Jimmu Tennō

Legendary first Japanese emperor (traditionally r. 660-585 b.c.e.)

• Born: Possibly third century b.c.e. (legendary date 711 b.c.e.)
• Birthplace: Takachiho Palace, Hyūga (now in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan)
• Died: Possibly late third century b.c.e. (legendary date 584 b.c.e.)
• Place of death: Kashihara Palace (now in Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, Japan)

According to Japanese tradition, Jimmu Tennō established the Imperial Japanese line and founded the empire after conquering the Yamato region in central Japan.

Early Life

Legend has it that Kamu Yamato Iware Hiko no Mikoto was born on the Japanese island of Kyūshū in 711 b.c.e. as the son of King Hiko Nagisatake Ugaya Fukiaezu no Mikoto, a great-grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, and Tamayorihime, the daughter of the sea god. Much later, long after his death, he would be given the name of Jimmu Tennō (jeem-mew tehn-noh) or Emperor Jimmu, in the late eighth century c.e., and he has been known by this name in Japan ever since.

Most historians agree that the traditional dates given for Jimmu’s life and reign are much too early, and many events of his life, as traditionally related, are clearly mythical. The reason for this was the desire to cite very ancient divine origins by Japan’s nobility in the seventh and eighth centuries, when the first histories of Japan were actually written. Writing itself was not introduced to Japan from China through Korea until about 404 c.e., almost one thousand years after the presumed death of Jimmu. The first history of Japan was written in 621 c.e., its single copy lost in a fire soon after. The Kojiki (712; English translation, 1882) and Nihon Shoki, or Shogi (720; Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Time to a.d. 697, 1896), are the two oldest sources of Jimmu’s life and reign and begin at the presumed date of the creation of the universe by the deities, continuing into the eighth century.

Until 1945, the official history of the Japanese empire treated these two traditional accounts of Jimmu’s life as real history. Afterward, some scholars came to believe Jimmu to be a purely mythical figure, something like a Japanese King Arthur. By the early twenty-first century, a more balanced historical consensus had been established.

Scholars agree that by the third century b.c.e., in the Yayoi period of Japanese history, there existed a strong kingdom on Japan’s southern island of Kyūshū. Sometime in the third century, people from Kyūshū seem to have conquered the Yamato region in the heart of the central Japanese island of Honshū, encompassing the present cities of Nara, Ōsaka, and Kobe as well as the ancient shrine of Ise, dedicated to Jimmu’s mythical ancestor, the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Thus it is believed to be possible that Jimmu was an actual ruler of the third century, helping to establish a unified empire of Kyūshū and Yamato that gradually grew to hold most of modern Japan. Some scholars see in the traditional account of Jimmu references to the legendary tenth emperor, Sujin, famed for building a strong empire. They believe that Sujin may have been a historical ruler on whom Jimmu was modeled later. Another theory holds that Jimmu is a mythical projection of the genuine twenty-sixth historical emperor Keitai, who also had to fight his way into Yamato before he was enthroned in the sixth century.

Regardless of the ongoing historical debates about the historical qualities of Jimmu, the eighth century accounts of his life still hold sway over much of the Japanese sense of national history. While most stories of Jimmu are open to historical questioning, they are nevertheless seen at least as powerful myths describing the origin of an Imperial line dating back more than a millennium.

According to tradition, Jimmu grew up in his parents’ Takachiho palace. He received the education of an imperial prince, which stressed both knowledge of and proficiency in sacred rituals and martial prowess. He was famous for his great intelligence and powerful will. At the age of fifteen, he was made official heir to the throne. He married a princess from Kyūshū, Ahiratsu Hime. Ahiratsu was only made consort of Jimmu, a rank beneath that of wife, even though together they had two children, Tagishimimi no Mikoto and Kisumimi no Mikoto.

Life’s Work

As the Japanese sources state it, in 667 b.c.e., Jimmu gathered his household in his palace and revealed his plan to conquer the Yamato region, an island away from his native lands. Jimmu justified his planned invasion with his divine mandate that called for him to subjugate the plains of Nara, for it was held as the center of the universe, predestined for his rule. His brothers and sons agreed with this divinely ordained plan and collected a strong naval expeditionary force to accomplish the goal.

As Jimmu’s expedition gathered, the future emperor picked up more followers, who would become the ancestors of Japan’s noble families ruling in the seventh and eighth centuries. This pattern would continue throughout the events of his life and indicates why this traditional story was so popular among Japan’s ruling elite seeking to establish their ancient roots.

In 666, Jimmu landed in the south of Honshū, in the present prefecture of Okayama. For three years, until 663, Jimmu rested in a temporary palace erected there and built up his huge fleet. He then sailed eastward across the Inland Sea and made landfall near today’s city of Ōsaka. With his troops bunched up on a narrow road as they headed inland, Jimmu had to turn back at first and launch his invasion from a different route. Driven by his desire to subjugate and unify what he considered his empire, however, Jimmu soon attacked the local chieftain and powerful adversary Nagasune Hiko, who ruled the fertile Nara plains behind the coastal mountains.

