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Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool
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Forging a Centralized State (550–794)

By the end of the Kofun period, the Yamato lineage had consolidated ruling power and stood at the apex of a hierarchy of other leading uji clans. From the mid-sixth through the eighth century, the Yamato embarked on programs to further strengthen their position, creating institutions, bureaucracies, religious support, and capital cities that would further legitimize and symbolize their power. These new tools of state were often modeled after those of China’s powerful Sui (581–618) and Tang dynasties (618–907) and those employed by Paekche and Silla, but adapted to fit Japan’s circumstances.

The first permanent capital city, Heijō-kyō (now Nara), was established in 710. It was modeled on the Tang capital Chang’an (now Xian) and remained the seat of government until 794, when the new capital was established in Heian-kyō (now Kyoto). Nara became Japan’s first large, urban center, with a population of over two hundred thousand. It hosted a massive court bureaucracy, with between seven and ten thousand government workers. During this era, Nara also developed into an impressive and important nucleus of Buddhism in Japan, epitomized by the building of the massive Tōdaiji Temple. The state continued to sponsor projects that legitimized the Yamato as the ruling lineage of a centralized state, commissioning the writing of the first national histories, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, along with the first anthologies of poetry, the Kaifūsō and the Man’yōshū. During the eighth century, however, severe epidemics of smallpox and other diseases, along with famine, plagued Japan, killing 25–35 percent of the population between 735 and 737 alone. The radical decrease in the productive population resulted in a major decline in imperial revenue.

POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIO-CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS

The mid-sixth to late eighth centuries are often subdivided into several different periods. The Asuka period begins with the official introduction of Buddhism from Paekche in 552 and extends to 645, when rulers inaugurated an era of great reform (Taika), designed to further enhance and consolidate Yamato power over the uji clans. The Asuka era witnessed the strengthening of diplomatic and cultural exchanges with Korean kingdoms and Sui dynasty China. The period is named after the Asuka region, where the ruler, Suiko, located her court. Prior to the establishment of Heijō-kyō, the palace of the ruler was considered the capital. Each time he or she died, the entire court moved to a newly built palace for the new ruler. The old palace was abandoned to avoid pollution associated with death and because of the belief that the spirit of the deceased ruler might remain within the palace and threaten a new regime.

In the late sixth century, the Soga clan, who were likely of Korean ancestry, dominated court politics, increasing their influence by marrying daughters to members of the imperial family. Soga territories were in the Asuka region, located in the Kinai plain. Empress Suiko (554–628), a niece of powerful uji chieftain Soga no Umako, was the official consort of Emperor Bidatsu (538–85). After he died, struggles over the imperial succession arose between the Soga and Mononobe clans. Suiko was appointed reigning empress in 592 and served in this role until her death in 628. She appointed her nephew Shōtoku (574–622, also known as Umayado) as her regent. Achievements of their joint reign included official recognition of Buddhism in 594, opening of diplomatic relations with China’s Sui dynasty in 600, the adoption of a system of court ranks in 603, and the promulgation of a seventeen-article “constitution” in 604.

Together Suiko and Shōtoku sought to transform the Yamato kingship into a more powerful centralized state modeled on Chinese ideals of imperial governance. Wishing to clearly elevate the position of the Yamato ruler above clan politics, they introduced a system of twelve court ranks, designated by caps of different colors and with different styles of feathers. Similar ranking systems were in place in Paekche, Koguryō, and Sui dynasty China. The cap rank system was intended to allow for some promotions based on individual merit, not heredity alone, thus containing the potential to weaken the power of the uji clans. In practice, however, the wealthiest and most powerful clans dominated positions within the top ranks.

The details of Shōtoku’s life are found in legends; the primary source of information on his achievements is the Nihon shoki, completed a century after his death. He is said to be the first to officially refer to the Yamato state as Nihon, as Japan is known today. In 607, he reportedly sent a letter to China’s Sui court with an impertinent address: (from) “The Child of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun to the Child of Heaven in the Land of the Setting Sun.”¹ One legend claims that he met Bodhidharma, known as Daruma in Japan, the fifth-century monk who transmitted the Ch’an (Zen) school of Buddhism from India to China. Daruma was disguised as a beggar but Shōtoku offered him food and clothing, demonstrating his compassion and wisdom in recognizing a holy man. As a side note, Daruma remains prominent in contemporary culture because of the popularity of the Daruma doll, a round, red figure depicting a bearded man with blank eyes. These dolls are symbols of good luck and perseverance. One makes a wish or sets a goal, painting in one eye, and paints in the second eye when the aim is achieved. The shape and function of the doll reflect grisly legends about Daruma, who sat in meditation for nine years, causing his limbs to atrophy. After falling asleep during meditation, he angrily cut off his own eyelids to prevent a second occurrence.

