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The pattern of auspicious omens reported to the court and recorded in Shoku Nihongi during the reign of the last Nara empress, Koken/Shotoku Tenno, offers essential insights into the royal political theology of the time. Royal edicts and memorials to the throne discussing portentous animals, cloud formations, and spontaneous inscriptions on unusual surfaces constituted a dialog between court and literati revealing a coherent interpretation of how the cosmos responded to the actions and situation of ruler and subjects. The omens were a component of a developing structure of yin-yang (onmyo) thought, although the evidence of the chronicle is that Onmyodo itself as a formal system had not yet crystallized. Most notable is that the omens were unfailingly good omens, upholding the sovereign in an age beset by succession disputes, conspiracies, and outright rebellion, and provided the occasions for creating auspicious era names.keywords: omens-shozui-weft texts-Onmyodo-nengo-Koken/Shotoku Tenno-edicts-senmyo-Shoku Nihongi(ProQuest: Foreign text omitted.)The calendar of eighth-century Japan is dotted with unusual era names (neng? ...) inspired by turtle omens: Reiki ... (715-717; "numinous tortoise"); Jinki ... (724-729; "divine tortoise"); and H?ki ... (770- 781; "jeweled tortoise"). Even the neng? of the great cultural era Tenpy? ... (729-749; "heavenly peace") was occasioned by the apparition of a large white tortoise with seven Chinese characters (...) proclaiming peace in the realm inscribed on its carapace. These neng? are uniquely Japanese and dif- fer from the Chinese-era names of the time. The Japanese-era names all resulted from portentous events in the history of the Nara period, and the periods des- ignated-ranging from a few months to twenty years-form a counterpoint to the longer-range Chinese calendars such as the Dayan ... calendar, adopted gradually during the reign of the last empress.The reign of the last empress, K?ken/Sh?toku Tenn? ... (r. 749-770),1 is unusual in many respects. In her reign the neng? adopted were four character combinations-Tenpy? Sh?h? ..., or Jingo Keiun .... The use of four characters for era names, probably inspired by those during the reign of Wu Zetian ... (690-705; Rothschild 2006, 134) is unique in Japanese history. K?ken/Sh?toku was the last in a series of six female Tenn? over a period of almost two hundred years, the first being Suiko Tenn? ... (r. 592-628). Not until a thousand years later were women again seated on the Chrysanthemum Throne, and then only twice and in extremely differ- ent circumstances. K?ken/Sh?toku, unlike all but one of the previous female Tenn?, had never been married to an emperor or crown prince, and she her- self never married. She was the first woman to be formally designated Crown Prince (K?taishi ...) and the only woman to take Buddhist orders while an empress regnant. In the Shoku Nihongi, over half of the sixty-two Old Japanese senmy? ... are ascribed to her.2Another peculiarity of her reign, pointed out by Murayama Sh?ichi (1981, 52), is that the number of both recorded auspicious omens and catastrophic events such as famines and epidemics peaked during this era. Japanese historians have embarked on increasingly sophisticated textual criticism of Shoku Nihongi, exam- ining the circumstances of its compilation, embedded text types such as jitsuroku ... (veritable records), the influence of features such as the adoption of Chi- nese calendars, astronomical observations, and the wishes of later emperors, particularly Emperor Kanmu ... (Sakamoto 1971; Nakanishi 2000 and 2002; Hosoi 2007). Hosoi in particular has provided a complete index of auspi- cious omens in the Rikkokushi as part of his analysis (see Chart 4 in Hosoi 2007, 83--85).The omen reporting and interpreting techniques found in Shoku Nihongi comprise only one component of a vast, multifaceted complex of ideas trickling into Japan for centuries from the Korean peninsula, China, India, and south- eastern and western Asia for many centuries. …

Auspicious Omens in the Reign of the Last Empress of Nara Japan, 749–770