Japan: The Story of a Nation

PREFACE

This book on the history of Japan has acquired quite a history itself. It had its inception in a series of four or five hours of lectures which I, as a lieutenant-colonel in the United States Army, occasionally gave to officer candidates in the army intelligence training program conducted in the Pentagon Building in Washington during World War II. It occurred to me that, if I could present a reasonably useful picture of Japanese history orally in four or five hours, I should be able to do the same in brief written form. This I undertook to do during the few weeks following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, when my intelligence activities suddenly lost their meaning and while I was waiting for a special release from the army in order to join the Department of State for policy planning work on Japan and Korea. I wrote virtually without reference to books, believing that the forgetting of minor details about Japanese history during my years of war service would help make the essentials stand out in my mind all the more clearly.

The result was a very thin, small volume entitled Japan: Past and Present. As the years passed, however, Japan changed rapidly, and the present became quite different from Japan at the time of the surrender. There was clearly a need to bring the book up to date. Lengthening perspective on the war and prewar years also kept showing Japan in new lights, and I had learned more about the whole of Japanese history. As a consequence, I started on a long series of revisions and extensions of the original work.

Japan: Past and Present appeared in revised and expanded editions in 1952 and 1964, the second written while I was recuperating in a hospital in Hawaii from an almost fatal stabbing I experienced while serving as the American ambassador to Japan. When I wrote still another updated and expanded revision in 1970, I made such extensive alterations throughout the book that I changed its title to Japan: The Story of a Nation. This I brought up to date again in revised editions in 1974 and 1981. In the 1981 revision I made the greatest changes of all, rewriting practically the whole of the book. Since 1981 the rate of change in Japan has slowed considerably while the attitude of the outside world toward Japan has changed enormously and at remarkable speed. This has necessitated in the present edition an extensive rewriting of large parts of the book as well as an addition of almost a decade of new materials.

To attempt to thank all those who have given me aid in the many editions of this book or the host of scholars on whose work I have drawn would be quite impossible. I shall limit myself to mentioning two people who have been particularly helpful in this latest revision. They are Professor Albert Craig, who has given me several very useful suggestions, and Ms. Ellie Rutledge, who bore the brunt of typing the manuscript and checking points of detail.

Edwin O. Reischauer

PART ONE

TRADITIONAL JAPAN

1

LAND AND PEOPLE

Japan has long had one of the world’s most distinctive and sophisticated cultures, and today it is an economic giant—the second or third largest in the world, standing at or near the forefront of many of the great advances of human civilization. This record is all the more remarkable when one considers Japan’s smallness in size and population as compared to the United States, Soviet Union, China, and India. Japan was all but ignored by the world at large only a century and a half ago. Thus the amazing story of its rise to its current prominence must be attributed largely to the Japanese people themselves.

Japan is not as large as France or even the single American state of California, though it is only fair to point out that it is larger than either Italy or the British Isles, the homes of the two greatest empires the Western world has ever seen. It is extremely mountainous, rising to the beautiful volcanic cone of Mt. Fuji, 12,389 feet high. Less than a fifth of its not particularly fertile terrain is level enough for cultivation. Thus it is much smaller in usable land than it appears on the map, and it is not blessed with many mineral resources either. Today it is dependent on foreign imports for more than 90 percent of its energy resources, mostly in the form of oil, almost all its minerals, and much of its food.

Japan’s chief natural assets are its plentiful rainfall and temperate climate, which encourages an energetic way of life. In latitude, it parallels the East Coast of the United States from New England to Georgia, with most of the larger cities at about the level of North Carolina. The climate is comparable to that of the American East Coast, except that, being located several hundred miles out in the ocean, Japan experiences somewhat less extreme temperatures in both winter and summer and receives considerably more precipitation as rain or snow.

Making full use of this abundant water, the Japanese, during the past two millennia, have laboriously constructed an intricate system of channels to convert wherever possible every piece of cultivatable land into irrigated rice paddies. These irrigated fields, combined with a long growing season, hot summers, hard work, and great agricultural skills, have made the Japanese the most productive farmers per acre in the world. About half the country can grow two crops a year—one of rice, the other of some other grain or vegetable. This intensive agricultural pattern has permitted Japan to maintain a larger population than any Western European nation since at least medieval times. Extensive irrigation controls of large river systems, as in Mesopotamia, India, and China, are thought by some to have contributed to centralized, despotic systems of government. In Japan the river systems are small, and irrigation instead appears to have helped foster the notable Japanese propensity for cooperation and consensus decision making in small groups.