Shōtoku is most celebrated for authoring Japan’s first “constitution,” a document with seventeen clauses or articles that primarily reflected Chinese Confucian law and institutions but melded these with both Buddhist philosophy and native traditions of governance that stressed discussion and consultation in order to reach consensus. The document overall emphasizes the principles of loyalty, harmony, and dedication to government as ideals for political life. The first clause critiques the factionalism in Yamato society, stating: “Harmony is to be valued, and contentiousness avoided. All men are inclined to partisanship and few are truly discerning. . . . But when those above are harmonious and those below are conciliatory and there is concord in the discussion of all matters, the disposition of affairs comes about naturally.”² The desire to elevate the ruler above clan factions, as the Chinese emperor was elevated above his ministers, is apparent in the third clause, “When you receive the imperial commands fail not to scrupulously obey them. The lord is heaven. The vassal is Earth.”³ Other clauses urge officials to be impartial, diligent, trustworthy, and fair to the people they govern. Buddhist thought is reflected in a clause that counsels against anger, stating that what is right and what is wrong are not absolute, but relative perspectives. To contemporary eyes the document may seem to be a collection of simple maxims, but it was quite revolutionary, representing the first official statement on the need for ethical government in Japanese history.

FIGURE 5. Shōtoku and the Yumedono portrayed on the 100-yen note, 1944.

Shōtoku is also revered as one of Buddhism’s most important early scholars and patrons, said to have authored several commentaries on Buddhist sutras. Over the centuries, he became the center of a cult of worship for the protection of Buddhism, the imperial family, and the nation. Important religious figures in later centuries, including Saichō (see chapter 3) and Shinran (see chapter 4), claimed to have experienced visions of Shōtoku. With Soga patronage, just fifty years after Buddhism was officially introduced to the court, there were over forty temples and nearly fourteen hundred ordained monks and nuns. Over the sixth and seventh centuries, six schools of Buddhism, imported from China and Korea, were established in Nara: Hossō, Kegon, Risshū, Sanron, Kusa, and Jōjitsu. These sects were largely focused on complex metaphysical philosophies of existence. The schools competed to attract elite patronage, and high-ranking monks increasingly attempted to meddle in court matters.

The earliest Buddhist temples were built by the Soga in the late sixth century but haven’t survived. Common features of early temples included a large entrance gate, a roofed gallery that enclosed a rectangular compound, a hall housing the primary artifacts of devotion, and a pagoda—a tall, multistoried tower modeled after Indian stupas, said to contain a relic of the historical Buddha. Among temples still standing, the oldest is Hōryūji near Nara, originally commissioned by Shōtoku and dedicated to the Buddha of Healing, Yakushi Nyorai. It contains the oldest wooden building in the world, believed to have been completed in 607. In addition to the features described above, the Hōryūji compound contains an octagonal building known as the Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, constructed in 739 to appease the spirit of Shōtoku. Hōryūji is a UNESCO World Heritage site, containing numerous sculptures and artifacts designated National Treasures in Japan.

Some of the art of the Asuka era was produced by Korean and Chinese craftsmen and reflects links between court families and the continent. Extant artworks demonstrate a variety of artistic styles found in Silla, Paekche, Koguryō, and Northern Wei China. The official style of Suiko’s reign, however, was the school of Tori Busshi, a seventh-century sculptor descended from a clan of Chinese saddle makers who had migrated to Japan. Tori’s statues have a geometric, front-oriented design and combine aspects of Northern Wei and Koguryō sculpture, but with a greater sense of softness and tranquility.

One representative work at Hōryūji, the Sakyamuni Triad, is a bronze sculpture depicting the historical Buddha Gautama in the center, flanked by two bodhisattva attendants. Gautama’s robes drape over the platform below in a two-dimensional “waterfall” style. His hands are in mudras, special positions of Buddhist iconography conveying fixed messages. Here, the right upraised hand symbolizes the Buddha’s fearlessness and blessing, and the open left palm symbolizes charity. The central figure is surrounded with a flaming halo depicting his previous incarnations. His attendants wear tall crowns and stand on lotuses, important symbols of purity in Buddhism because they flower above the muddy waters, paralleling the ability of humans to overcome desire and achieve enlightenment. Lotuses also symbolize the multidimensional Buddhist universe, each of their petals representing a different world.

Other Hōryūji treasures include the Tamamushi shrine, a portable wooden structure from the mid-seventh century, named for the beetle whose iridescent wings were originally inlaid in the pedestal. The lacquered wood panels of the shrine contain oil paintings illustrating tales of the Buddha’s previous lives. In one, a prince offers his body to feed a starving tigress and her cubs, a compassionate act that ensures he will become a Buddha in a future life. The six-foot-tall, gilded wood Guze Kannon statue is housed in the Yumedono and supposedly represents Shōtoku, resembling portraiture of the prince and standing at the same height. Considered sacred, the statue is seldom viewed and remains in excellent condition, as it is stored wrapped in over five hundred yards of cloth. It had not been seen for many centuries until Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American professor hired by the Meiji government who became involved in efforts to preserve Japan’s art treasures, demanded that it be unwrapped.

