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Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to compare the attitudes towards ritsuryô ideals displayed in two poetry collections, the Man’yōshū and the Kaifūsō, that echo the vision of power and learning promoted by the Codes, notably by the Shiki'inryō and the Gakuryō, while maintaining a critical distance.

Paper long abstract:

The epochal synthesis by Takikawa Masajirō (1970s) has demonstrated how the knowledge of ritsuryō could help researchers interpret the Man’yōshū, to the lives and duties of civil servants. This has opened up new avenues for research within a field that had previously shown very little interest in legal concerns, deemed extraneous to literature. It is now widely accepted that knowledge of ritsuryō is an indispensable tool of Man’yōshū scholarship and, to a lesser extent, of Kaifūsō (Collection of Fond Remembrance of the Past) scholarship.

The ritsuryō seems in some cases to have been more than a reference: as Kuranaka Shinobu has pointed out for officials’ biographies and poems by Yamanoue no Okura, the ritsuryō ideals had sometimes a foundational function for the identities of authors and could act as the driving force propelling their literary creations. The maximal degree of overlap between scholars, civil servants, and poets was in this sense attained later, in the court of Saga (809–823).

On the whole, however, neither the Man’yōshū nor the Kaifūsō can be said to represent a posture of complete identification with the ritsuryō. The latter one, whose preface otherwise celebrates the promulgation of a code of law by Prince Shōtoku, contains a very limited number of allusions to ritsuryō specialists (such as Yamato no Nagaoka, the addressee of a letter by Umakai) and the references to codes are shockingly lacking in passages emphasizing the political achievements of Monmu and Fujiwara no Fuhito. Regarding the Man’yōshū, it seems that the attitude of close adherence to ritsuryō ideals represents only a single streak within the wider context of an anthology that displays a vision of power that revolves around clans and pre-ritsuryō conceptions of rulership. In my paper, I shall explore the negotiations with the ideals of the ritsuryō system at play in both anthologies, more specifically with those expressed in the Shiki’inryō (for the Man’yōshū) and the Gakuryō (for the Kaifūsō) and seek to determine from what point of view the various stances are formulated.