Prince Shōtoku

Japanese tradition remembers Prince Shōtoku as the wise regent of the early seventh century who built a centralised state on Chinese models, gave Japan its first written code of conduct for officials and planted Buddhism firmly at the royal court. The real man, a prince of the Yamato royal house usually called Umayado in early sources, certainly existed, but how much of this record is his own work is debated, because almost everything known about him comes from the Nihon Shoki, a court chronicle completed in 720, a century after his death.

According to the chronicles he was born in 574, a son of the future Emperor Yōmei and of Princess Anahobe no Hashihito, Yōmei's half-sister. Both parents were related to the powerful Soga clan, and the prince took part in the defeat of the Soga's great rivals, the Mononobe clan. Legend surrounds his birth: he was said to have been born at a stable door and to have spoken at birth, which is explained as the source of his name Umayado, "stable door". The title Shōtoku, "sage virtue", by which he is known today first appears in a poetry collection compiled in 751.

In 593 his aunt became ruler as Empress Suiko, and according to the Nihon Shoki she made the prince regent, governing alongside the Soga chief Soga no Umako. In 603 the court introduced the system of twelve cap ranks, intended to promote officials by ability rather than birth, and in 604, the chronicle says, the prince issued the Seventeen-Article Constitution, a set of Buddhist and Confucian moral precepts for officials that placed the sovereign at the top of the state. In 607 an embassy led by Ono no Imoko went to the Sui dynasty of China. The Chinese history of the Sui records a letter from the ruler of Wa addressed from "the land of the rising sun" to "the land of the setting sun", one of the earliest such descriptions of Japan; tradition credits it to the prince. The court also sent an army against Silla, in Korea, in 600.

The prince is revered as a founder of Japanese Buddhism. He is credited with building Shitennō-ji in what is now Osaka after the victory over the Mononobe and, with Suiko, Hōryū-ji near his palace at Ikaruga, which temple records date to 607; excavations in 1939 confirmed that his palace stood in the eastern part of the Hōryū-ji complex. He is also traditionally named as the author of commentaries on three Buddhist sutras, which, if genuine, would make him the first known Japanese writer. He died in 622 and was said to have been buried at Shinaga in Kawachi.

Historians have long recognised that later piety embroidered his life. In the twentieth century the historian Tsuda Sōkichi questioned the Seventeen-Article Constitution, and in 1999 Ōyama Seiichi argued that most of the prince's achievements had been invented by the compilers of the Nihon Shoki for political ends; he did not deny that Umayado lived, but held that the saintly Shōtoku was a creation of the court. The theory attracted wide public attention, but according to the scholar Ishii Kōsei, by 2021 it had found little support among specialists. Authorship of the sutra commentaries and other works attributed to him also remains uncertain.

Over the following centuries a devotional cult grew up around the prince as protector of Japan, the imperial house and Buddhism, and later religious leaders such as Saichō and Shinran claimed inspiration from him. In modern times his portrait appeared on several Japanese banknotes.

Our 600 map shows the islands of Japan in his lifetime, across the sea from Sui China and the Korean peninsula.