The Great History of Japan

Dainihonshi (大日本史, “The Great History of Japan”) is a monumental chronicle of Japanese history compiled over roughly 250 years. The project was begun by Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), the second lord of the Mito domain and grandson of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and carried on by his successors and the scholars of the Mito school long after his death.

Written in classical Chinese (kanbun) on the annals-and-biographies model of the Records of the Grand Historian, it covers Japanese history from the legendary first emperor, Jinmu, to the reunification of the Northern and Southern Courts under Emperor Go-Komatsu in 1392. Its argument that the Southern Court held the legitimate succession became a defining tenet of Mito school thought and fed the pro-imperial (sonnō) ideology of the late Edo and Meiji eras.

These English translations are machine-assisted first drafts, checked for readability and being compared against the Japanese text. Please consult the original before citing them.