Paper short abstract:

Taking Japan's "Mirrors" as a collective site in which medieval ideas of morality, historiography, and authority intersect, this paper explores a changing configuration of religious movements, discourses on writing, and political vicissitudes that legitimated particular ways of presenting the past.

Paper long abstract:

Japan's 11th- through mid-14th-centuries saw the rise and fall of the historiographic "Mirror" as a potentially powerful means of talking about the past. The first to appear, "The Great Mirror," touched off a mini-boom in "Mirror" production that yielded six additional "Mirrors". While four overtly engaged with one another and shared a commitment to presenting the past in cosmological terms, the period also produced the seeming outliers "The Mirror of the East" (13th/14th c.) and "Mirror of the Watchman of the Fields" (1295). Although these "Mirrors" have rarely been treated as a set, this paper proposes taking the "Mirrors" as a collective site in which medieval ideas of morality, historiography, and divine as well as worldly authority intersect. So doing reveals the workings of a changing configuration of religious movements, discourses on writing, and political vicissitudes that together legitimated particular ways of relating and understanding Japan's past.

The early "Mirrors" featured circular narratives ordered along multiple genealogical lines and written solely in a local idiom. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, "Mirrors" increasingly incorporated a more straightforward annalistic format, engaging with the language and structure of orthodox historiography. The fact that it is "The Mirror of the East" and not "The Annals of the East" or "A Tale of the East" that recounts the founding of the Kamakura bakufu suggests that the genre and its recent developments were seen as conveying a certain amount of authority. Nevertheless, "Mirrors" failed to be established as the preferred voice of a warrior-led government. This paper argues that we can best make sense of this by examining the flip side of the "Mirrors'" move towards the center: the elision of cosmological rhetoric from the "Mirrors" and its resurfacing in contemporary texts that would collectively resonate with a wider audience: "A Record of the Jōkyū Years," "A Disquisition on Plum and Pine," and most famously, "A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns." In this, we see the workings of a move from the old trappings of orthodoxy—annals, Chinese, etc.—towards a new sense of what constituted authority in late medieval Japan.