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  • Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’ s Premodern Capital by Matthew Stavros
  • Ellen Van Goethem
Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’ s Premodern Capital. By Matthew Stavros. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 256pages. Hardcover $47.00; softcover $29.00.

With the publication of Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital, Matthew Stavros has provided a useful example of how attention to the built environment opens up new vantage points from which to examine history, making possible fresh interpretations concerning a variety of topics and phenomena. This ambitious book gives a panoramic overview of Kyoto’s urban history, from the city’s foundation by Kanmu Tennō in the late eighth century up to the dawn of the early modern era in the sixteenth century. It constitutes the first monographic history of premodern Kyoto written in English since 1931, when four of Richard Ponsonby-Fane’s earlier articles were collected in the classic yet woefully unreliable Kyoto: The Old Capital of Japan, 794–1869. Richly illustrated, easily accessible, and supported by a dedicated website (www.kyotohistory.com), this is a solid work of scholarship that, despite a few deficiencies that I shall discuss below, makes significant contributions to the field and deserves a wide readership.

At the core of Stavros’s study is an interesting distinction between “public authority” and “private power.” In the author’s words, “the former refers to the formal, statutory, and ultimately abstract efficacy of the state (or emperor) while the latter signifies the real-world influence of individuals or institutions with access to massive wealth and vast networks of personal allegiance” (p. xix). Stavros argues that Kyoto’s founders envisioned the capital and its architecture as material embodiments of public authority, powerful symbols, and constant reminders of the transcendent efficacy of the state and the emperor. Despite the rapid disintegration of imperial influence and the decisive shift of power into the hands of private political actors, the ruling elite continued to reinforce a discourse about Kyoto being an exclusive domain where the state remained relevant. Stavros holds that such an anachronistic and, in time, utterly unrealistic practice, was similar to that which motivated the sustained coveting of imperial ranks and posts.

Chapter 1, “Heian-kyō: The Ideal,” sets the stage by outlining the relationship between Kyoto’s original urban plan, official architecture, and authority. It describes how Kanmu meant for Kyoto to be a testament to a strong, centralized, Chinese-style polity. Land was divided systematically into identical blocks and allocated according to status. The section that explains how the city’s famous grid pattern was created through the alignment of blocks reveals how planners sought to correct equity problems that plagued earlier capitals. Notions about functional purity informed what Stavros labels “taboos” proscribing the existence of religious institutions, warriors, and burial in the capital. Though he is right about there being no sectarian (or [End Page 394] what he calls “institutionalized”) religious structures in the city, there was certainly a prominent Buddhist presence in the two official temples of Tōji and Saiji as well as in the court chapel (Naidōjō, Shingon’in) within the imperial palace. Throughout the chapter, the emphasis is on how official structures were symbols of formal status and prescribed venues of ritualized statecraft. Stavros claims that “where people lived, what they built, and how they interacted with the cityscape were guided by principles of status, propriety, and precedent” (p. 3). As the fullest and least romanticized description of the Heian-era city written in English, this chapter will be enlightening to many readers. The many maps, color illustrations, and diagrams enrich the narrative and will be useful for anyone teaching on the history or culture of the Heian period. Nevertheless, caution is needed with the map indicating locations of Chinese-style capitals (p. 5, figure 1.1), because “Asuka-kyō” was by no means laid out on a grid, nor was it a “capital”—or even a “city”—in the same sense as the later locations on the map. Moreover, the dates of the second stage of the Heijō capital are missing, leaving a four-decade gap in the chronology. A final criticism on this...

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