FIGURE 6. Sakyamuni Triad, 623 C.E., Hōryūji Monastery, Nara, Japan. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite Suiko and Shōtoku’s efforts to stimulate governmental reform, there was little real effect since the uji clans continued to have complete autonomy over their lands and its inhabitants. After Shōtoku’s death in 622, the powerful Soga became the primary opponents of major reforms that concentrated power in the hands of the Yamato rulers. In 644, an anti-Soga faction, including Naka no Oe (626–72, later known as Emperor Tenji) and Nakatomi no Kamatari (614–69, head of a powerful clan of Shinto ritualists), led a coup against the Soga, slaughtering chieftain Soga no Iruko and his followers at a banquet for a visiting Korean dignitary. Following this coup, Nakatomi was bestowed with a new clan name, Fujiwara, and became the ancestor of one of the most illustrious families in Japanese history, one that would intermarry with and dominate the imperial line for centuries.

The period between the coup and the establishment of the capital at Nara in 710 is known as the Hakuhō period. It is characterized by continuing efforts to centralize and bureaucratize government; the rapid expansion of Buddhism among leading clans, witnessing major developments in Buddhist art and architecture; and the development of the writing system and calligraphy. Japan was still largely decentralized, but during the seventh century the Yamato court faced pressure to construct a strong, centralized state to defend themselves against the expansionist Tang empire, which allied with Silla to conquer Koguryō and Paekche, a Yamato ally. Fearing invasion, the Japanese needed to marshal national economic and defensive resources. They were aided in their efforts by Paekche refugees, including members of the royal house, who fled to Japan in larger numbers after they were defeated by the Tang-Silla alliance in 660. By the mid-700s, a network of roads connected every region from northern Honshu to southern Kyushu to the center of power in the Kinai plain, enabling greater trade and commerce along with an infrastructure for defense.

In 646 the new emperor, Kōtoku (596–654), proclaimed an era of “great change,” announcing major reforms planned in an edict. The Taika reforms aimed to recover power for the imperial family and reduce the influence of the clans by creating a system of centralized government using Chinese imperial models. The Taika edict contained four articles. The first declared that private ownership of land would be abolished; all land would henceforth be considered public (i.e., belonging to the emperor) and would be allocated fairly among farmers, based on their family size. Another clause announced that new government and military institutions, emulating those of China’s powerful Tang dynasty, would be established in both the capital and the provinces. A third edict declared the establishment of a new tax system, with the populace paying taxes in kind through goods such as rice, textiles, and horses and through unpaid labor on roads and other imperial construction projects. Taxes were needed to support the planned expansion of the bureaucracy and military. The final edict ordered a national census in order to help determine land distribution, taxes, and manpower available for military conscription.

The old uji clan aristocracy remained, but the authority and income of clans and their chieftains would now be derived from their position as officials of the court and central government. Unlike ordinary farmers, uji clans received special, large land grants that enabled them to retain their privileges and wealth. Members from the powerful clans staffed the many developing government departments and councils of state. Positions quickly became hereditary.

The planned “great changes” were far too extensive to be realized overnight, but they provided a blueprint for the transformation of the government according to Chinese models, and reforms proceeded steadily in the seventh and eighth centuries. A fully Chinese-style state, however, was never achieved, for two primary reasons. For one, the Chinese used an examination system to choose its bureaucratic leaders according to merit. Although the Japanese also adopted an examination system for officials, those qualified to take the exams were limited to court families. Some lower-ranking court members had the possibility of advancement, but it was rare, and the Japanese bureaucracy remained a hereditary system that preserved the privileges of the aristocrats. Another difference from the Chinese model was the concept of the emperor. The Chinese emperor had a divine mandate, known as the Mandate of Heaven, which could be revoked if he or his dynasty proved to be unvirtuous or ineffective leaders. In Japan, the imperial family’s divine mandate was claimed via direct descent from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. It was thus irrevocable and not associated with the virtue or merit of the ruling family.

The Hakuhō period, from 645 to 710, was a time of vigorous reform, directed by members of the imperial family itself. Some of the most powerful emperors in Japanese history ruled during this period, each furthering the structures needed to create a strong, centralized state. Emperor Tenmu (631–86), who reigned from 673 until his death in 686, ruled with his consort Jitō (645–703). He is considered the first monarch to be addressed as Emperor (Tennō) within his own time. Tenmu’s achievements included revision of the cap rank system to reflect closeness and loyalty to the imperial throne, strengthening of military institutions under the fear of invasion, the commissioning of national histories, and the compilation of a seventeen-volume code that specified penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryō) law; the Taihō code became the legal basis of the ritsuryō state, which prevailed in Japan until the late tenth century.

