If the 5th century represents an expansion of power throughout the archipelago, it also was a time of involvement in Korean affairs, as the struggle for peninsular hegemony intensified. At the time of Yamato's expedition against Koguryo in the late 4th century, Paekche and Yamato found themselves allied against Silla or Koguryo (or both); while the latter looked to northern Chinese kingdoms for support and legitimation, Yamato and Paekche usually turned to southern China. In fact, Yamato dispatched some 10 embassies to the Southern Sung between 421 and 478.
Paekche was frequently attacked by Koguryo during the century, prompting continued requests for assistance from Yamato; it is recorded that Paekche even sent a crown prince to Yamato as a hostage on one occasion and the mother of the king on another. Yet, probably because of internal dissension, Yamato did not dispatch any troops to the peninsula, although a lengthy memorial sent with the embassy of 478 and presented to the Southern Sung emperor requested that the Yamato king Yuryaku be appointed commander of a large army being raised for dispatch against Koguryo.
Yamato's interest in Korea was apparently a desire for access to improved continental technology and resources, especially iron, which was especially plentiful near the lower reaches of the Naktong River in the south. Yamato apparently gained a modicum of power in this region, controlled by the league of the Kaya (Japanese: Mimana) states between Paekche and Silla, though the exact relationship--whether ally or tributary--is unclear. But in the 6th century, Silla became militarily powerful, and Yamato faced several reversals in the area, ultimately being driven entirely from the peninsula when Silla annexed the Kaya league in 562.
Japanese Buddhist Temple
The 6th century, in fact, represented a decline of Yamato power both at home and abroad. It was also marked by another shift of the court, this time back to the old region around Mount Miwa sometime late in the reign of Keitai (507-c. 531). From Keitai's reign there was a marked reduction in royal power. A large force assembled to be sent against Silla, for example, had to be detoured to Kyushu in 527 to put down the rebellion of a local chieftain named Iwai, who had apparently refused to raise soldiers and supplies for the continental campaign. That campaign on the continent also ended in defeat, signaling the decline of Yamato power. The rest of the 6th century can be characterized by the growing accumulation of power by regional clan leaders and a weakening of royal power, as well as the rise of new clans, mostly of recent continental origin, who managed technical service groups.
Chief among them were the Soga, who under the successive chieftains Iname and his son Umako rose to positions of dominance at court. Possessed of administrative and technical skills, especially in the fiscal area, the Soga established marriage connections with the royal house that permitted them considerable influence at court. The Soga are also known as sponsors of Buddhism at the Yamato court. Ultimately, the Soga clan eclipsed all other clans at court, especially after the destruction of the Mononobe clan in a major battle in 587, and dominated the political scene. By the end of the 6th century, Japan had reached a low point in both foreign and domestic affairs.
During the declining years of the Yamato court, however, there was one event of the utmost cultural importance: the introduction of Buddhism from Paekche. The date of its introduction is traditionally set at either 538 or 552, but it seems likely that Buddhist beliefs had begun spreading among the Japanese at a much earlier date. Buddhism at first was an object of wonder and admiration, a rare item of foreign culture symbolized by its beautiful statuary, its imposing religious paraphernalia, and its majestic temples. The Buddhism that first spread among the Japanese was almost certainly a simple reliance on the magical aspects of the religion in seeking various benefits in the present world. It was regarded as especially important in protecting the state. A true understanding of its doctrines did not come until the time of Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Taishi).
The idealized government of Prince Shotoku
The Yamato court was resuscitated by efforts made within the royal family itself, efforts that in the course of a century reformed the government of the country and set it moving toward formation of a centralized state more suited to the new age. This era is sometimes called the Asuka period for the region south of modern Nara where the royal courts were located. The movement was touched off by the theories of ideal government expounded by Prince Shotoku. Shotoku served as regent for his aunt, the empress Suiko (ruled 592-628), who was enthroned after the murder of her predecessor, Sushun (it was during Suiko's reign that the term tenno, or emperor, was adopted). Shotoku took the Buddhist principles of peace and salvation for all beings as the ideal underlying his government. He made no move, even, to charge the murderer of Sushun but worked to convince him gradually, through the ideas of Buddhism, of the wrong he had done. The prince's political policies, however, were based squarely on Chinese Confucian ideals.
