Twentieth-century Japan was an ideocracy. It was organized around an ideology called State Shintō which asserted, among other things, that the emperor was divine and the Japanese unique. It begat all manner of theories about the Japanese (Nihonjinron): it was claimed that the Japanese race is a unique isolate thanks to living in an island country (shimaguni) with a unique climate (fūdo); that the Japanese heart (Yamatogokoro) is the true heart or “spirit” (magokoro) as opposed to the Chinese heart (karagokoro); that the Japanese language is unique and causes the Japanese to think in particular patterns unparalleled in other human languages; that the Japanese have a special human relationship (ningen kankei) in which the self and the other are fused (jita gōitsu); and that there is no real individual (kojin), only groupism (shūdan-shugi). This kind of thinking was so strong that people were jailed for speaking out against it.
Japanese uniqueness and the divinity of the emperor are undergirded by a pseudo-historical record of the creation of the nation (kuniumi) known as the “kiki myth” which goes something like this: In the beginning there was shapeless matter that began to move, forming the High Plain of Heaven (Takamagahara) and the earth below it. Then came the Seven Divine Generations of gods (Kamiyonanayo) including the siblings Izanagi and Izanami who had intercourse together and thus produced the Japanese archipelago. They then went on to give birth to other gods (kamiumi), particularly the Three Precious Children (sankishi): Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, Tsukuyomi, god of the moon, and Susanoo, god of storms. The first emperor of Japan, Emperor Jimmu (reigned 660–585 bce), was the great-grandson of the god Ningi, the grandson of Amaterasu who was, therefore, the progenitrix of the imperial line—a lineage that remains unbroken to the present day, according to the kiki narrative.
This myth came from two texts: the Kojiki (712), meaning “Record of Ancient Matters”, and the Nihonshoki (720), meaning “Chronicle of Japan”, which detail not only the creation of Japan but hundreds of years of imperial history. These books tell slightly different creation stories which were amalgamated together into one kiki myth in the ninth and tenth centuries when the Nihonshoki was transformed from a narrow dynastic history into a broader origin story for the Japanese court, which required taking the much more detailed account of creation from the Kojiki and combining it with the more detailed imperial chronology of the Nihonshoki. We know that this change in meaning occurred because Emperor Saga (reigned 809-823) inaugurated public readings of the Nihonshoki at court, the records of which we have access to. In later readings, the state-historical canon was expanded to encompass every other historical text, even Chinese ones, further legitimizing the Japanese imperial household.
Interest in the Nihonshoki dwindled in the 11th and 12th centuries but was renewed in the late Heian Period by commentators on poetry anthologies such as the Kokinshū (914). They started to use the pseudo-historical events of the Nihonshoki to explain poems’ etymology or context. This, combined with the influence of Buddhist anecdotal literature that employed vignettes for didactic purposes, resulted in the Nihonshoki becoming a chronicle of discrete episodes divorced from their original narrative context. This, in turn, caused commentaries to increasingly attribute any aetiological explanation to events within the text, even for matters not referred to in it originally.
Then, between the 13th and 15nth centuries, the kiki myth was radically reinterpreted to fit a new worldview: Buddhism, the force of which had been renewed by the arrival of new schools from China in the Kamakura Period. Through exegesis, they synthesized Buddhist cosmology with Japanese mythology in an evolving process which culminated in a comprehensive principle under which the traditions of Japan, China and India could be subsumed. This principle was called honji suijaku which asserted that native gods (kami) were manifestations (suijaku) of the original Buddhist deities (honji). The tradition held that the Japanese gods were not inferior to Buddhist deities but were, in fact, manifestations of the same indivisible whole (gongen). This allowed for a harmonious coexistence of Shintō and Buddhist beliefs by asserting that the native gods were essentially different forms or expressions of the universal Buddhist deities. The two entities should have equal standing: in reality, the original Buddhist deities were considered more important until, in the Kamakura Period, the school of Yoshida Shintō inverted this principle (han honji suijaku) to assert that the Japanese gods were superior. This was first attributed to the 14th century monk Jihen who famously analogized Japan to a seed, China to a branch, and India to a fruit, claiming that Japan was in fact primary amongst the East Asian nations. Of course, there was neither empirical nor any real textual evidence for this. These ideas were brought to fruition by Yoshida Kanetomo and Yoshida Shintō.
Between the 17th and 18th centuries, Song Neo-Confucianism arrived in Japan, beginning what intellectual historians call the Confucian Phase of Japanese history and ending the Buddhist Phase. There were two ways that these Neo-Confucian scholars interpreted the Nihonshoki. One involved the application of Chinese historical accounts that stressed the applicability of Song Confucian principles to Japan. Because the Japanese age of the gods did not correspond with Chinese history, this meant it was read as allegory. The other methodology was to blur the distinctions between humans and gods and to read the chronicles detailing the kiki myth as literal truth while imposing Song Confucian ideas like principle (ri) or matter (ki) upon it. In either case, the Nihonshoki was reinterpreted in line with the new intellectual climate to make it consistent with Confucian metaphysics and cosmology.
Matthieu Felt tracks this process in his book to show that the kiki myth doesn’t exist outside of history and is instead a product of history, the meaning of which changes as the times change and new political circumstances dictate renewed readings of traditional history. It was formed as the creation stories of the Nihonshoki and the Kojiki were synthesized together and grew to subsume all other historical records. When Buddhism started to dominate Japanese intellectual, cultural and political life, Japanese myths were adapted to take on Buddhist elements and the doctrine of honji suijaku emerged. Then, when Confucianism took hold instead, the myths again adapted to it, as they did once more when a new empirical methodology (kōshōgaku) took hold of Japanese philology. Felt’s argument is that the Japanese myths are alive and continually adapting to the context in which they live, and he narrates these changes in meaning over time.
He stops his story short of the twentieth century, but we can see how the transformation of the kiki myth continued under State Shintō. The British historian EH Carr made a famous remark about what we now call cherry-picking: he said that, “by and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.” I’m reminded of this quote when I look at how the kiki myth has changed over time to suit the political needs of interpreters. When it comes to (mostly) benign intellectual currents like Buddhist metaphysics or Confucian cosmology, the adaptation of the myth might seem almost scientific: philologists are simply coming to understand the wider context of the myth and are correcting it, you might say, to fit what they now know to be true. The problem comes down to the fact that what looks true for someone might not look as true for someone else. In the case of State Shintō, there aren’t many around now who’ll see much truth in it, but at the time it was convenient and had enough adherents. The process that Felt describes is not exclusive to circumstances in which we’ve realized flaws in our myths; it is also a method of historical negationism in which any ideology can obtain empirical grounding. That makes it quite insidious.