The ritsuryō system incorporated patriarchal Chinese legal, philosophical, and social norms and attitudes. It assumed that all power was derived from the monarch, who was above the law. The system established two realms of government. The Department of Divinity (Jingikan) handled all ritual and spiritual matters, including court ceremonies, divination, astrology, and geomancy; the Department of State (Dajōkan) dealt with secular and administrative matters through eight ministries, such as Military, Justice, Taxation, and Treasury. The penal portion of the Taihō code specified sanctions for hundreds of different types of crimes, from beating with a light or heavy rod to exile to death. Elite offenders rarely faced corporal punishment; they could forfeit grades of rank or make payment as restitution for their misdeeds. The administrative portion of the code scrupulously defined the qualifications, duties, and prerogatives of each official appointment. It divided the country administratively into sixty-six provinces, with governors appointed by the court. Provinces were subdivided into districts, administered by local officials responsible for collecting taxes, keeping population and land registers, and maintaining the peace.

Tenmu is often recognized as the first ruler to officially sponsor Buddhism as a protector of the country and the imperial family. Before this time, individuals like Shōtoku or clans like the Soga patronized Buddhism; but under Tenmu and his successors, the construction of great Buddhist temples and monasteries was sponsored by the state. Their role was to pray and conduct rituals for the protection and prosperity of the state. During the eighth century, Japanese monks produced or copied more than a hundred thousand volumes of Buddhist texts to this end. The court’s favoring of Buddhism was usually based less on deep understanding of metaphysical philosophy than on obtaining practical benefits through magical powers. Practices to obtain health and prosperity included the worship of Buddhist images and copying sutras. A focus on health and healing, likely prompted by the epidemics that plagued the era, is seen in the popularity of the Buddha of Healing, Yakushi Nyorai.

Following the death of Tenmu, Empress Jitō ascended the throne and ruled from 686 to 697, continuing to carry out administrative reforms that strengthened imperial family power. The law code initiated by Tenmu was actually promulgated under Jitō, and it was during her reign that plans for Japan’s first permanent capital city were initiated.

THE FIRST PERMANENT CAPITAL

As the Japanese built their Chinese-style system of government administration, the central bureaucracy grew rapidly, requiring a more permanent and spacious capital with a great palace surrounded by government buildings. The court moved to the newly built city of Heijō-kyō in 710 and remained there until 784, abandoning the practice of shifting the capital each time an emperor died. Nara was designed as a smaller version of the Tang capital at Chang’an. It was laid out in an orderly fashion, with the palace in the center, to the north, and offices, temples, markets, and residences of the nobles to the south. A grand boulevard ran from the palace to the city’s main entrance in the south, and a checkerboard grid of smaller streets ran north–south and east–west. For the 1,300th anniversary of the city in 2010, the former palace grounds, which had been used as rice fields for over a thousand years, were partially reconstructed. Visitors marveled at the massive scale, many times the size of existing imperial palaces.

The site for construction was chosen through Chinese geomancy, the art of selecting a suitable location based on the arrangement of surrounding hills, wind, and water, known popularly today as feng shui. Nara was Japan’s first truly urban center, with a population of two hundred thousand and with a cosmopolitan outlook that reflected the influence of Tang China, then the greatest empire in the world. The Nara court adopted the practices of the Tang and Silla courts, placing high value on performance of elegant music (gagaku) and masked dances as ritual means to maintain peace and harmony in the realm. Tang Buddhist art, emulated by the Japanese, had a variety of world influences, not just from India but from Persia, Greece, and the Byzantine Empire, all in contact with China by means of the overland trade route known as the Silk Road. Many art objects preserved in Nara came from these exotic locales. The courts of eighth-century Japan welcomed visitors from throughout South and Southeast Asia and beyond. In the following centuries Japan would become much more insular, and such cosmopolitanism would not be seen again until the sixteenth century and the modern era.

Nara civilization reached a peak with the reign of Emperor Shōmu (701–56) from 724 to 749. He was the first emperor whose official consort, Kōmyō, was not of the royal family, but rather a member of the Fujiwara clan. Shōmu is remembered as a devoutly Buddhist emperor. In 741, following a series of national disasters and epidemics, he decreed that state-supported temples, monasteries, and nunneries be constructed in every province to pray for the health and protection of the state. He is best known for commissioning the Daibutsu, a fifty-three-foot-high statue of the Buddha Dainichi, which was to be housed in a new temple known as Tōdaiji, the Great Eastern Temple. It was mammoth in comparison to earlier temples such as Hōryūji, spreading over a huge tract of land. Shōmu urged the entire population to contribute to the effort, even if only a twig or handful of dirt if they had nothing else to give. Fundraisers were sent to the provinces to collect contributions and to generate support for the project among the populace.

At this time, Buddhism was largely limited to the elite; the court discouraged Buddhist monks from proselytizing among the people, afraid that popular preachers might use magical abilities to attract large followings, which could result in turmoil. The state monitored and restricted the numbers of monks and nuns ordained and ensured that their lives were closely regulated. Nevertheless, some became itinerant priests in defiance of the law. One such individual, Gyōki (668–749), began to travel widely around the country to preach Buddhism to commoners and to help the poor through charitable works. During his lifetime, he built forty-nine monasteries that also served as community centers—providing medical facilities for the poor, helping to organize public works projects, and teaching farmers to build better irrigation systems. He is also recognized as the first individual to construct a map of Japan. Through the efforts of such itinerant priests, the basic teachings of Buddhism, such as the idea of karmic retribution (i.e., that good actions bring good results and evil actions eventually bring misfortune) began to gradually diffuse through the population. The people venerated Gyōki as a living bodhisattva, but the government persecuted him and his followers for their illegal activities. When he proved to be effective at recruiting labor and contributions for Tōdaiji, however, he earned a pardon and was given the highest Buddhist rank possible.