In a first battle, Jimmu’s forces were defeated at Ōsaka, and his brother Itsuse was mortally wounded by an arrow from a lowly enemy foot soldier. Retreating south by sea toward the tip of the Wakayama peninsula, Jimmu lost his remaining two brothers to the ferocious sea. Angry that there should be storms at sea despite the status of their mother as sea goddess, both jumped into the ocean, whereupon one was turned into a god and the other brother reached the eternal land.

Landing in the south, after executing a local chieftain—as he did everywhere he faced opposition—Jimmu tried to lead his army across the mountains against Nara. Suddenly his troops were enshrouded by a poisonous vapor. The mist was lifted by the intervention of the sun goddess Amaterasu. She also sent Jimmu a three-legged sun-crow, Yatagarasu, to lead his army out of the mountainous wilderness nearby the shore and bring it in contact with the enemy.

By force and trickery, Jimmu and his most able officer, Michi no Omi, succeeded in subduing their various enemies. This involved inviting some opponents to a friendship banquet, only to have Jimmu’s troops slaughter the drunken guests. Late in 663, Jimmu met up again with Nagasune Hiko. Their battles were inconclusive until a golden kite descended from heaven and blinded Hiko’s soldiers, who abandoned the battlefield. As Nagasune Hiko asked Jimmu for mercy, he was killed by his own brother-in-law, who then submitted their army to the victorious Jimmu.

In 662, Jimmu cleaned the Nara area of bandits, among them some hideous earth spider people, who were summarily executed. In spring, he decided to found a genuine empire and civilize the land and his people. In 661, Jimmu married Hime Tatatara Isuzu Hime no Mikoto, a beautiful princess with a divine father from the Nara plains. This dynastic marriage to a local princess clearly underlines Jimmu’s claims to both Kyūshū, site of his birth and that of his first consort, and Yamato, the conquered region where his new wife was born.

In 660, in his newly built palace at Kashihara near today’s city of Nara, Jimmu enthroned himself and his wife Tatatara as Japan’s first emperor and empress. At that point the country was considered unified, and the Japanese nation was born, the crowning achievement of Jimmu, according to legend.

Subsequently, Jimmu rewarded his followers, and he had two more children, one of whom would succeed him on the throne. According to tradition, he reigned for seventy-five more years, as the country prospered and grew. The Nihon Shoki states that Jimmu died in 585, at the age of 127 (traditional calculations add a year to a person’s age).

Significance

Most contemporary scholars see in the legendary figure of Jimmu and the often fantastic accounts of his life and deeds a traditional rendition of the genuine, albeit much later, historical process of the beginning of the imperial system in Japan. Whether Jimmu actually existed as a person in history or is a purely legendary construct appears less significant than the agreement that in the third century b.c.e., central authority was established over two connected cultural centers, on Kyūshū and Honshū. This gave rise to the eventual establishment of the Japanese empire. Historically, Jimmu became important as Japanese civilization came into its own, imperial rule solidified, and the young nation sought to establish a worthy native counterpart to the much older Chinese culture.

Thus, the traditional date of Jimmu’s accession as emperor is based on Chinese numerology rather than history. Calculating backward from the eighth century, 660 was considered a grand kanoto tori, a year in which universe-shaping events would take place. Consequently, the foundation of the Japanese nation was put into this special year. By projecting so far back the origin of the empire, ancient historians had to give impossibly long lives to the first fourteen legendary emperors, whose reigns had to cover a huge span of years, testing the limits of human longevity.

Regardless of the rather shaky historical basis for the person of Jimmu, the story of Japan’s first emperor has enjoyed great popularity in Japan for many centuries. Misused by the militarists in World War II, the Jimmu legend was criticized in the postwar period. In its revived and revised form, it serves to remind the Japanese people of the long duration of their culture and preserves a nostalgic notion of an ancient, mythical past.

The First Ten Legendary Emperors of Japan, 660-30 b.c.e.

660-585

• Jimmu

581-549

• Suizei

549-511

• Annei

510-477

• Itoku

475-393

• Kfshf

392-291

• Kfan

290-215

• Kfrei

214-158

• Kfgen

158-98

• Kaika

97-30

• Sujin

Bibliography

Aston, W. G., trans. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan. 1896. Reprint. Rutland, Vt.: C. E. Tuttle, 1972. A translation of the Japanese text originally published in 720 and also called Nihon Shoki (or Shogi) that contains one of the two original accounts of Jimmu’s life and work.

Brown, Delmer M., ed. Ancient Japan. Vol. 1 in The Cambridge History of Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Collection of essays covering the latest scholarship on the actual rise of early Imperial Japan, with an interesting reflection on ancient Japanese historical consciousness and the role played by the legendary first emperor, Jimmu.

Lu, David J. Japan: A Documentary History. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Contains an abridged account of Jimmu’s accession to Japan’s throne and related historical documents of the period.

Philippi, Donald L., trans. Kojiki. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. English translation of the first Japanese account of Jimmu’s life and rise to power, originally published in 712. The reader has to get used to Philippi’s unique style of transcribing ancient Japanese names into Roman letters, which alters the spelling of most.

Reischauer, Robert Karl. Early Japanese History, c. 40 b.c.-a.d. 1167. 1937. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1967. A pre-World War II compilation of Japanese sources telling of mostly legendary events.

Sansom, George B. A History of Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978. Still valuable study of the earliest, legendary period of Japanese history.