It was a time of court intrigue and power plays and rebellions.
The Nara Period lasted from 710 to 794, when Japan’s capital stood at Heijo-kyo, or present
day Nara.
Kyo means “capital.”
The Taika Reforms from decades before called for a permanent capital for Japan.
Then they procrastinated for 50 years, then said, “Alright, we should probably build
it now.
Let’s sign up for that salsa class too.”
So Nara is famous for being the site of Japan’s first permanent capital, but like my dating
profile, that’s not entirely accurate.
Traditionally, after the death of an emperor, a new capital would be built in a new location
for the next emperor.
This meant each emperor had his own capital city, because they thought early Japanese
history wasn’t complicated enough.
The reason for this practice could be that the emperor’s death was a polluting event,
remember the Japanese had this spiritual notion of purity.
Death was the dirtiest thing ever, so it would have polluted the old palace, and you can’t
have the new emperor stay in a dirty palace.
Another reason could be that they simply built the new capital at the home of the new emperor.
Empress Jito broke tradition in 694 when she ordered a new capital built at Fujiwara.
Fujiwara-kyo was different because it was designed after the capital of Tang China,
and it became the home of three successive rulers.
So you could say that Fujiwara-kyo was Japan’s first permanent capital.
In 710, the capital moved to Nara, kicking off the Nara Period with a grand palace complex.
This one was also modeled after China’s capital, and was the most impressive palace
they had built up to that point.
But the phenomenon of the moving capital did not end there.
It actually moved a few more times in the Nara Period.
In 740, Emperor Shomu moved the capital to Kuni.
Three years later, to Shiragaki.
And in 745, back to Nara.
Nara remained the capital until 784, when it moved to Nagaoka.
Finally in 794, it moved to Heian-kyo, marking the beginning of the Heian Period.
Heian-kyo came to be called Kyoto, and it would remain the capital of Japan for a thousand
years.
In the Nara Period, an infamous clan began to wrap its fingers around the Japanese court
by marrying their daughters to emperors and powerful nobles.
Nakatomi no Kamatari was the mastermind behind the Soga coup of 645.
He championed the policies of Emperor Tenji, a co-conspirator in said coup, for years afterwards.
Before Kamatari died, Emperor Tenji awarded him the surname of Fujiwara.
Thus began the Fujiwara clan.
Japan was moving towards a powerful centralized government with laws for administration and
punishment.
The emperor was becoming an increasingly influential position and the power struggles in court
were over who had control of the throne.
Kamatari’s descendants understood this.
The struggle was real.
There were rebellions, murders, and an attempt to overthrow a sitting empress.
So looks like politics back then was friendlier than it is today.
In the Nara Period, the Japanese did something that forced all Japanese historians to change
their pants.
They started writing.
The Japanese did write before that, the Chinese writing system was introduced in the prior
Asuka Period.
But it was in the Nara that writing took off.
The Nihon Shoki and Kojiki historical texts were published.
These works gave us Shinto myths and legends, histories, and legitimized the Imperial Family
by making them the descendants of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.
The Nihon Shoki was written in Chinese script.
Literacy at the time meant you knew how to read and write Chinese.
But we started seeing documents written in a hybrid script that borrowed Chinese characters
to represent the sounds of the Japanese oral language.
This Old Japanese script was used to write the Kojiki and a bunch of other stuff, including
the famous Man’yoshu, a collection of thousands of poems.
The amount of written documents exploded.
Letters, official records, population registries.
Poetry became all the rage among the aristocracy, because that’s what rich people do.
I write adult Harry Potter fanfic.
The time of female rulers came to an end in the Nara Period.
From 592 to 770, Japan had 8 empresses.
Six women in total, two of them ascended the throne twice.
We don’t know for sure how influential the empresses were.
Some scholars say they were used as political placeholders.
When rival factions in the Japanese court could not decide on an emperor, they would
enthrone an empress for the time being.
They could have also used this tactic to foil the ambitions of popular rival candidates.
Other historians hold that female rulers were not all that different from male rulers.
The truth was probably somewhere in the middle.
There were examples of empresses engaging in political games.
Retired empress Koken actually had a sitting emperor exiled, then retook the throne.
By the end of the Nara Period, the Japanese had built much of the structure of Japanese
society and government.
The Taika Reforms kicked off a series of changes that transformed Japan from a loose collection
of clans into a proper state.
The clans were still powerful, don’t get me wrong, but they became powerful players
within the larger state.
The system of provinces and provincial governors created in this time stayed mostly unchanged
for a thousand years until the Meiji era.
And don’t forget the religious and political ideas that were formed to elevate and protect
the emperor.
They spread Buddhist sutras that propped up the emperor,
adopted Chinese philosophy about what makes up the ideal state,
and made official the native beliefs claiming divine ancestry
for the Imperial Family.
Many of the societal and political systems built in the Nara Period would remain throughout
most of Japanese history.
Hellooo.
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