FIGURE 7. Scroll painting depicting the dedication of the Daibutsu at Tōdaiji Temple, Nara, Japan, 1536. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Shōmu’s orders to construct the giant Buddha statue and massive temple, far from strengthening and protecting central rule, exhausted national supplies of bronze and precious metals. These expensive ventures—in the face of epidemics, natural disasters, and intra-court strife—were likely a major factor in the decline of national administration over the next century and a half. Tōdaiji, however, became the greatest Buddhist establishment in Japan and the focal point for Nara culture. At the great Buddha’s eye-opening ceremony, a priest from India, the motherland of the faith, painted in the pupils of the statue’s eyes to provide it with symbolic life. Ten thousand Buddhist priests and visitors from many distant lands attended the ceremony, the largest and most elaborate in early Japanese history.

Tōdaiji statuary included a new method of sculpture that used dry lacquer over a clay base, allowing artists to achieve a remarkable degree of realism. Lifelike detailing can be seen in the statue of Ganjin (668–763), a blind Chinese monk who founded the Risshū school of Nara Buddhism and helped raise the funds to build Tōdaiji from among the populace. Ganjin had been invited to Japan to teach and made five attempts at the arduous voyage across the East China Sea. During one, he lost his eyesight to infection. He finally succeeded on his sixth attempt in 754, joining a Japanese diplomatic mission returning home. The following year, he constructed Japan’s first official ordination platform at Tōdaiji. Another outstanding example of dry lacquer technique is the Asura, one of the eight types of Buddhist guardian deities, housed at Nara’s Kōfukuji Temple. The slender, three-headed, six-armed figure—sometimes known as Japan’s Venus de Milo—differs from the muscular, martial figures of other types of guardian deities. The Asura’s two side faces display stern expressions befitting a guardian deity, but the front-facing countenance is more complex, revealing both concern and steadfastness.

The Tōdaiji complex also contains a remarkable treasure house called the Shōsōin, which contains more than ten thousand precious items, including the personal belongings of Emperor Shōmu and his wife Kōmyō, ritual objects used in the Buddha statue’s eye-opening ceremony, maps, documents, medicines, musical instruments, and masks used for performing court dances. The objects came from all corners of the world: Southeast and Central Asia, India, Arabia, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They included a vast variety of fabrics, glass, ceramic ware, paintings, and statuary that have been preserved in excellent condition for over a millennium. This is due to the fact that the Shōsōin was constructed using special techniques that allowed the log walls to expand and contract in order to maintain steady temperature and humidity conditions. Furthermore, it was very rarely opened over the centuries.

In 749, after a twenty-five-year reign, Emperor Shōmu abdicated the throne, prostrating himself before the great Buddha statue and taking the tonsure, the first retired emperor to become a Buddhist monk. Since he lacked an appropriate male heir and his nonroyal consort Kōmyō could not accede to the throne, he appointed his unmarried, twenty-one-year-old daughter Abe as heir. She would reign twice, as Empress Kōken (749–58) and as Empress Shōtoku (766–70). Many in the court were critical of this appointment; in 757, over four hundred and fifty courtiers mounted an unsuccessful rebellion against the empress. Kōken stepped down the following year, passing the throne to Tenmu’s grandson and her adopted heir, who became Emperor Junnin (733–65). Unlike males of the royal families, who could take the daughters of court families as wives or consorts, royal females were required to marry within the family. Kōken had no children of her own.

FIGURE 8. Asura, 734 C.E., Kōfukuji Temple, Nara, Japan Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In 761, the retired empress was cured of illness by a charismatic monk named Dōkyō, scion of an elite provincial family. Later that year, she took the tonsure, shaving her head and donning Buddhist robes. She began to feud with the sitting emperor, Junnin, accusing him of disloyalty and unfiliality, and announced that she would reassume key powers of the throne. Junnin’s allies, led by Fujiwara no Nakamaro, attempted another coup against the retired empress, but Kōken successfully reascended as Empress Shōtoku in 766. Her critics claimed that a nun was not qualified to hold the position of sovereign, but she dismissed such detractors, reminding them that her father, Shōmu, had advised her to deal harshly with any who obstructed her imperial will.

