#azai sandai

[odaclan]

The Nobunaga skull cups story debunked, again

A good while ago, I posted a debunking of the story that said Azai and Asakura’s skulls were turned into sake cups. I claimed that the origin of this narrative is actually the Azai Sandaiki, and this is all dubious because it’s a text that is at best considered more of a compilation of “folklore” rather than a legitimate chronicle.

Well, as it were, the Japanese government has a digitization of "Collection of Historical Texts” 史籍集覧 compiled by one Kondou Heijou 近藤瓶城. Volume 6′s index says that it contains the whole compilation of Azai Sandaiki, so I decided to have a look at it myself to see if the skull cup story is indeed from there.

It was not.

The Azai Sandaiki text actually literally just says the exact same thing as the Shinchoukouki. The segment I marked in red says “Nagamasa and Yoshikage’s heads were stripped of flesh and lacquered” (hence, skulls), and the segment I marked in blue says “[the skulls] were presented alongside the sake cups during New Year celebrations with the daimyou at Azuchi”. There’s nothing about the skulls actually being the cups.

I did another search online to see if anyone managed to identify other references, but as it turns out, the articles that made the claims mostly links to Wikipedia with a time stamp of 2021. That claim about the Azai Sandaiki has since been removed in the live page (probably by people who double-checked the same book). The text now simply says that the skull cups story is a myth, and cites no origin of the myth.

That means Shiba Ryoutarou’s Koumyou ga Tsuji novel is now the sole oldest identifiable source of this skull sake cup story. If there is no older chronicle or historical text that Shiba copied from, then this is all just wholesale fiction.

It’s possible that the archaic phrasing might have caused Shiba to misunderstand what was going on here. Or perhaps, he purposely twisted the original historical text to fit his novel’s narrative. There’s nothing wrong in him taking artistic liberties, of course, since he’s just writing a novel. The fault lies in the people who then paraded around this narrative as historical fact.

If Shiba Ryutarou made it up for his novel, then the whole narrative about skull cups is all garbage, and has not even a shred of historical value (Edo period folktales at least has some possibility being true, we just don’t always know for sure)