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Jimmu
Emperor of Japan
Reign	February 18, 660 BC – 9 April 585 BC (mythic)
Successor	Suizei
Born	February 13, 711 BC (mythic)
Died	April 9, 585 BC (aged 126) (mythic) Japan
Burial	Unebi-yama no ushitora no sumi no misasagi (畝傍山東北陵) (Kashihara, Nara)(mythic)
Spouse	Ahiratsu-hime Himetataraisuzu-hime
Issue	Tagishimimi-no-mikoto Hikoyai-no-mikoto Kamuyaimimi-no-mikoto Emperor Suizei
Father	Ugayafukiaezu
Mother	Tamayori-bime

Emperor Jimmu (神武天皇, Jinmu-tennō) is the canonical Sino-Japanese name for the legendary first Emperor of Japan in the traditional order of imperial succession. Both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki give his native Japanese name as Kamu-Yamatö-ipare-biko (神倭伊波礼) Ipare (modern Japanese iware) indicates a toponym whose precise purport is unclear. The Imperial house of Japan traditionally based its claim to the throne on its putative descent from the sun-goddess Ama-terasu-opo-mi-kamï via Jimmu's great grandfather Ninigi. While his accession is traditionally dated to February 11, 660 BC, modern historians regard the entire chronicles regarding the earliest Emperors as late fabrications woven from legendary materials, and treat the traditions regarding Jimmu as mythical.

Name and title

The conventionally accepted names and dates of the early emperors were not to be confirmed as "traditional" until the reign of Emperor Kanmu (737–806), when Oumi no Mifune conferred on all putative 'Emperors' before Ōjin, known until then as sumera no mikoto/ōkimi, the title of tennō or 'Heavenly Ruler', a Japanese pendant to the Chinese imperial title Tiān-dì (天帝). This practice had began under Empress Suiko, and took root after the Taika Reforms with the ascendancy of the Nakatomi. Jimmu's name, like those of several other legendary emperors, was already attested among the ruler names of the Korean kingdom of Silla. According to the legendary account in the Kojiki, Emperor Jimmu would have been born on February 13, 711 BC (the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar), and died, again according to legend, on March 11, 585 BC (both dates according to the lunisolar traditional Japanese calendar).

Legendary narrative

In Japanese mythology, the Age of the Gods is the period before Jimmu's accession.

The story of Jimmu seems to rework legends associated with the Ōtomo clan, and its function was to establish that clan's links to the ruling family, just as those of Suijin arguably reflect Mononobe tales and the legends in Ōjin's chronicles seem to derive from Soga clan traditions. Jimmu figures as a direct descendant of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Amaterasu had a son called Ame no Oshihomimi no Mikoto and through him a grandson named Ninigi-no-Mikoto. She sent her grandson to the Japanese islands where he eventually married Konohana-Sakuya-hime. Among their three sons was Hikohohodemi no Mikoto, also called Yamasachi-hiko, who married Toyotama-hime. She was the daughter of Ryūjin, the Japanese sea god. They had a single son called Hikonagisa Takeugaya Fukiaezu no Mikoto. The boy was abandoned by his parents at birth and consequently raised by Tamayori-hime, his mother's younger sister. They eventually married and had a total of four sons. The last of these sons, Kan'yamato Iwarebiko, became Emperor Jimmu.

Jimmu's migration

Mythic records in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki describe, with distinct versions that often disagree on details, how Jimmu's brothers were born in Takachiho, the southern part of Kyūshū (in modern day Miyazaki prefecture), and decided to move eastward, as they found the location inappropriate for reigning over the entire country. Jimmu's older brother, Itsuse no Mikoto, originally led the migration, and led the clan eastward through the Seto Inland Sea with the assistance of local chieftain Sao Netsuhiko. As they reached Naniwa (modern day Ōsaka), they encountered another local chieftain, Nagasunehiko (lit. "the long-legged man"), and Itsuse was killed in the ensuing battle. Jimmu realized that they had been defeated because they battled eastward against the sun, so he decided to land on the east side of Kii Peninsula and to battle westward. They reached Kumano, and, with the guidance of a three-legged crow, Yatagarasu (lit. "eight-span crow"), they moved to Yamato. There, they once again battled Nagasunehiko and were victorious.