Shōtoku proceeded to reorganize court government, appointing Dōkyō head of the Department of Divinity. Although many monks had advised the throne in the past, none had been appointed to such high court rank. He was proclaimed the Prince of the Law (Hōō) and given broad authority in spiritual and secular matters. The empress responded to critical members of the court as follows: “Although my head is shaved and I wear Buddhist robes I still must govern the realm. As the Buddha declared, ‘Kings who ascend the throne receive the ordination of a bodhisattva.’ Such words show that there can be no objection to rule by one who has taken orders. Furthermore, since the reigning monarch has taken the precepts, it is fitting that the grand minister should also be a monk.”⁴

In 769 the court received an oracle from a shrine in Kyushu stating that peace and prosperity could be maintained in the realm only if Dōkyō was enthroned as sovereign. An official sent to Kyushu to investigate returned with a second oracle advising that wicked pretenders who attempted to usurp the throne from the imperial line should be ousted from the court. Dōkyō was exiled; the empress died five months later, succeeded by Emperor Kōnin, the great-grandson of a seventh-century emperor, Tenji. For the past century the throne had been occupied by the descendants of Tenmu, the brother of Tenji. With Kōnin, a new royal lineage emerged, with the throne passing next to his son, who ruled as Emperor Kammu, and to Kammu’s subsequent progeny.

Historians have debated the question of who was responsible for the first, forged oracle in the Dōkyō scandal: some point to the monk himself, while others believe that the priest of the Kyushu shrine sought to curry favor with him, and still others claim that the empress herself devised the scheme. An alternative theory holds that the entire story was fabricated. It was recorded in the Shoku nihongi (completed in 797, the second of six national histories following the Nihon shoki), commissioned by Kammu. Historian Joan Piggott suggests that the compilers aimed to enhance Kammu’s legitimacy and lineage by casting aspersions on Kōken, part of the Tenmu lineage replaced by his father.⁵

Unlike earlier emperors, who drew their wives and a small number of consorts from leading clans like the Soga and Fujiwara, Kammu had sixteen empresses and consorts, so that no clan could claim undue influence over him. He was an active emperor who deployed military campaigns to suppress the Emishi people of Ezo (northern Honshu and Hokkaido), believed to be descendants of the Jōmon and ancestors of Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu. The Emishi (a disparaging Japanese term meaning “toad barbarians”) had battled Yamato armies in northern Honshu for centuries. They were skilled in horse-mounted archery and engaged in guerrilla tactics that proved effective against the slower, infantry-based imperial armies. Kammu appointed Sakanoue no Tamuramaro to the office of Sei-i Taishōgun (popularly abbreviated as shogun), or “barbarian-quelling generalissimo,” to defeat the Emishi. Sakanoue changed the Imperial Army’s battle strategies, adopting the enemy’s techniques, and succeeded in driving the barbarians north to Hokkaido.

From the sixth through the eighth century, empresses and gender-complementary pairs of rulers were not unusual. Among the most notable of the gendered pairs were Empress Suiko and her nephew Shōtoku in the Asuka period; Emperor Tenmu and his consort Jitō in the Hakuhō era; and Emperor Shōmu and his consort Kōmyō, and Empress Kōken and her Buddhist monk adviser Dōkyō, both during the Nara period. By the end of the eighth century, however, the notion of male dominance and rulership prevailed over ideas of gender complementarity. One key reason for this shift was the increasing acceptance of Chinese Confucian texts and norms, which were embedded within the codes of law and administration produced by the Japanese state in the early eighth century. As a result, succession to the throne was limited to males; female members of the court, including consorts and officials, began to experience a long, broad decline in their authority and status that continued throughout the following centuries.

The question of whether females can inherit the throne poses controversy in Japan today. The current Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife, Crown Princess Masako, have only one child, their daughter Aiko, who was born in 2001. The Imperial Household Act of 1947 decreed that only males could be named to the imperial succession, but given that members of the imperial family had not produced a male heir for over forty years, many Japanese believe that the law should be amended to allow a firstborn daughter to ascend to the throne before younger brothers and cousins. Conservatives have advocated against Aiko’s succession, however, arguing that the selection of early empresses offered only temporary solutions, compromises to avert conflict over succession. They charge that Empress Kōken was a weak sovereign, infatuated with and victimized by a Rasputin-like monk, concluding that the instability of her reign provided court members with the rationale to exclude royal females from acceding to the throne. Since the 2006 birth of a male heir to the crown prince’s younger brother, Akishino, it has become far less likely that the law will be changed to allow women to inherit the throne.

NARA LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

The development of Buddhist visual art during the early centuries of the centralized state was accompanied by the first great blossoming of Japanese poetry. Since the court had no written language of its own, the functioning of the state depended on the use of Chinese ideographic characters for official texts, codes of law, proclamations, and recording of national histories. Non-governmental forms of written communication, such as Buddhist sutras and poetry, also relied on written Chinese. Spoken Chinese differs radically, however, from spoken Japanese. Chinese is monosyllabic, tonal, and does not employ tense, while Japanese is polysyllabic, nontonal, and highly inflected. Classical Chinese, which used kanji characters for their meaning, was employed in most official communications, but in the eighth century a method of employing these ideographs phonetically, like letters, enabled writers to express the spoken Japanese language using Chinese characters. The phonetic use of these characters is known as man’yōgana. This approach was used by the first national history, the Kojiki, and by the poetry anthology known as the Man’yōshū. Standard classical Chinese prevailed for the majority of official and religious texts, including another, more standardized national history, the Nihon shoki, and a Chinese-style poetry anthology, the Kaifūsō.