Plentiful rainfall means that Japan is a verdant land, with a heavy forest cover on its mountains. The combination of rugged coastlines, precipitous but forested mountains, and a lush countryside makes Japan a most beautiful land wherever people and industry have not despoiled it. All this natural splendor may have contributed to the great sensitivity the Japanese have shown throughout history to the wonders of nature and to their great love of its beauty.

Japan’s location cannot be considered to have been any great asset, particularly in early times. It lies at the extreme eastern edge of the Asian-European ancient world of high civilization, considerably farther out to sea than the British Isles on its western edge. Japan was no crossroads of world trade but lay at the veritable end of the earth, the most isolated of all the major countries that enjoyed a high civilization in premodern times. External influences for long came to it slowly and only as filtered through the nearby continental lands of China and Korea.

There were important compensations, however, for this insularity. For a land cut up into small pieces by innumerable mountain ranges, the waters surrounding Japan permitted relatively easy communication between the islands and also along the coast. This was particularly true of the Inland Sea, which cut through the middle of western Japan. The sea also provided ample supplies of fish, which remain the chief source of animal protein in the Japanese diet. Their insular position also spared the Japanese from the conquests and pillage by foreign hordes inflicted on many other lands and from incessant warfare along their frontiers. Isolation thus gave the Japanese relatively greater peace and more opportunities than most peoples have had to develop their own special talents and produce a remarkably distinctive way of life.

Japan is part of the East Asian zone of civilization, which centers around China and includes Korea and Vietnam. This is the part of the world that has derived most of its basic culture from the civilization developed in ancient times on the plains of North China. Although the home throughout history of a large part of the human race—roughly a fifth to a quarter—the East Asian cultural zone has been the most isolated of the great spheres of early civilization. It was cut off from the other centers of ancient culture in India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean Basin by the great land barrier of the mountain ranges and deserts of Central Asia and the jungles and rugged terrain of Southeast Asia. In this relatively isolated zone, Japan was the most isolated area of all. In contrast to the 20 miles of the Straits of Dover separating England from France, it is 100 miles from Japan to Korea and 500 to China.

Japan nonetheless is culturally a daughter of Chinese civilization, much as the countries of North Europe are daughters of Mediterranean culture. The story of the spread of Chinese civilization to the peoples of Japan during the first millennium after Christ is much like the story of the spread of Mediterranean civilization to the peoples of North Europe during the same period. But the greater isolation of the Japanese from the home of their civilization and from all other peoples meant that in Japan the borrowed culture had more chance to develop along new and often unique lines. One popular concept is that the Japanese have never been anything more than a race of borrowers and imitators. The truth is quite the contrary. Although geographic isolation has made them conscious of learning from abroad, it has also allowed them to develop one of the most distinctive cultures to be found in any area of comparable size. Take, for example, things as basic as their traditional clothing, their cuisine, or their domestic architecture and the manner in which they live at home. The thick straw floor mats, the sliding paper panels in place of interior walls, the open, airy structure of the whole house, the recess for art objects, the charcoal-burning braziers (hibachi), the peculiar wooden or iron bathtubs, and the place of bathing in daily life as a means of relaxation at the end of a day’s work and, in winter, as a way of restoring a sense of warmth and well-being—all these and many other simple but fundamental features of daily life in traditional Japan are unique to the country and attest to a highly creative culture rather than one of simple imitation.

Japan’s cultural distinctiveness has perhaps been accentuated by its linguistic separateness. Although the Japanese writing system has been derived from that of China and innumerable Chinese words have been incorporated into Japanese in much the same way that English has borrowed thousands of Latin and Greek words, Japanese is basically as different from Chinese as it is from English. Its structure is strikingly like Korean, but even then it appears to be no more closely related to Korean than English is to Russian or the Sanskrit-derived languages of India. Possessing a writing system more complex than any other in common use in the modern world and a language with no close relatives, the Japanese probably face a bigger language barrier between themselves and the rest of the world than any other major national group.

Geographic isolation and cultural and linguistic distinctiveness have made the Japanese highly self-conscious and acutely aware of their differences from others. In a way this has been a great asset to them in the modern age of nation-states, for they have faced no problem of national identity. Indeed, Japan constitutes what may be the world’s most perfect nation-state: a clear-cut geographic unit containing almost all the people of a distinctive culture and language and virtually no one else. On the other hand, extreme self-consciousness bred of isolation has become a serious handicap in the current age of international interdependence. It has made the Japanese somewhat tense in their contacts with foreigners, and they have shown relatively little sensitivity to the feelings and reactions of other peoples. At times they appear obsessed with a sense either of superiority or inferiority toward the outside world. Japan’s isolation may help explain some of the extremes in its international relations and also, perhaps, the uneasiness Japanese feel even today about their place in the world.

