The death of Prince Shōtoku in 622 prevented his ideals of government from bearing full fruit. The Soga family, regaining its former powers, killed Shōtoku’s son Yamashiro Ōe and all his family in 643. At the same time, however, the students whom Shōtoku had sent to China were returning to Japan with accounts of the power and efficiency of the Tang 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 between Silla, Paekche, and Koguryŏ continued; Koguryŏ had contributed to the downfall of Sui by defeating two massive campaigns launched against it and remained an implacable foe of Tang. 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 Ōe 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 nengō (“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 Tang (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 Tang-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 Ōe, who, ascending the throne as the emperor Tenji, directed his attention to domestic affairs. He built fortifications in Kyushu to prepare for an expected Tang 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 Shintō 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 ritsuryō political structure emerged.

The ritsuryō system

The ritsuryō system refers to the governmental structure defined by ritsu, the criminal code, and ryō, the administrative and civil codes. Such a system had long been in force in China, and the Japanese ritsuryō was an imitation of the lüling of Tang 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 Taihō Code of 701 and its successor, the Yōrō Code of 718.

Under the ritsuryō 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 (Dajōkan), 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 ritsuryō system was not too bound by its provisions to provide special favors for men of high rank and good family. This too was a compromise between the new principles of the ritsuryō 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 kōri, or gun (county), and the sato, or ri (village), to be administered by officials known as kokushi, gunji, and richō, respectively. The posts of kokushi were filled by members of the central bureaucracy in turn, but the posts of gunji and richō 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 labor, 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 labor for those living in distant parts. Adult males were also obliged to give military service and to provide labor 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 Shintō 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 ritsuryō 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 by 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 ritsuryō system began to crumble, and as it did so, the whole system of government grew increasingly shaky.