Shotoku

Prince Shotoku is traditionally credited with establishing Buddhism in Japan, and he is often regarded as the country's earliest national hero. The devotional following that formed around him is considered among the most significant developments in early Japanese religious history. This study traces how that following took shape across the two centuries after his death, a stretch marked by major shifts in Japanese religious life.

The author focuses on several clans that traced their origins to migrants from the Korean kingdom of Silla. Placing these families within their social and cultural settings, he makes a persuasive case that they were central to the arrival of continental practices in Japan, affecting nearly every part of governance and communal belief. In his account, these immigrant lineages built the Shotoku cult and also brought with them foreign systems of writing, ritual, and rule.

By setting the ancestral legends of these clans beside the Shotoku legends and the imperial chronicles, the author argues that the groups shaped Japanese Buddhism and, to a large extent, the frameworks through which the imperial cult and the Japanese nation were imagined and formed. The book offers a substantially new view of the Asuka and Nara periods and will interest scholars working on early Japanese religion, especially those examining how ethnicity, lineage, texts, and ritual interacted.