The prince's most striking domestic achievements were the establishment of a system of 12 court ranks in 603 and the Seventeen-Article Constitution in 604. The former, which made clear the relative stations of court officials by giving them caps of different colours, aimed to encourage the appointment of men of ability and give the court a proper organization and etiquette of its own. The ranks themselves were named for Confucian values--virtue, humanity, decorum, faith, righteousness, and knowledge, each in greater and lesser grades.
The constitution set forth the ideals of the state and rules for human conduct. It distinguished the ruler, government ministers, and the people as the three human elements making up the state and clearly laid down the duties and rights of each; it thus established the ideal of a centralized state presided over by a single ruler, and it provided a kind of basic law of the nation. The document not only shows the influence of Buddhism--of which the prince can be counted as the first major propagator in Japan--but it also embodies many of the ethical and political doctrines of Confucian government, long since established in China and subsequently implemented in the kingdoms on the Korean peninsula as well. By borrowing the ideas and vocabulary of continental government, Shotoku attempted to buttress the legitimacy of the royal house, which had suffered diminution at the hands of great clans.
Shotoku's chief achievement in foreign relations was the opening of relations with the Sui dynasty (581-618) of China. The exchanges between Japan and China in the 5th century had placed Japan in the position of a tributary state. Prince Shotoku opened relations with Sui on an equal basis, supposedly shocking the Chinese emperor by addressing him as the ruler of the nation "where the sun sets," while he was the ruler of the nation "where the sun rises." Envoys were exchanged by the two countries. He also sent Japanese students to China to learn directly from Chinese culture, which had hitherto reached Japan via the states of Korea. Shotoku was a profound student of Buddhism who gave lectures on the scriptures and himself wrote commentaries. His commentary on the Lotus Sutra, four volumes of which survive in the original draft written by the prince himself, may be called the oldest written work of known authorship in Japan.
As Buddhism gained ground, imposing temples were built in the Chinese style. The astonishment aroused by these great wooded buildings--often built with more than one story and with massive tiled roofs, where previously there had been only low, thatched houses, may well be imagined. A new civilization descended on Japan almost overnight. Of the temples built at the time, all that has survived of most of them are the foundation stones, but the Horyu Temple, founded between 601 and 607 at Ikaruga in present Nara prefecture, still preserves its ancient wooden structures; its extant buildings, dating from the late 7th and early 8th centuries, are the oldest wooden structures in the world.
The Taika reforms
The death of Prince Shotoku in 622 prevented his ideals of government from bearing full fruit. The Soga family, regaining its former powers, killed Shotoku's son Yamashiro Oe and all his family in 643. At the same time, however, the students whom Shotoku had sent to China were returning to Japan with accounts of the power and efficiency of the T'ang dynasty (618-907), which had overthrown the Sui dynasty and unified China. These accounts impressed on educated men the need to reform the government, strengthen the power of the state, and take every step to prepare against possible pressure from outside.
East Asia remained in a state of turmoil. The fierce competition for peninsular dominance among Silla, Paekche, and Koguryo continued; Koguryo had contributed to the downfall of Sui by defeating two massive campaigns launched against it and remained an implacable foe of T'ang. It was not idle worry that Japan might itself be drawn into the conflict. Thus, pressures for a cohesive, unified state were strong.
