analyzing it via contemporary texts helped clarify the
thematic importance of Chinese history—in particular, its significance
for a warrior audience.
155
154. In a discussion of the somewhat earlier depiction of Minister Kibi in the
Fusō
ryakki
, Kubota Jun opines that “it is true that in the wake of the destruction of the
Tang and the fall of the Song, there was a popular shift in perception [toward] over-
coming an inferiority complex vis-à-vis China. But, if one goes a bit further, were not
such posturing of enhanced national prestige or such consciousness of resistance
warped manifestations of this very sort of inferiority complex?” (
Chūsei bungaku no
jikū
, 176). This interpretation is certainly possible but ultimately difficult to prove.
Nonetheless, Kubota’s observation is useful for noting the fascination this historical
moment held for Japanese. My understanding of the Minister Kibi scroll derives largely
from Komatsu,
Nihon no emaki 3: Kibi no Otodo nittō emaki.
155. Tonomura, “Kamakura bushi to Chūgoku koji,” 110 and 112.
196
Containing China
To reiterate the second major point of this chapter, the selection of
China as subject matter also enabled (or perhaps necessitated) changes
in the treatment of history. In general, history, or at least Chinese his-
tory, was written as something that was completely distinct from the Japa-
nese present. In contrast to
The Water Mirror
, in which the past was
portrayed as having a reach that extended into both the present and future,
in
The China Mirror
the past became a contained object. One corollary
of this containment of the past, in particular when considered together
with the elision of abstract cosmological discourse on the nature of time,
is the solidification of the presentation of the past in
Mirrors
as unidirec-
tional. None of the later
Mirrors
—even the conservative
Clear Mirror
—
inscribes time as anything other than linear.
Perhaps the most significant change wrought by
The China Mirror
,
however, is the departure from a genealogical orientation. The ground-
work for this was arguably laid in
The Water Mirror
, when Tadachika
opted to focus solely on the imperial family: there, genealogy and insti-
tution occupied essentially the same space. Completing this move,
The
China Mirror
chronicles the movement of the mandate of heaven rather
than the generations of any single family. In terms of a constant focus, it
is the history of an institution rather than of its representatives. In sum-
mary, it is a didactic narrative that features the permanence and mobil-
ity of the authority to rule—the mandate—while at the same time illus-
trating the decline of individual imperial (genealogically driven) lines.
Given this, it is tempting to suppose that such an account would have
been of greater appeal to a warrior elite in the east than to readers based
in a court on the wane.
Taken together with the continued use of Chinese-like
kanbun
writ-
ing and the foregrounding of text in
The China Mirror
, these changes
paint a picture in which the subsequent appearance of an “official”
kanbun-
language
Mirror
to recount the founding of the Kamakura
ba-
kufu
makes a great deal of sense. As chapte
r
4 will demonstrate, much as
the early
Mirrors
afforded court writers a way to order the wars and re-
bellions that shook the late twelfth century, their mode of engagement
with the past would again exert an appeal—this time on court and
ba-
kufu
writers alike—in late thirteenth-century efforts to address change
in the wake of the Mongol invasions.
Main texts (in chronological order)
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