In Yamato, Nigihayahi no Mikoto, who also claim descent from the Takamagahara gods, was protected by Nagasunehiko. However, when Nigihayahi met Jimmu, he accepted Jimmu's legitimacy. At this point, Jimmu is said to have ascended to the throne of Japan.

According to the Kojiki, Jimmu died when he was 126 years old. This emperor's posthumous name literally means "divine might" or "god-warrior". It is undisputed that this identification is Chinese in form and Buddhist in implication, which suggests that the name must have been regularized centuries after the lifetime ascribed to Jimmu. It is generally thought that Jimmu's name and character evolved into their present shape just before the time in which legends about the origins of the Yamato dynasty were chronicled in the Kojiki.

The fluidity of Jimmu before the compilation of the Kojiki and of the Nihon Shoki is demonstrated by somewhat earlier texts that place three dynasties as successors to the mythological Yamato state. According to these texts, Jimmu's dynasty was supplanted by that of Emperor Ōjin, whose dynasty was supplanted by that of Emperor Keitai. The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki then combined these three mythical dynasties into one long and continuous genealogy.

No site for Jimmu's grave is clearly identified by tradition or mythology.

Commemorating Jimmu's reign

Veneration of Emperor Jimmu, who was said to be the divine founder of Japan's unbroken imperial line, was a central component of the imperial cult that formed following the Meiji restoration. In 1872 the Meiji government announced a new holiday called Kigensetsu ("Era Day") commemorating the anniversary of Jimmu's mythical ascension to the throne 2,532 years earlier. Between 1873 and 1945 an imperial envoy sent offerings every year to Mount Unebi, which was claimed to be Jimmu's tomb, and in 1890 Kashihara Shrine was established nearby on the spot where Jimmu was said to have become Japan's first emperor.

A grandiose Kigensetsu celebration was put on in the year 1940, reputed to be the 2,600th anniversary of Emperor Jimmu's enthronement, during which the government constructed the Hakkō Tower on the legendary site of Emperor Jimmu's palace near Miyazaki. The tower was named after a nationalistic slogan, Hakkō ichiu (literally "eight cords, one roof") coined by Tanaka Chigaku in 1903 on the basis of phrasing found in the Nihon Shoki account of Jimmu's reign. It was subsequently espoused by the Imperial government as an expression of Japanese expansionism from 1928 onwards. The Japan Times in 1940 asserted that Emperor Jimmu, finding five races in Japan, had made them all as "brothers of one family."Hakkō ichiu was thus employed in a way that envisioned the unification of the world (the "eight corners of the world") under the Japanese Emperor's "sacred rule". The same year the Japanese government erected numerous stone monuments relating to key events ascribed to Jimmu in his legendary life, at "Emperor Jimmu Sacred Historical Sites", which still exist today.

Kigensetsu was suspended in 1948 during the occupation of Japan, but was reinstated in 1966 as Kenkoku Kinen no hi ("National Foundation Day"), a patriotic holiday still celebrated in Japan today. Although the propaganda narrative surrounding Jimmu's life was officially abandoned at the end of World War II, many Japanese history textbooks continued well into the 1970s to promote the story of Japan's divine origins and Jimmu's founding of an unbroken imperial line.

See also

• Imperial cult
• Xu Fu
• Modern system of ranked Shinto Shrines
• The Age of the Gods
• Emishi people
• Jomon period