In 645 Prince Nakano Oe and Nakatomi Kamatari engineered a coup d'état within the palace, killing the Soga family and wiping out all forces opposed to the imperial family. They then set about establishing a system of centralized government with the emperor as absolute monarch at its head. An edict issued in 646 abolished private ownership of land and people by powerful uji. The land thus taken over by the state was to be allocated among all who had attained a certain age, with the right to cultivate, in exchange for which the tenants were to pay a fixed tax. Provisions also were made for a governmental system embracing a capital city and local administration and for defense and communications facilities. A system also was established whereby a kind of "complaint box" was installed at court to give people a chance to appeal directly to the emperor. The main outlines of the reforms were drawn up in about five years. They are given the name Taika reforms for the nengo ("year name")--the first such in Japanese history--that was given to the era at that time. In the countries of East Asia, era names are a symbol of an independent nation, a sign that the sovereign's authority is effective.
Not long after the Taika reforms, Japan did, in fact, become involved in a dispute that led it to again send troops to Korea. Paekche, whose capital fell in 660 to the combined forces of T'ang (China) and Silla, called on Japan for help. Japan, which had traditionally been friendly with Paekche, sent a large army; it was crushed, however, in 663, by a T'ang-Silla army at the mouth of the Kum River. Japan withdrew entirely and gave up any further intervention on the Korean peninsula. The Japanese ruler of the time, the empress Saimei, went to northern Kyushu and directed operations personally, even though she was already 67 at the time.
Saimei was succeeded by Prince Nakano Oe, who, ascending the throne as the emperor Tenji, directed his attention to domestic affairs. He built fortifications in Kyushu to prepare for an expected T'ang and Silla invasion and amended the system established by the Taika reforms so as to make it more suitable to the practical needs of the state. Upon Tenji's death, a fierce succession dispute erupted into warfare between the supporters of his younger brother and those of his uncle. His younger brother was victorious, and, as the emperor Temmu, he, like his brother, devoted his energies to strengthening imperial government. He upgraded the status of the Shinto shrine at Ise, making it the fountainhead of the dynasty's legitimacy; propagated Buddhism nationwide as a means of protecting and strengthening the state; ordered the compilation of official histories to enhance the prestige of the nation and, consequently, the dynasty; and had the Taika reforms codified as the Asuka Kiyomihara Code, from which the ritsuryo political structure emerged.
The ritsuryo system refers to the governmental structure defined by ritsu, the criminal code, and ryo, the administrative and civil codes. Such a system had long been in force in China, and the Japanese ritsuryo was an imitation of the lü-ling of T'ang China and incorporated many of its original articles. Where different local conditions called for amendment, however, they were made without hesitation; it is a good early example of the skill of the Japanese in adapting foreign culture. The features were first delineated in rough form in the Taika edicts, but then were refined--perhaps first by Tenji in the Omi Code and then by Temmu--and certainly given final form in the Taiho Code of 701 and its successor, the Yoro Code of 718.
Under the ritsuryo system, the Japanese emperor, for example, was in some respects an absolute monarch who ruled over the whole country as the head of a bureaucracy in the same manner as the emperor of China. Yet at the same time, he was also the traditional high priest who maintained peace for the land and people by paying tribute to the deities and sounding out their will. Thus, the central government was headed by twin agencies--the Council of State (Dajokan), which combined within its functions the various practical aspects of administration, and the Office of Deities (Jingikan), a parallel bureaucracy for the worship of the deities.
Prospective bureaucrats were required to study at a central college and to pass prescribed examinations; during their term of office their performance was subjected to scrutiny once a year, and their rank and position were adjusted in accordance with the results. The recruitment of officials via examination was based on the highly developed bureaucratic system of China, yet the ritsuryo system was not too bound by its provisions to provide special favours for men of high rank and good family. This, too, was a compromise between the new principles of the ritsuryo system and the old spirit of respect for birth. In fact, the examinations were soon dropped. The provinces were divided into three types of administrative division: the kuni, or koku (province), the kori, or gun (county), and the sato, or ri (village), to be administered by officials known as kokushi, gunji, and richo, respectively. The posts of kokushi were filled by members of the central bureaucracy in turn, but the posts of gunji and richo were staffed by members of prominent local families.
