K.F. Friday
Nihon Montoku tennō jitsuroku (“Veritable Records of Emperor Montoku”), and Nihon sandai jit-
suroku (“Veritable Records of Three Reigns”).^12 The first “privately produced” histories were
literary works cast in imitation of the official chronicles—Eiga monogatari (“Tales of Splendor”),
Ōkagami (“Great Mirror”), Imakagami (“New Mirror”), Mizukagami (“Water Mirror”), Azuma
kagami (“Mirror of the East”), and Masukagami (“Enhanced Mirror”)—and wartales, including
Shōmonki (“Tale of Masakado”), Mutsu waki (“Account of Mutsu”), Ōshū gosannenki (“Chronicle
of the Latter Three Years’ War”), Heike monogatari (“Tale of the Heike”), and Genpei jōsuiki
(“Account of the Rise and Fall of the Minamoto and Taira”).^13 Interpretive histories, written by
individuals, arguably began with Jien’s Gukanshō (“Excerpts by a Foolish Official”), which
appeared in the early thirteenth century, and Kitabatake Chikafusa’s fourteenth- century Jinnō
shōtōki (“Record of the True Lineages of Divinities and Sovereigns”), followed by the work of
Motoori Norinaga and other kokugaku (“national studies”) scholars of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries.^14
But modern research on Japanese history began in the late nineteenth century, pioneered by
Nakada Kaoru, Hara Katsurō, Hoshino Hisashi, Miura Hiroyuki, Kiraizumi Kiyoshi, Kume
Kunitake, Watanabe Yosuke, Ryō Susumu, Nishioka Toranosuke and others. These Meiji—
(1868–1912) and Taishō— (1912–1926) era historians were heavily influenced by the “scientific”
perspective advocated by Leopold von Ranke and the German positivists, and by issues revolving
around Japan’s search for its place in the world, vis- à-vis the rest of Asia and the Western powers.
Much of their work was dominated by comparisons and constructs—such as feudalism—drawn
from European history. From the 1920s, Marxist models became influential, as historians debated
over how to fit Japan’s past into Marx’s framework of Slave, Feudal, and Capitalist stages through
which all developing societies pass.
During the 1930s, historical research in Japan was progressively circumscribed by the govern-
ment’s increasingly strident nationalism. But these shackles came off with the end of the Pacific
War, and historians found themselves newly free to question even the most basic premises of the
received wisdom. Postwar scholarship on premodern Japan has been dominated—and sharply
divided—by two groups: Marxist- Socialist historians led by Ishimoda Shō, Matsumoto
Shinpachirō, and (in more recent decades) Amino Yoshihiko; and a positivist, or empirical, school
led by Satō Shin’ichi, Nagahara Keiji, Kuroda Toshio, and Takeuchi Rizō. Both groups set their
sights on recovering a history centered on the interplay of central with local power, and of the
agency of elites with that of the rank and file.
Western scholarship on premodern Japan has a much shorter history, and until just a few
decades ago suffered from an appreciable gap in methodological sophistication. The earliest work
was Englebert Kaempfer’s Das Heutige Japan, published posthumously (and in English translation)
in 1727, as The History of Japan. Based principally on the author’s first- hand observations and
information otherwise collected during his two- year sojourn in Japan in the 1690s, Kaempfer’s
study, along with French, Dutch, and German versions thereof subsequently produced, remained
Western readers’ sole window into the archipelago for more than two centuries, when it was at
last joined by Walter Dening’s The Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, James Murdoch’s three- volume A
History of Japan, and a handful of other works.^15
Dening’s and Murdoch’s accounts were principally collections and compilations of legends.
The real Anglophone pioneers of historical scholarship on premodern Japan were Asakawa
Kan’ichi and Robert Karl Reischauer in the prewar era; and George Sansom, Delmer Brown,
Minoru Shinoda, and Paul Varley in the 1950s and 1960s. With the exception of Asakawa, who
was in many respects a man ahead of his time, these scholars based their work primarily on chron-
icles and other narrative sources, and on amalgamation of studies published in Japanese. But this
approach changed, and Western scholarship on premodern Japan came of age, in the late 1960s