Notes

1. 神倭伊波礼琵古命:Kamu-Yamatö-ipare-biko (nö-mikötö) Donald Philippi, tr.Kojiki, University of Tokyo Press, 1969 p.488
2. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, University of Hawai'i Press, 1995 pp.106-7.
3. Kelly, Charles F. "Kofun Culture," Japanese Archaeology. April 27, 2009.
4. Kitagawa, Joseph. (1987). On Understanding Japanese Religion, p. 145, p. 145, at Google Books; excerpt, "... emphasis on the undisrupted chronological continuity from myths to legends and from legends to history, it is difficult to determine where one ends and the next begins. At any rate, the first ten legendary emperors are clearly not reliable historical records."
5. Boleslaw Szczesniak,'The Sumu-Sanu Myth. Notes and Remarks on the Jimmu Tenno Myth,' in Monumenta Nipponica,Vol. 10, No. 1/2 (1954), pp. 107-126.
6. ^ Aston, William. (1896). Nihongi, pp. 109–137.
7. Jacques H. Kamstra Encounter Or Syncretism: The Initial Growth of Japanese Buddhism, Brill 1967 pp.65-67.
8. Jacques H. Kamstra Encounter Or Syncretism: The Initial Growth of Japanese Buddhism, Brill 1967 p.67.
9. Nussbaum, "Jindai" at p. 421, p. 421, at Google Books.
10. Jacques H. Kamstra, Encounter Or Syncretism: The Initial Growth of Japanese Buddhism, Brill 1967 pp.69-70.
11. Nussbaum, "Chijin-godai" at p. 111, p. 111, at Google Books.
12. Kennedy, Malcolm D. A History of Japan. London. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963.
13. Ooms, Herman. Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: the Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009
14. Imperial Household Agency (Kunaichō): 神武天皇 (1); retrieved August 22, 2013.
15. ^ Martin, Peter. (1997). The Chrysanthemum Throne: A History of the Emperors of Japan, p. 18-20.
16. ^ Ruoff, Kenneth. (2001). The People's Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, p. 21-23.
17. Ponsonby-Fane, p. 419.
18. Walter Edwards, "Forging Tradition for a Holy War: The 'Hakkō Ichiu' Tower in Miyazaki and Japanese Wartime Ideology," Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 2003, 289-324.
19. Tanaka coined the phrase in a four-hour lecture given in November 1903, Kōso no Kenkoku to Honge no Taikyō.(皇宗の建国と本化の大教) The lecture was published in April 1904 as Sekai Tōitsu no Tengyō (世界統一の天業). In the written version (1903) he used 天地一宇. In his 1912-1913 lectures he reverts to 八紘一宇, ‘his succinct version of the Nihongi wording (whose Chinese text gave him trouble in interpreting). ‘This is the origin, it seems, of the slogan adopted by the ultra-nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s'. Edwin B. Lee, ‘Nichiren and Nationalism: The Religious Patriotism of Tanaka Chigaku,’. in Monumenta Nipponica 1975, 30:1 (1975).pp.19-35 pp.28-29.
20. 然後、兼六合以開都、掩八紘而為宇、不亦可乎 in Sakamoto Tarō, Ienaga Saburō, Inoue Mitsusada, Ōno Susumu (eds.) Nihon Shoki Iwanami Koten Bungaku Taikei 67, 1967 p.213
21. Bix, Herbert. (2001). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, p. 200-201.
22. Dower, John W., War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, faber and faber, 1993 p.223.
23. Earhart, David C. (2007). Certain Victory, p. 63.
24. Ruoff, Kenneth. (2010). Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire's 2,600th Anniversary, p. 186.
25. Brownlee, John S. Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods, p. 180–185.
26. "Founding Day rekindles annual debate". The Japan Times. February 11, 1998. Retrieved May 24, 2014. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
27. Tokutake, Toshio. (1995). 教科書の戦後史, p. 172-178.

References

• Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, Volume 1. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. OCLC 448337491
• Bix, Herbert P. (2001). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins. 10-ISBN 0-06-093130-2; 13-ISBN 978-0-06-093130-8
• Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. 10-ISBN 0-520-03460-0; 13-ISBN 978-0-520-03460-0; OCLC 251325323
• Brownlee, John S. (1997). Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 0-7748-0645-1
• Chamberlain, Basil Hall. (1920). The Kojiki. Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on April 12 10 May, and June 21, 1882; reprinted, May 1919. OCLC 1882339
• Earhart, David C. (2007). Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. 10-ISBN 0-7656-1776-5; 13-ISBN 978-0-7656-1776-7
• Kitagawa, Joseph Mitsuo. (1987). On Understanding Japanese Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 10-ISBN 0691073139/13-ISBN 9780691073132; 10-ISBN 0691102295/13-ISBN 9780691102290; OCLC 15630317
• Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005). Japan encyclopedia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 10-ISBN 0-674-01753-6; 13-ISBN 978-0-674-01753-5; OCLC 58053128
• Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society. OCLC 194887
• Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Odai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland. OCLC 5850691
• Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. 10-ISBN 0-231-04940-4; 13-ISBN 978-0-231-04940-5; OCLC 59145842

