Paper short abstract:

I discuss the relationship of narratives with historical experience by examination of expressions for the past in court historiography and diaries. These texts give evidence of a new historical awareness I approach by investigating temporal aspects in regard to genre, social background, and purpose.

Paper long abstract:

The advent of historical tale literature during the 11th century marks an important development in Japanese historiography. Following up on the earlier abandoned official court chronicles, emerging private histories give evidence of a new historical awareness. While the Eiga monogatari took up the temporal frame and structure of the last unfinished Shin kokushi, the Ōkagami rewrote the same past into a new literary setting that would become the model for succeeding historiography in Japanese. It is this kind of historical experience I discuss in my paper by looking at temporal expressions. The main focus is on perceptions of the past concerning quantitative and qualitative aspects in court historiography and political diaries. Attention is given in particular also to recent theoretical approaches to history in Japan and the possibility to apply them to premodern sources.

Parallel to both mentioned and already well studied sources, courtly diaries and chronicles in literary Chinese offer further valuable insights. They demonstrate the continuing historical awareness of the court elite in its reliance on the past as a model for decision making and ritual decorum. One can hardly overestimate the importance of historical precedents in the political discourse. Courtiers frequently referred to historical examples for justifying their positions and their conduct at an overall highly agonal court. History was thus perceived in these sources mostly in pragmatic terms. Yet how past conceptions differed and functioned is not clear. Compared to the historical tale literature, these texts access the past from a different perspective according to their genre, social background, and purpose. They have hitherto received less attention than more elaborate literary writings for assessing historical experience, which is not surprising, given their largely repetitive style and bureaucratic content. An in-depth analysis of chronographic elements from a synchronic perspective will reveal how the court nobility's conceptions of time differ.

I will limit my paper to an examination of a selection of different textual evidence from late 11th and early 12th century source material. On the basis of my results, I hope to shed some light on the connections between verbal expressions and their social and political conditions.