Around the ninth century, the method of using Chinese characters to express Japanese sounds evolved into a native syllabary of about fifty symbols called kana. Although the Japanese were then able to write their language exclusively in kana, many Chinese words had entered the vocabulary and continued to be written using their kanji characters. Ultimately, the Japanese came to write in a mixture of Chinese characters and kana, which is why it is among the most complex written languages in the world today.

The Kojiki, Japan’s earliest extant literary work, completed in 712, and the Nihon shoki, completed in 720, were introduced in chapter 1 as the sources of Japanese mythology. They were commissioned by Emperor Tenmu in the 670s to legitimize and glorify the Yamato reign, in the manner of early Chinese dynastic histories. These works combined genealogical records of the imperial family with myths, legends, songs, and poetry. The Kojiki, which combined man’yōgana and classical Chinese, was more difficult to read and less systematic than the Nihon shoki, which better reflected the style and patterns of Chinese dynastic histories and included more references to Confucian and Buddhist ideas taken from Paekche and Chinese sources. The Nihon shoki is considered to be a fairly reliable historical source from about the sixth century forward. Both works reflected the court’s ambition to assert a level of civilizational development relatively equal to that of China and Korea. At the same time, the histories convey a sense of ethnocentrism, depicting Japan as the center of the world and the Sun Goddess as the world’s most powerful deity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nativist scholars such as Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane used these texts as a basis to chauvinistically assert Japan’s superiority over other nations (see chapter 6).

Poetry was a central component of the cultural life of the Nara court; the ability to compose poetry was usually required for official positions. The Kojiki and Nihon shoki contain numerous poems and simple songs, but the first efforts at issuing anthologies occurred in the mid-eighth century with the Kaifūsō (Fond recollections of poetry), compiled in 751, and the Man’yōshū (Collection of ten thousand leaves), compiled sometime after 759. The Kaifūsō contains 120 verses in classical Chinese. Most are full of allusions to Chinese literature and history, demonstrating elite esteem for and desire to emulate the higher civilization of the continent. The Man’yōshū, a collection of around 4,500 poems contained in twenty volumes, is often considered the true beginning of a Japanese poetic tradition and is among the most revered works of Japanese literature. Throughout subsequent centuries, this work has served as a reference point for poets, writers, and artists.

Japanese literature and poetry are often described in contrast with Western literature and poetry; the latter are said to emphasize ideas, action, and morality, while the Japanese emphasize emotion, beauty, and reflections upon nature and seasonal change. Such broad contrasts support stereotypes of Japanese national character but are rooted in the different styles and subject matters of respective texts. Many Japanese poets favored expressive lyricism over pedantic verses about virtue. Two frequent subjects of classical Japanese poetry were romantic love and nature. Poets especially celebrated the ephemerality of beauty in nature—the transient splendor of natural phenomena that mark the seasons. Poetic words and images evoking spring included mist, the songs of frogs and nightingales, and, of course, cherry blossoms. Wisteria, lotus, and cicadas are among the tropes signaling summer; the harvest moon and crimson foliage of maple trees evoke autumn; cold, bleak landscapes and bare trees recall winter months. These and other seasonal tropes are still widely used today. The sensitivity to change and to the passage of time represented by such seasonal discernment reflected Buddhist sentiments about the transience and cyclicality of life.

Early poems often followed the Chinese practice of composing verses to commemorate public rituals, ceremonies, and events, such as the death of monarchs, visits by foreign envoys, or journeys and pilgrimages made by court members. In comparison to the Kaifūsō, the poems of the Man’yōshū are relatively free of Confucian ideals and Chinese conventions and allusions. During the ninth and tenth centuries, court poetry would evolve to strictly follow rules and forms and could address only a limited range of topics and emotions. The often unrefined and emotionally direct poems of the Man’yōshū are often said to represent the first true record of early Japanese sentiment. Nationalist scholars have claimed that this anthology demonstrates the pure, sincere, or primeval character of the early Japanese that existed before contamination by Chinese philosophy, religion, and literature. Such judgments are difficult to sustain, however, given that the earliest extant works already demonstrated deep Chinese influence.

The poems in the Man’yōshū are arranged chronologically, beginning with poems improbably attributed to figures in remote antiquity and ending with works composed in the eighth century. Most fit into categories including poems about love and longing, grief and lamentation, travel, and nature. The vast majority of the entries, over four thousand, are short poems (tanka), with five lines in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern. This genre would remain dominant for many centuries, but the anthology also contains 265 long poems (chōka), rarely found in later anthologies of classical poetry.

