The Twelve Cap Ranks, the Seventeen-Article Constitution, the embassies to Sui China: Prince Shōtoku, familiar from every Japanese textbook, is said to have been born at Tachibana-dera in Asuka. We follow his life as the Nihon Shoki tells it, and look at how the name "Shōtoku Taishi" came about.
Almost every achievement of Prince Shōtoku comes with the name of Soga no Umako beside it. What if the man really running the country was Umako, and the image of the prince was built from Umako's deeds? We introduce the evidence for this theory and the arguments against it.
Empress Jitō's poem about Mount Kagu begins "Spring has passed, and summer seems to have come." It is loved as a poem about early-summer scenery, but there is also a reading that sees the empress's own ambition in it.
Nukata no Ōkimi had a daughter with Prince Ōama and is thought to have later gone over to Emperor Tenchi. In the poems the two exchanged at Gamōno, did her lingering feelings for Ōama show through? Here is the theory that reads them that way.
In 679 Emperor Tenmu made six princes swear at Yoshino never to fight one another. It is well known that the oath was not kept. But follow each of them in turn and you find that the story does not end with killing alone.
Enter the mountains at the far end of Asuka, cross a single ridge, and you are in Yoshino. Prince Ōama crossed this road as if fleeing pursuers. Empress Jitō travelled the same road back and forth more than thirty times during her reign.
The man given command of the army in the Jinshin War was a 19-year-old eldest son. Because of his mother's low standing, he was considered far from the throne. Yet the way his death was treated was too grand for a mere prince.
As the empress who completed the ritsuryō state (a state governed by law codes), she is usually spoken of in the same breath as her husband, Emperor Tenmu. But she was also Emperor Tenchi's daughter. This column considers whether the sense of carrying on her father's legacy may have been the stronger one.