The Legend of the Kojiki’s Creation

At a Glance

Central figures: Emperor Tenmu, who ordered the compilation; Hieda no Are, the court official charged with memorizing Japan’s oral traditions; Empress Genmei, who revived the project after Tenmu’s death; and Ō no Yasumaro, the scribe who transcribed it all into written form.
Setting: The Yamato court of early 8th-century Japan, during a period of political consolidation and efforts to secure the imperial lineage’s claim to divine descent.
The turn: Emperor Tenmu dies before the work is finished, leaving Hieda no Are’s memorized accounts unwritten - until Empress Genmei appoints Ō no Yasumaro to complete what Tenmu began.
The outcome: In 712 CE, Yasumaro finishes transcribing the three volumes of the Kojiki, Japan’s oldest surviving chronicle, preserving the creation myths, genealogies of the kami, and the lineage of the imperial family in permanent written form.
The legacy: The Kojiki became the foundational text of Shinto belief and the primary record of Japan’s divine origins, tracing imperial authority directly to Amaterasu; the complementary Nihon Shoki followed eight years later in 720 CE.

Before Japan had a written history, it had Hieda no Are. The Yamato court held a vast inheritance of stories - creation myths, records of the kami, genealogies stretching back to the gods themselves - and all of it lived in living memory, passed mouth to ear across generations. Memory is faithful until it isn’t. The stories shift. Details fall away. A court that rested its claim to rule on divine descent needed something more permanent than the minds of its storytellers.

Emperor Tenmu understood this. He had come to the throne through war, consolidating power across the islands, and he knew that political authority and sacred legitimacy were not separate matters. The question was how to bind them together in a form that could not be misremembered.

Emperor Tenmu’s Command

Tenmu reigned from 672 to 686 CE, a period of significant restructuring for the Yamato court. He gathered around him officials who could serve as living archives, and from among them he selected Hieda no Are - a court attendant believed to possess an extraordinary memory, capable of fixing vast quantities of spoken material without loss or distortion.

What Tenmu asked of Hieda no Are was not simply to remember stories for entertainment. It was to hold the whole body of Japan’s foundational myths and imperial genealogies intact, ready to be transcribed. The kami stories. The account of Izanagi and Izanami stirring the primordial ocean and drawing up the islands. The birth of Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susa-no-o. The descent of Ninigi-no-Mikoto to the earthly realm, and the line of emperors flowing from that descent down to the present court. All of it was to live in Hieda no Are until it could be properly written.

Then Tenmu died. The project remained unfinished, the accounts preserved in one person’s memory but committed to nothing permanent.

Empress Genmei and Ō no Yasumaro

Tenmu’s death could have ended the work. It did not. Empress Genmei, who came to the throne in 707 CE, recognized what remained incomplete and what was at stake in leaving it that way. Japan’s spiritual and political claims rested on these stories. Without a written record, they remained vulnerable - to the death of the one who held them, to the slow pressure that oral transmission places on any fixed account.

Genmei appointed Ō no Yasumaro, a court scribe of considerable standing, to do what Tenmu had not lived to see done. Yasumaro’s task was to sit with Hieda no Are and take down everything - not simply to transcribe, but to organize, to render coherent in writing material that had been shaped for recitation rather than reading.

The work began and, in 712 CE, it was complete. Yasumaro submitted the finished text to the empress with a preface explaining how it had been assembled: from Hieda no Are’s spoken accounts, from older written materials that had survived, from the care taken to preserve the actual words of the original traditions even where they resisted the written Chinese that the court used for formal documents.

The Three Volumes

The Kojiki - the Record of Ancient Matters - is divided into three volumes, each moving the narrative from the cosmic toward the historical.

The Kamitsumaki, the Upper Volume, opens at the beginning: the separation of heaven and earth, the first kami coming into being, and then Izanagi and Izanami descending to give form to the islands of Japan. It recounts their union, the birth of the land, the terrible accident by which Izanami dies giving birth to the fire god, and Izanagi’s descent into the underworld to find her. From this first grief comes the origin of death and purification. From Izanagi washing himself clean after his return come Amaterasu, kami of the sun, Tsukuyomi of the moon, and Susa-no-o of the sea and storm.

The Nakatsumaki, the Middle Volume, descends to earth. Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto down to rule the islands. From Ninigi’s line comes Emperor Jimmu, the legendary first emperor of Japan, whose reign the text presents as the origin point of continuous imperial rule. This is the section where myth becomes genealogy - where the distance between gods and rulers collapses into a family tree.

The Shimotsumaki, the Lower Volume, moves further into the historical record, tracing the lineage of emperors down to Empress Suiko, who reigned from 593 to 628 CE. The mythological and the historical are not separated here. They run together, the divine ancestry of the court woven into the account of its actual succession, so that to read the history is always to be reminded of where the line began.

What Yasumaro Preserved

Yasumaro’s contribution was not passive. He shaped what he received. The Kojiki is written partly in Chinese characters used for their sounds rather than their meanings - a method developed to capture the Japanese language, with its own grammar and cadence, in a script that had no native form for it. This was not a small problem to solve.

He also made choices about framing. The myths in the Upper Volume are not presented as stories among other stories. They are presented as the actual origin of things - of the land, of the kami, of the order by which the world is structured. The imperial family does not simply claim descent from the gods. The text demonstrates that descent, step by step, from the primordial separation of heaven and earth to the named emperors of recorded history.

Yasumaro’s preface acknowledges the difficulty: some accounts differed, some names had variant forms, some material was hard to render in writing without distorting it. He made decisions, noted discrepancies where he could, and produced something coherent from what must have been a complicated body of received tradition.

The Nihon Shoki and What Followed

Eight years after the Kojiki, in 720 CE, the court completed the Nihon Shoki - the Chronicles of Japan. Where the Kojiki had been written primarily for the Yamato court itself, recording Japan’s traditions in Japan’s own linguistic register, the Nihon Shoki took a different approach: a more formal Chinese style, a more detailed chronology, a presentation designed to communicate Japan’s history to a broader audience that included continental scholars and diplomats.

The two texts are complementary. The Nihon Shoki often covers the same ground as the Kojiki, but with variant versions noted and a more systematic historical frame. Neither replaces the other. Read together, they show the same foundational stories held in two different kinds of attention.

The Kojiki remained what it had been made to be: a record of origins, in the language of origins, set down so that what had been held in one person’s memory would not be lost when that person was gone.