One often-noted feature of the Man’yōshū is that many poems appear to have been written by people from different classes, including peasant farmers, frontier guards, and beggars, alongside those penned by emperors and other aristocrats. Such works address the difficulties of poverty or the loneliness of soldiers posted in the provinces, nostalgic for their homelands. Others employ rustic phrases or rural dialects. Modern scholars believe that they were actually written by courtiers posing in these roles, because members of other social classes generally lacked the necessary education to compose poetry. Nevertheless, the nonaristocratic perspective expressed in these works distinguishes them from later imperial anthologies.

The gifted poet Yamanoue no Okura (660–730), a court member of embassies to Tang China who is believed to be of Paekche origin, authored several poems describing a life of poverty. His long poem “Dialogue between Poverty and Destitution” begins as follows:

On nights when rain falls

Mingling with the blowing wind,

On nights when snow falls,

Mingling with the pouring rain,

I have no choice

But to endure the cold.

I eat lumpy salt,

Keep nibbling away at it,

Drink sake dregs,

Keeping sipping away at them,

Snuffle the snot in my nose,

Keep running my hand

Over my skimpy beard,

Boast to myself,

“Where is there to be found a better man?”

But I’m cold all the same. . . .⁶

Another of Okura’s verses poignantly depicts the predicament of a poor family when the main breadwinner has fallen ill:

By my pillowside

My father and my mother crouch,

And at my feet

My wife and children; thus am I

Surrounded by grief

And hungry, piteous cries.

But on the hearth

No kettle sends up clouds of steam

And in our pot

A spider spins its web.

We have forgotten

The very way of cooking rice;

Then where we huddle

There comes the voice

Of the village chief with his whip,

Standing, shouting for me,

There outside the place we sleep.⁷

Poems about love and romance often feel surprisingly contemporary, concisely capturing human feelings such as passion, longing, and regret, shared across time and space. An eighth-century poem attributed to a Princess Hirokawa describes being swept away by a new affair after experiencing the devastation of heartbreak:

I thought there could be

No more love left anywhere.

Whence then is come this love,

That has caught me now

And holds me in its grasp?⁸

An anonymous poem pleads for a visit from an indifferent lover, offering a view of the garden as enticement:

That you like me not

It may well be—

Yet will you not come

Even to see the orange tree

Abloom in my dooryard?⁹

A peasant farm girl awaits a nighttime rendezvous with her elite lover in the following short poem:

My hands, so chapped from

rice pounding

Tonight he will hold them

again, sighing,

my young lord of the mansion.¹⁰

An anonymous poem attributed to a frontier guard describes how the early winter season brings recollection of time spent with his wife:

I will think of you, love,

On evenings when the grey mist

Rises above the rushes,

And chill sounds the voice

Of the wild ducks crying.¹¹

The most well-known and celebrated poet of the Man’yōshū is Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, a court poet of middle rank who served three sovereigns from around 680 to 700. He is considered one of the “Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry,” a list of the most accomplished Japanese poets from the sixth to eleventh centuries. Hitomaro contributed nineteen long and seventy-five short poems to the Man’yōshū. He demonstrated a great range of subject matter, from commemorating activities of the imperial family to intimate expressions of romantic love. One of his finest poems in the collection, excerpted below, is the awkwardly titled “On Seeing the Body of a Man Lying among the Stones on the Island of Samine in Sanuki Province.” This moving verse recounts the experience of a typhoon in the Inland Sea and the speaker’s identification with, and pity for, one of the storm’s victims:

O the precious land of Sanuki,

Resting where the seaweed glows like gems! . . .

Having rushed our ship upon the breakers

From the port of Naka,

We came rowing steadily until the wind

That rises with the tides

Stormed down from the dwelling of the clouds. . . .

We sought haven on rugged Samine,

The isle so beautiful in name.

Erecting a little shelter, we looked about,

And then we saw you:

Pillowed upon your shaking beach,

Using those wave-beaten rocks

As if the coast were spread out for your bedding;

On such a rugged place

You have laid yourself to rest.

If I but knew your home,

I would go tell them where you sleep;

If your wife but knew this place,

She would come here searching for you,

But knowing nothing of the way—

The way straight as a jeweled spear—

How must she be waiting,

How anxiously now longing for you,

She so dear who was your wife.¹²

In summary, this period marked the consolidation of a centralized Japanese state that simultaneously drew upon continental models of kingship while developing its own indigenous conventions. Successive generations of the Yamato ruling clan attempted to strengthen their rule by adopting the norms of Chinese dynastic rule, such as court rank, a permanent capital, codified systems of penal and administrative law, and bureaucratic examinations. Native traditions, however, tempered reform attempts: hereditary privileges were preserved for uji elites, and the notion of a revocable divine mandate for the imperial family was rejected. Another route for strengthening authority was through the patronage and official sponsorship of Buddhism as protector of the imperial family and nation, resulting in a broad network of temples, including Nara’s impressive Tōdaiji. The poetry and historical chronicles of the era also reflect the duality of indigenous and continental influence, with the Kojiki and Man’yōshū written in the native tongue, using Chinese characters as a phonetic medium only, while the Nihon shoki and Kaifūsō were composed in classical Chinese.