From Myth to History to Sacred History: “Scientific” History in the Service of the Imperial Nation

The introduction of Rankean “scientific” history in the 1880s led its early students to question the historicity of the imperial foundation myths, upon which the Japanese Imperial Constitution was based. These state-sanctioned historians were chastised and their positions at Tokyo Imperial University were threatened for challenging the state doctrine. Until 1945, subsequent “scientific” researches in a similar vein were quashed by the government. Conventional narrative holds that the state-employed “academic” historians thereafter took two tracks. They either relegated themselves to compiling primary sources and thereby building the foundations for later “scientific” research, or abandoned “scientific” history in support of emperor-centered history based on the imperial myths (kôkoku shikan). From the perspective of the self-proclaimed postwar “scientific” historians, this “unscientific” emperor-centered history had led the Japanese nation into the war. In analyzing their predecessors, their postwar positions preclude them from exploring in detail the possibility that prewar historians attempted to support the imperial state “scientifically.” 

Yet, the doyen of prewar Japanese History, Kuroita Katsumi (1874-1946), did just that. Kuroita was mesmerized by the Mediterranean ruins during his travels in 1908-1910, and especially intrigued by the story of Troy.  He saw its discovery as the triumph of “science” to confirm the historicity of “myths.”  In his understanding, most of the academic community saw the Homerian poems as myths, until the excavation of Troy “cast a gleam of hope” to their historicity. Kuroita vowed to introduce similar excavation efforts in Japan, to discourage facile dismissal of the imperial myths. Kuroita’s decade-long endeavor culminated in the establishment of his Ancient Culture Research Institute (Nihon Kobunka Kenkyûjo, 1934), whose first project located the “mythical” city of Fujiwara. His involvement in similar governmental projects confirmed other historic sites, some of which were then officially designated as “sacred sites.”