Three waves of editing left their fingerprints on the Nihon Shoki. First, the original 30-volumes rolled off the imperial press in 720 CE under Prince Toneri and Ō no Yasumaro, painting Japan’s creation myths in polished Classical Chinese. Just two years later, Fujiwara no Fuhito led an Nara-period touch-up, smoothing stylistic rough edges and tweaking genealogies to bolster court legitimacy. A third imperial revision around 734 refined date entries and harmonized discrepancies in ancestral lines.

Over the centuries, those early manuscripts—vulnerable to fire, decay and political shifts—vanished, yielding a handful of medieval copies and printed editions instead. Three major textual “families” emerged among scholars:
• The “Ōno” line, preserved in a Kamakura monastery, notable for a fuller Susanoo legend.
• The “Mitsuta” lineage, known from Edo-period woodblock prints, where a few legendary passges around the Yamato founders vary in tone.
• The “Tawaraya” or “Kan’ei” editions, compiled in the 17th century, which introduced minor emendations in dating and place names.

Edo scholars like Shimonaka Yasubei compared these strands, producing the Bunsei (1823) and Kansei (1790) editions that became classroom standards. Motoori Norinaga’s Shuten commentary (late 18th century) leaned on the Bunsei text, influencing how myths of Amaterasu’s cave were read for generations.

Modern critical editions—Kume Kunitake’s 1896 collation and the 2002–05 Teikokugakuin University project—scrutinize every variant, from alternate scribal glosses in Heian manuscripts to divergent imperial regnal years. Recent digital-humanities efforts at Kyoto University (2023) even apply machine learning to chart patterns of omission and substitution across versions.

That ever-shifting tapestry of edits and editions keeps the Nihon Shoki alive and fresh—proof that ancient chronicles, much like a well-worn map, tell new stories whenever they’re re-traced.