Asuka period

In the sixth century the Soga clan, champions of Buddhism and managers of the court's finances and immigrant specialists, rose to dominate Yamato through marriage alliances with the royal line. In 587 Soga no Umako defeated the rival Mononobe clan, and in 592 he placed his niece Suiko on the throne, the first woman to rule in her own right. Her nephew Prince Umayado, known to posterity as Shōtoku Taishi, served as her regent; tradition credits him with the twelve cap ranks of 603, the Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604 and the missions to Sui China, though how much was his personal work is debated.

In 645 Prince Naka no Ōe and Nakatomi no Kamatari assassinated Soga no Iruka in the palace (the Isshi Incident) and launched the Taika Reform, which declared land and people subject to the throne and set out a programme of provinces, household registers and taxation. Defeat by a Tang–Silla alliance at the Battle of Hakusukinoe in 663 prompted fortifications in Kyushu and a move of the capital to Ōtsu. After the succession war of 672, the Jinshin War, Emperor Tenmu and his consort and successor Jitō completed the transformation: the title tennō, the name Nihon, the first planned capital Fujiwara-kyō (694) and the Taihō Code (701).

The goal of the reformers was a ritsuryō state – one governed by penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryō) codes on the Chinese pattern. The land was divided into provinces and districts under appointed governors; households were entered in registers, and farmland was allotted to cultivators in return for taxes in rice, cloth and local products, labour service and military conscription. A formal hierarchy of court ranks and ministries replaced the old system of hereditary clan titles, although the leading families simply took the highest posts.

In practice the system was built step by step over half a century and was never applied uniformly; household registers from the early eighth century, preserved in the Shōsōin, show how far it reached into village life in some regions.

According to the Nihon Shoki, the king of Baekje sent a gilt-bronze Buddha and sutras to the Yamato court; the Soga embraced the foreign faith, the Mononobe and Nakatomi opposed it, and the dispute became part of the struggle for power. After the Soga victory in 587 Buddhism spread rapidly among the elite. Asuka-dera, founded by Soga no Umako around 596, was the first full-scale temple complex, built by craftsmen from Baekje; by the end of the seventh century there were hundreds of temples.

Buddhism served the state as much as private devotion: temples prayed for the protection of the realm and the health of the ruler. At the same time kami worship was reorganised around the court, with the Ise shrines elevated as the shrine of the imperial ancestor and the first periodic rebuilding of Ise traditionally dated to 690 under Empress Jitō.

Art historians distinguish Asuka culture of the early seventh century, strongly shaped by the art of the Northern and Southern Dynasties as transmitted through Korea, from Hakuhō culture of the late seventh century, which reflects early Tang style. The Shaka Triad cast by the sculptor Tori Busshi in 623 for Hōryū-ji, with its elongated faces and archaic smiles, epitomises the first; the fuller, more naturalistic bronzes of Yakushi-ji the second.

Writing spread among officials and monks. Wooden tablets (mokkan) excavated in their hundreds of thousands at palace sites record taxes and messages, and the court poetry of this age, including the verses of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, was later collected in the Man'yōshū. The painted tombs of Takamatsuzuka and Kitora in Asuka, dated around 700, preserve murals of court figures, the four directional guardians and star charts.

The economy remained agrarian, but the state began to organise it: roads and post stations, official granaries and the first government-minted coins. The Fuhonsen coins of the late seventh century and the Wadō kaichin coins of 708 were used mainly around the capital; rice and cloth remained the usual media of exchange.

Foreign policy oscillated between learning and conflict. Missions to Sui (from 600, including that of Ono no Imoko in 607, whose letter famously addressed the Chinese emperor as an equal 'Son of Heaven') and from 630 to Tang brought back monks, scholars and books. Yamato's support for Baekje ended in defeat at Hakusukinoe in 663, after which the court built fortifications and the Dazaifu headquarters in northern Kyushu against possible invasion.

The Asuka period created the framework of the Japanese state: an emperor legitimised by divine descent and Buddhist protection, a bureaucracy of ranks and ministries, provinces that survived as geographical units until the nineteenth century, and the name Nihon, 'origin of the sun'. The Taihō Code and its revision of 718 remained formally in force until the Meiji era.

Many sites of the period can still be visited in and around the village of Asuka, often called the heartland of Japanese civilisation, and at Ikaruga, where Hōryū-ji preserves architecture and sculpture of the seventh century.