External links

• A more detailed profile of Jimmu
• A detailed summary of Jimmu's descent legend

v t e Emperors of Japan (list)
Legendary	Jōmon 660 BC–291 BC Jimmu Suizei Annei Itoku Kōshō Kōan Yayoi 290 BC–269 AD Kōrei Kōgen Kaika Sujin Suinin Keikō Seimu Chūai Jingū
Yamato	Kofun 269–539 Ōjin Nintoku Richū Hanzei Ingyō Ankō Yūryaku Seinei Kenzō Ninken Buretsu Keitai Ankan Senka Asuka 539–710 Kinmei Bidatsu Yōmei Sushun Suiko Jomei Kōgyoku Kōtoku Saimei Tenji Kōbun Tenmu Jitō Monmu Genmei
Nara	710–794 Genmei Genshō Shōmu Kōken Junnin Shōtoku Kōnin Kanmu
Heian	794–1185 Kanmu Heizei Saga Junna Ninmyō Montoku Seiwa Yōzei Kōkō Uda Daigo Suzaku Murakami Reizei En'yū Kazan Ichijō Sanjō Go-Ichijō Go-Suzaku Go-Reizei Go-Sanjō Shirakawa Horikawa Toba Sutoku Konoe Go-Shirakawa Nijō Rokujō Takakura Antoku Go-Toba
Kamakura	1185–1333 Go-Toba Tsuchimikado Juntoku Chūkyō Go-Horikawa Shijō Go-Saga Go-Fukakusa Kameyama Go-Uda Fushimi Go-Fushimi Go-Nijō Hanazono Go-Daigo
Northern Court	1333–1392 Kōgon Kōmyō Sukō Go-Kōgon Go-En'yū Go-Komatsu
Muromachi	1333–1573 Go-Murakami Chōkei Go-Kameyama Go-Komatsu Shōkō Go-Hanazono Go-Tsuchimikado Go-Kashiwabara Go-Nara Ōgimachi
Azuchi-Momoyama	1573–1603 Ōgimachi Go-Yōzei
Edo	1603–1868 Go-Yōzei Go-Mizunoo Meishō Go-Kōmyō Go-Sai Reigen Higashiyama Nakamikado Sakuramachi Momozono Go-Sakuramachi Go-Momozono Kōkaku Ninkō Kōmei Meiji
Empire of Japan	1868–1947 Meiji Taishō Shōwa
Japan	1947–present Shōwa Akihito Naruhito
Unless otherwise noted (as BC), years are in CE / AD  Imperial Consort and Regent Empress Jingū is not traditionally listed. Imperial family tree Imperial House Order of succession Imperial tombs Category

v t e Japanese mythology
Mythic texts	Kojiki Nihon Shoki Fudoki Kujiki Kogo Shūi Hotsuma Tsutae Nihon Ryōiki Konjaku Monogatarishū Shintōshū Butsuzōzui
Japanese creation myth	Kotoamatsukami (Hitorigami) Ame-no-Minakanushi Kamiyo (Kamiyonanayo) Kuniumi Kamiumi Izanami Izanagi
Takamagahara mythology	Amaterasu Susanoo Tsukuyomi Ame-no-Uzume
Izumo mythology	Yamata no Orochi Hare of Inaba Ōkuninushi Kuni-yuzuri Takeminakata
Hyūga mythology	Tenson kōrin Ninigi Konohanasakuya-hime Toyotama-hime
Human age	Emperor Jimmu Tagishimimi Kesshi Hachidai
Mythological locations	Ashihara no Nakatsukuni Ama-no-Iwato Onogoro Island Ne-no-kuni Ryūgū-jō Sanzu River Takamagahara Tokoyo no kuni Yomi
Mythological weapons	Amenonuhoko Kusanagi no Tsurugi Totsuka-no-Tsurugi Ame-no-ohabari Futsu-no-mitama [ja]
Major Buddhist figures	Amida Nyorai Daruma Five Tathagatas
Seven Lucky Gods	Benzaiten Bishamonten Daikokuten Ebisu Fukurokuju Hotei Jurōjin Kisshōten
Legendary creatures	Dragon Kappa Kitsune Oni Shinshi Tengu Yōkai Yūrei
Other	Shinigami Ryukyuan religion Amamikyu Tenson dynasty Ainu mythology Kamuy Kamuy-huci Hasinaw-uk-kamuy
Shinto deities Japanese deities Sacred objects Japanese religions Glossary of Shinto

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• Legendary Emperors of Japan
• Longevity traditions
• People of Jōmon-period Japan