The early evolution of historical consciousness

Abstract

Japan's earliest extant historical accounts were not written until the first decades of the eighth century A.D. , but people living on the Japanese islands were surely conscious, long before that, of change in the world around them, especially of the regular rising and setting of the sun and of the inevitable approach of death in the lives of plants, animals, and human beings. Archaeological investigations suggest that even before the introduction of wet-rice agriculture around 200 b.c. , hunters and nut gatherers were making a wide range of adjustments to cold and hot seasons of the year, as well as to light and dark segments of the day. Then with the emergence of agricultural life in the later Yayoi period, the realization that rice grows only in one part of the year certainly deepened their awareness of the seasonal cycle, as we know from the early appearance of festivals held at the start and end of the growing season. But by the following Burial Mound period, roughly from A.D. 250 to 600, leaders of emerging states seem gradually to have become preoccupied with a fundamentally different kind of temporal progression: the replacement of one hereditary ruler by the next. They were henceforth concerned not only with the cyclical activity of natural phenomona but also with a succession of reigns moving in a linear fashion from distant points in the past to an indeterminate future. Tracing the pre-800 stages in the rise of this new type of historical consciousness is complicated by a paucity of Japanese chronicles and documents written during that early period, but we now have enough historical, archaeological, and ethnological evidence to be quite certain that the three characteristics of historical expression found in early accounts of Japan's past, and discussed in this chapter, were grounded in beliefs of “prehistorical” times.