An Inflection Point in the Legend of Empress Jingū's Invasion of Korea

Abstract

Empress Jingū is a legendary person who, according to Kojiki and Nihon-shoki, led an army to invade the Korean peninsula. Interestingly enough there is a remarkable difference in the way of narrating the episode between those ancient texts and some medieval accounts. It is often attributed to the Mongol invasions of Japan in the mid-Kamakura Period, but the jingoistic ideology of the “divine nation” had been already formed before the invasions partly due to a strong anxiety over the probable eruption of civil war. Thus the discursive change of the legend was caused not by some actual events but by an epistemological shift in national outlook.