The people were divided into two main classes, freemen and slaves. The slaves were the possession of the government, the aristocracy, and the shrines and temples; as such, they were obliged to provide unlimited labour, but their total number accounted for less than one-tenth of the population. The majority of the free population were farmers. At the age of six, each male child was apportioned paddy fields that remained his to cultivate for life. A tax was levied on the produce of the paddies, and a head tax was levied on adult males. The paddy field tax was low (about 3 percent of the crop), but the head tax, payable in handicrafts such as silk and hemp, imposed a heavy burden.
Moreover, the transport of the goods from the provinces to the capital was the responsibility of the taxed, which involved an enormous labour for those living in distant parts. Adult males were also obliged to give military service and to provide labour for public works at the command of the local kokushi, amounting to not more than 60 days per year. Since the government's finances depended on such tribute from the common people, whenever the latter found the burden too much and fled to avoid paying taxes, government revenues quickly declined.
The lowest-ranking freemen were the groups of smiths, tanners, and others engaged in manufacturing. They were mostly the descendants of those with be status who inherited their trades and paid their taxes in the form of manufactured goods or by working for fixed periods in the government workshops.
All land was, in principle, the property of the state. Most of the land was distributed equally among the people, but, apart from this, land of a certain annual yield was given to bureaucrats and other high-ranking persons as stipends and to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples as sources of revenue. Land other than paddy fields was left to individuals to use as they pleased. There was a need to open up new paddy fields as a means of providing for a growing population, but the ritsuryo system made inadequate provision for this process. In fact, the complex taxation and allotment system discouraged the heavy investment necessary to open new paddy fields.
Ultimately, the government had to encourage the opening up of new land by offering incentives; and in 743 the law was changed to allow permanent private possession of land to the person who had first put it under cultivation. As a result, the aristocrats and the shrines and temples set about putting land under cultivation in order to increase their own privately owned territories. The principle of public ownership of land provided for in the ritsuryo system began to crumble, and as it did so the whole system of government grew increasingly shaky.
Beginning of the imperial state
In 710 the imperial capital was shifted a short distance from Asuka to Nara. For the next 75 years, with minor gaps, Nara was the seat of government, and the old custom of changing the capital with each successive emperor was finally discarded. During this period, the centralized government provided for under the ritsuryo structure worked reasonably well; it was a time of atypical social mobility based on merit, where those with Chinese learning or Buddhist knowledge enjoyed access to power. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature is the brilliant flowering of culture, especially Buddhist culture. The leaders in its promotion were the emperor Shomu and his consort, Komyo. Immediately on his accession, Shomu--who from childhood had been given a thorough schooling as future emperor--showed an eager concern to promote the stable livelihood of the people. Convinced that the Buddhist faith was a means to ensure both the happiness of the individual and peace for the country as a whole, he introduced strong doses of Buddhism into his government.
One of the measures he took was the founding of the provincial temples known as kokubunji. Each province was to build a monastery (kokubunji) and a nunnery (kokubun niji), each with a seven-story pagoda and each housing a statue of the Sakyamuni Buddha. Each monastery was to have 20 monks, each nunnery 10 nuns, whose constant task would be to recite the scriptures and offer up prayers for the welfare of the nation. Just as the temporal world had its kokushi (governors) in each province to attend to its administrative and juridical matters, so the spiritual world would have officially appointed monks and nuns, distributed evenly among the provinces, to attend to the spiritual needs of the people.
