Name O Yasumaro | ||
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Ō no Yasumaro (太 安万侶, died August 15, 723) was a Japanese nobleman, bureaucrat, and chronicler. He may have been the son of Ō no Honji (多 品治), a participant in the Jinshin War of 672.
Contents
He is most famous for compiling and editing, with the assistance of Hieda no Are, the Kojiki, the oldest extant Japanese history. Empress Genmei (r. 707-721) charged Yasumaro with the duty of writing the Kojiki in 711 using the differing clan chronicles and native myths. It was finished the following year in 712.
Yasumaro most probably also played an active role in compiling the Nihon Shoki, which was finished in 720.
Yasumaro became clan head in 716, and died in 723.
Ō no Yasumaro Epitaph
On January 23, 1979 the grave of Ō no Yasumaro was unearthed in a tea plantation in Konose Ward of Nara City. Its engraving reads:
In Fiction
Yasumaro appears in the video game Toukiden: The Age of Demons as a mitama (a soul of a hero from Japanese history).