Nara period

Government rested on the ritsuryō system inherited from the Asuka period, with the Council of State (Daijōkan) at its head. Real power alternated between the imperial family and the rising Fujiwara clan, descendants of Fujiwara no Kamatari. His son Fujiwara no Fuhito shaped the law codes and married his daughters into the imperial house; his grandson Emperor Shōmu was the first sovereign born of a Fujiwara mother.

The period was punctuated by crises. A smallpox epidemic in 735–737 killed perhaps a quarter or more of the population, including all four Fujiwara brothers who led the government. Fujiwara no Hirotsugu rebelled in Kyushu in 740, and Shōmu moved the capital repeatedly before returning to Nara in 745. Under his daughter, who reigned twice as Kōken and Shōtoku, the monk Dōkyō gained such influence that an oracle of 769 was said to name him as successor to the throne – an episode that ended with his exile and hardened resistance to clerical influence at court. Emperor Kanmu left Nara in 784 for Nagaoka-kyō and then in 794 for Heian-kyō.

Heijō-kyō measured about 4.3 by 4.8 km, with an eastern extension, and housed the court, officials, temples and markets – a city of perhaps a hundred thousand people. Most of the population, however, lived as farmers in the provinces, bearing heavy obligations in rice tax, local products, corvée labour and conscription. Many fled their allotted land, and famine and epidemics were frequent.

To increase cultivation, the government allowed reclaimed land to be held for three generations (723) and then permanently (743). Temples and aristocratic families used these rules to build up private estates, the origin of the shōen system that would erode state control in the Heian period. The court minted coins, but rice and cloth remained the main media of exchange outside the capital. In the northeast, the state fortified its frontier against the Emishi at Taga Castle, founded in 724.

Buddhism in the Nara period was above all a religion of state protection. In 741 Shōmu ordered every province to build a monastery and a nunnery (kokubunji and kokubunniji), and in 743 he announced the casting of a giant bronze Vairocana Buddha. The statue, about 15 m tall, was consecrated at Tōdai-ji in 752 in a ceremony attended by monks from as far as India. Six scholastic schools – among them Kegon, Hossō and Ritsu – studied doctrine in the great temples of the capital, and the Chinese monk Jianzhen (Ganjin), who reached Japan in 753 after several failed voyages, established a proper ordination platform and founded Tōshōdai-ji.

Kami worship was integrated into the state through the Department of Divinities (Jingikan) and official rites. The Fujiwara clan's shrine Kasuga Taisha, founded in 768, stood beside its temple Kōfuku-ji, and the first shrine-temples (jingūji) signalled the growing combination of kami and buddhas.

The court commissioned Japan's first books. The Kojiki (712) retold myths and legends in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese; the Nihon Shoki (720), in classical Chinese, presented an official history from the age of the gods to 697. Provincial gazetteers (fudoki) were ordered in 713, and the Kaifūsō (751) collected Chinese poetry by Japanese authors.

The Man'yōshū, compiled in its final form after 759, probably by Ōtomo no Yakamochi, gathers about 4,500 poems by emperors, courtiers, soldiers and commoners, written with Chinese characters used for their sound (man'yōgana). Its imagery of seasons and plum blossom supplied the name of the Reiwa era in 2019. The Tenpyō culture of the mid-eighth century is preserved above all in the Shōsōin, the log storehouse of Tōdai-ji, whose objects – lutes, glassware, textiles, mirrors, documents – include pieces from Tang China, Central Asia and Persia.

Nara preserves more eighth-century buildings and sculpture than any other place in East Asia. Eight properties in the city form the World Heritage site Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara.

The Nara period fixed many enduring features of Japanese civilisation: the imperial myths recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the close bond between Buddhism and political authority, the classical poetry of the Man'yōshū, and a capital-centred aristocratic culture. The move away from Nara in 784 was partly motivated by the wish to escape the power of its great monasteries, which nevertheless remained influential for centuries.

Nara itself, no longer a capital, survived as a temple town. Its monuments, deer and ancient forest make it the most complete window onto the eighth century anywhere in East Asia.