The second measure taken by Shomu was the construction of the Todai Temple as kokubunji of the capital and the installation within it of a huge bronze figure of the Vairocana Buddha as supreme guardian deity of the nation. The casting of the Great Buddha (Daibutsu) was a tremendously difficult task; but the emperor called on the people at large to contribute to the project, in however humble a way, and thereby partake of the grace of the Buddha. The great image that was produced as a result, though damaged in later ages, still stands in the Todai Temple and is famous the world over as the Great Buddha of Nara. The court also tried to attract Chinese monks to Nara. The most important of these was Ganjin (Chinese: Chien-chen), who finally reached Nara in 753 on his sixth attempt and founded the Ritsu sect at Toshodai Temple.
The marriage of Buddhism and politics that was Shomu's ideal was to cause trouble after his death. The temples gradually amassed vast wealth, and the monks acquired high political positions and began to interfere in secular affairs. A movement to counter such abuses arose among the aristocracy, the leaders of the movement being the Fujiwara family, descendants of Nakatomi Kamatari, who had played such an important role in the Taika reforms. Kamatari and his son Fuhito (both later given the surname Fujiwara) had supervised compilation of the Taiho and Yoro codes that formalized the ritsuryo system and had become prominent figures at court as a new type of bureaucrat-noble. Moreover, Shomu's marriage to Fuhito's second daughter (who became known as the empress Komyo) created the precedent for a marital relationship with the imperial house that was to last throughout much of premodern Japanese history. The subsequent progress of the family's fortunes in the Nara period was not always smooth, however.
In particular, the emphasis on Buddhism undercut the family's influence. At the end of the 8th century, the powerful priest-premier Dokyo rose to a position of undisputed hegemony under Shomu's daughter, who reigned twice, as the empress Koken and then as Shotoku; and Fujiwara nobles feared that the priestly domination of government threatened the future of the nation. Ousting Dokyo following the death of the empress, they set on the throne a new emperor, Konin, who was less enthralled with Buddhism. Konin's son, the emperor Kammu, who was of a similar mind, shifted the capital first to Nagaoka and in 794 to Heian (or Heian-kyo; present Kyoto) to sever connections with the temples of Nara and reestablished government in accordance with the ritsuryo system. Kammu's accession also represented a shift from the descendants of the emperor Temmu back to those of Tenji, whose base of power was located in Yamashiro province, the site of the new capital.
The cultural flowering centring on Buddhism was an outcome of lively exchanges with other nations. Four times within 70 years the government sent official missions to the T'ang court, each mission accompanied by a large number of students who went to study in China. By this time T'ang had formed a great empire that controlled not only the central plains of China but parts of Mongolia and Siberia to the north and of Central Asia to the west.
Nara culture, borrowing from the T'ang, whose capital, Ch'ang-an, was a great international city, evinced a marked international flavour itself. The consecration ceremony of the Great Buddha of Todai Temple, for example, was conducted by a Brahman high priest born in India, while the music was played by musicians from throughout East Asia. But despite this internationalism, respect was also shown for traditional Japanese cultural forms. An outstanding example of this respect is the collection of Japanese verse known as Man'yoshu (c. 8th century AD), an anthology of 4,500 poems both ancient and contemporary. Poets represented in the anthology range over all classes of society, from the emperor and members of the imperial family through the aristocracy and the priesthood to farmers, soldiers, and prostitutes; and the scenery celebrated in the verse represents districts throughout the country. The poems deal directly and powerfully with basic human themes, such as love between men and women or between parents and children, and are deeply imbued with the traditional spirit of Japan, scarcely influenced at all by Buddhist or Confucian ideas. The anthology had immense influence on all subsequent Japanese culture.
The compilation of Japan's two most ancient histories, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, also took place at the beginning of the 8th century. Both works are extremely important, for they draw on oral or written traditions handed down from much earlier times. The histories--a combination of myth, folk belief, and, as they near the contemporary age, historical fact--were highly political in nature: by stressing the connection between the imperial family and the sun goddess (Amaterasu), they provided a written legitimation of the rule of the imperial house. By purposely dating Japanese history back as far as 660 BC, the compilers sought to raise the level of national sophistication in Chinese and Korean eyes.
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