Prince Asaka

Prince Asaka was a son of Emperor Shōmu and Agata Inukai no Hirotoji. Princesses Inoe and Fuwa were his sisters by the same mother. His birth is usually placed around 728, inferred from his reported age at death. After his half-brother Motoi died in infancy, Asaka was Shōmu's surviving son, but the court did not designate him crown prince. In 738, that position went to his half-sister Princess Abe, later Empress Kōken. [S01]

In the intercalary first lunar month of 744, Asaka accompanied Shōmu on a journey from Kuni toward Naniwa. The Shoku Nihongi, a court chronicle completed in 797, records that illness in his legs made him turn back from the temporary palace at Sakurai. The biographical accounts place his return at Kuni and his death two days after leaving the procession. His sudden death has prompted suspicions of assassination, including a theory involving Fujiwara no Nakamaro. These are explanations proposed for the death; the surviving notice does not establish a killing or identify a killer. [S01, S02, S04]

Asaka also belonged to the poetic company of Fujiwara no Yatsuka and Ōtomo no Yakamochi. The eighth-century Man'yōshū preserves poems associated with their gatherings and Yakamochi's mourning. One elegy names the wooded hills of Wazuka. A burial mound there is designated his tomb by the Imperial Household Agency; the modern designation should be distinguished from proof of every detail of the prince's burial. His remembrance survives through both poetry and that identified landscape. [S01, S03]