Princess Tajima

Who They Were

Princess Tajima (但馬皇女, Tajima no himemiko) was a Japanese princess of the Asuka period (538–710), the daughter of Emperor Tenmu and a poet whose work was preserved in the earliest surviving anthology of Japanese verse. She died on 17 July 708 at Fujiwara-kyō, the grid-planned capital that her father had begun building south of the old Yamato heartland.

Her mother was Hikami no Iratsume (氷上娘), a daughter of Fujiwara no Kamatari, the courtier who in 645 helped Emperor Tenji destroy Soga no Iruka and launch the Taika Reform. Through her mother, Tajima belonged to the Fujiwara clan at the moment of its rise; through her father, she belonged to the imperial line that the Fujiwara would go on to dominate for centuries.

She was married to Prince Takechi, her half-brother — a union that was unremarkable among the Asuka-period aristocracy, where marriage within the imperial kin group was a normal instrument of politics. Takechi was one of Tenmu's most prominent sons, and the marriage tied two branches of the same ruling house together.

Life and Career

Tajima was born around 650, in the Hakuchi era (白雉, year 1), a period when the Yamato court was still absorbing the administrative and legal ideas it had imported from Tang China. Her father was not yet emperor. Tenmu took the throne only in 673, after the Jinshin War, a succession struggle against the son of Emperor Tenji; Tajima was already in her twenties by the time her father became the sovereign.

Her recorded activity is almost entirely poetic. She is counted among the poets of the Man'yōshū (万葉集), the vast eighth-century anthology that preserves some 4,500 poems and is the single most important source for early Japanese verse. The poems attributed to her are love poems exchanged with Prince Takechi, and they are among the earliest surviving examples of waka (和歌) composed by a named woman of the imperial family.

She died on 17 July 708, in the first year of the Wadō era, at Fujiwara-kyō. Her husband Prince Takechi is referenced in connection with her, and the poetic exchange between them is the context in which her name survives. She did not live to see the capital move again to Nara in 710, two years after her death.

Why They Matter

Tajima matters for two reasons that pull in different directions. The first is political: she is a node in the dense web of marriage alliances that connected the imperial house to the Fujiwara in the seventh century. Her mother was a Fujiwara; her husband was a son of Tenmu; her father was the emperor who consolidated the throne for his own line. Reading her life is reading the family strategy that produced the Nara court.

The second is literary. The Man'yōshū preserves very few poems by women of the royal house, and Tajima is one of them. Her verses with Prince Takechi are early evidence that waka was already a medium for private, emotional exchange among the elite — not only for public ritual or court ceremony. That the poems survive at all is because later compilers thought them worth keeping.

She is also a reminder that the Asuka period was not a pre-literate age. Writing in Japanese, using Chinese characters for their sound and sense, was already producing a literature by the early eighth century, and women were among its authors.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 但馬皇女.

• Kana reading: たじま の ひめみこ
• Romaji: Tajima no himemiko

Broken down character by character:

• 但 (reading in this name: ta) — a kanji meaning "however," "but," or "only." Here it carries no semantic weight; it is used purely for its sound to spell Tajima.
• 馬 (reading in this name: jima) — "horse." The ma of Tajima voices to jima in the compound, a standard sound change in Japanese. Again the character is phonetic, not meaningful.
• 皇 (reading: hime) — "imperial," "sovereign." This is the element that marks the bearer as a member of the imperial house.
• 女 (reading: miko) — "woman," "female." Combined with 皇, it forms 皇女 (himemiko), the standard title for a princess of the blood.

The first two characters, 但馬, are also the name of an old province — Tajima, in what is now northern Hyōgo Prefecture. Asuka-period princesses were frequently named after places, and the name Tajima likely refers to that region rather than to any meaning in the characters themselves. The second half, 皇女, is a title rather than part of the personal name: it tells the reader that this woman was a daughter of an emperor. So the whole name means, in effect, "the imperial princess [named after] Tajima."

Legacy

Tajima's legacy is her verse. The poems she exchanged with Prince Takechi entered the Man'yōshū and have been read continuously for well over a thousand years, which makes her one of the earliest Japanese women whose words survive under her own name. Later poets and scholars of the classical tradition treated the Man'yōshū as the foundation of Japanese literature, and Tajima sits near the beginning of that foundation.

Her death date, 17 July 708, is recorded precisely, and her place of death, Fujiwara-kyō, places her at the centre of the court in the final years before the capital moved to Nara. She belongs to the small group of Asuka-period women — princesses, consorts, and poets — whose names and works were preserved by the compilers of the eighth century, and through them to the earliest layer of Japanese literary history.