Dai Nihon Shi
The Dai Nihon Shi ("Great History of Japan" or "History of Great Japan") is a history of Japan written over a period of nearly 250 years by scholars of the Mitogaku school based in Mito domain. It is characterized chiefly by its organization around a narrative of the Japanese imperial line, in emulation of Chinese dynastic histories.
The Dai Nihon Shi "was not created with any revolutionary intent,"[1] but was coopted or appropriated by revolutionaries in the Bakumatsu period, to support a pro-imperial (anti-Tokugawa) vision of Japanese history. In particular, such movements used the Dai Nihon Shi as the basis of an understanding of Japanese history centered around the emperor as the chief ever-present element, and the samurai as only temporary; this was later used to justify an expansionist, imperial(ist) Japan.
The project was first begun at the orders of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, lord of Mito, in 1657. Zhu Shunsui was among the prominent contributors in the earliest stages.
References
- Schirokauer, et al., A Brief History of Japanese Civilization, Wadsworth Cengage (2013), 146.
- Luke Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, University of Hawaii Press (2012), 167-168.
- ↑ Roberts, 167.
