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The spring of 701 was a momentous time for the Japanese court. In the first month, after a hiatus of thirty-two years, the government reaffirmed an earlier decision to learn directly from China by sending an embassy to the Tang dynasty. Ten more official missions traveled to Chinese capitals during the next 150 years to report on East Asia’s most advanced civilization. Then, in the third month of 701, aristocrats finished compiling the Taihö Code, Japan’s initial comprehensive edition of Chinese law. Anxious to increase its power at home and fearful of invasion from abroad, the court sought more thorough control of the archipelago’s land and people through the institutions of Taihö. From 710 to 784, the grand new capital at Nara served as a symbol of the court’s emulation of Chinese civilization. Measuring about 5.5 kilometers east to west and 4.5 kilometers north to south, Heijö (as Nara was also known) seemed like a fitting monument to the majesty and grandeur of the new imperial institution. Nara was hardly alone, however. Before it was constructed, there had been Fujiwara (694–710), Naniwa, and Ötsu; Kuni and Shigaraki were capitals for a brief interlude (740–745); and both Nagaoka (784–794) and Heian (794–1868) were home to the ruling family after Nara. If anything epitomized the elite’s indebtedness to Chinese civilization and statecraft during the late seventh and eighth centuries, it was these magnificent cities. Japanese historians have long grappled with two related questions concerning the archipelago’s Chinese-style capitals. First, how did planners and politicians adapt the thousand-year-old Chinese idea of a large, symmetrical capital to their land? Second, how completely was the government able to con1 2 3 C a p i t a l s c h a p t e r 3 struct these giant urban centers? The sustained efforts of Japan’s archaeologists have made it possible to examine these important problems in greater detail than ever before. O u t l i n e o f P r e v i o u s R e s e a r c h Unlike the study of Yamatai or early Korea-Japan relations, writing on the archipelago’s palaces and Chinese-style capitals has lacked any single overarching argument and has been free of major controversy.1 Historians and geographers working in the Edo period were the first to turn their attention to this subject, and usually they concentrated on such problems as the location and plan for a palace or city. Before the Meiji Restoration, Kitaura Sadamasa, a scholar of National Learning, used old records in an effort to infer the size and layout of Nara; he actually walked the area of Heijö and proposed the existence of the Northern Grid (hoppen) to the northwest of the palace.2 Two Neo-Confucians debated the exact placement of Naniwa and Ötsu, while National Learning devotees Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga studied Fujiwara.3 Capitals received little attention from historians and other specialists before 1900. The exception was Kyoto, which had served as home to the emperor during the Edo period and held a wealth of primary sources, including maps surviving from earlier epochs. For the first time a historian queried why the court had moved to Heian from Nara in the late eighth century. On the eleven hundredth anniversary of the founding of Heian in 1894, architects reconstructed the imperial palace from plans and other materials in Kyoto and oversaw the erection of Heian Shrine based on their model.4 Between 1900 and 1920, the study of Japan’s ancient capitals and palaces became a major scholarly undertaking. Kita Sadakichi (1871–1939) was most responsible for this heightened interest. In 1915, he published August Capitals (Teito), which rose above narrow antiquarian concerns to look into larger problems arising from Japan’s borrowing of Chinese civilization. Among Kita’s lasting accomplishments were these: his assertion that Naniwa under Emperor Kötoku (645–654) was Japan’s first Chinese-style palace; his discovery that Japan, like China, had had more than one capital at a time; his detailed comparisons of Heian and Heijö with the Chinese cities of Chang-an and Luo-yang; and his discussion of why Japan’s political centers had had no outer walls.5 Kita followed Japanese tradition by using historical geography to describe each capital, and his inferences proved invaluable to later scholars. In research 1...

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