The Japanese are basically Mongoloid in race, closely related to their neighbors in Korea and China; but like all modern peoples, they are the product of extensive racial mixture. Many different groups found their way into Japan, a few as early as paleolithic times. During the last ice age, which continued until about 11,000 years ago, Japan was joined by land to the rest of Asia. Since Japan was the geographic end of the line, peoples who wandered into it could not move on but stayed and mixed with those who came later.

One interesting racial ingredient was provided by the Ainu. These may be a proto-Caucasoid people—that is, a group that split off from the white race so early that not all the characteristics of this race had as yet developed. At one time the Ainu may have occupied most of Japan, or they may have been only relatively late intruders from the north. In any case, some twelve centuries ago their ancestors lived in the northern island of Hokkaido and the northern third of the main island of Honshu. Since then they have been slowly pushed north and all but some 20,000 have been culturally and racially absorbed by the Japanese. Today they are on the point of vanishing, but they have left behind a genetic legacy that may account for the relative abundance of facial and body hair of some Japanese as compared with other Mongoloids, and possibly helps to explain the great variety of facial types among the Japanese.

There is a popular theory that some early immigrants to Japan were carried there by the Japan Current, which flows from Southeast Asia past Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, and Japan, much like the Gulf Stream off the East Coast of the United States. Strong similarities in mythology, social customs, and early architecture between Japan and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are cited in support of this concept. There is, however, no archeological evidence to back it up. A better explanation of these similarities is that they resulted from very early waves of cultural influence and, possibly, people who moved outward from South China, some to Southeast Asia and others to Japan, perhaps by way of Korea.

The archeological record clearly shows that a large number, if not most, of the early inhabitants of Japan came to the islands from Korea and areas farther away in Northeast Asia, and there is indisputable historical evidence that a considerable flow of people from the peninsula into Japan continued until the eighth century A.D. An early ninth-century book attributes recent continental origin to more than a third of the aristocratic families at the Japanese court at that time. By then, however, the mixing was almost complete, and the Japanese were well on their way to becoming the homogeneous people we know today. They also already occupied most of what we now call Japan. Only in the extreme north were the culturally alien Ainu still to be absorbed, and in southern Kyushu there were still some groups that may have been culturally as well as politically distinct, but were in any case on the verge of complete assimilation.

Paralleling the flow of people and probably carried in part by it, a series of cultural influences also spread from the Asian continent to Japan. Pieces of the world’s oldest known pottery, dating from around 10,000 years ago, have been found in Japan as well as China. From around 10,000 B.C. there developed in Japan a primitive hunting, fishing, and gathering society, known as Jomon from its mat-patterned pottery, which shows great variety, boldness, and originality in its designs.

Although Jomon culture lingered on until comparatively modern times in the extreme north, it was beginning to be displaced or absorbed by a more advanced agricultural society by around 300 B.C. This new culture, called Yayoi, is identified by its relatively simple, thin, wheel-shaped pottery, but its outstanding feature was its irrigated rice cultivation, much like that in use today. It also possessed bronze and iron; bronze artifacts, including obvious imitations of Chinese bronze mirrors, were used primarily for ceremonial purposes. Starting in north Kyushu, the area closest to Korea, Yayoi culture spread rapidly up the Inland Sea to central Japan and on to the Kanto Plain in the east. This plain, where modern Tokyo is located, is the largest relatively level area in Japan. The metallurgy and agriculture of the Yayoi culture were ultimately derived from China, but only indirectly. They probably came to Japan as the result of waves of culture and movements of peoples from Korea and areas north of China, most likely pushed eastward into Japan by the unification of China in the third century B.C.

A new archeological era, the tumulus period, named for the large earth mounds erected over the graves of dead leaders, began around 300 A.D. In time these mounds came to be of huge size, indicating the existence of relatively large political units capable of marshaling a great deal of manpower. The largest mound, located in central Japan and dating probably from the late fifth century, is almost 2,700 feet long and surrounded by moats. Many were of keyhole shape—square in front and round behind. The arms and horse trappings associated with finds from this period suggest a mounted, warlike, aristocratic people, much like the nomadic warriors of Northeast Asia who were invading Korea at that time. The wall paintings on some of the tombs from the seventh century are almost identical to contemporary paintings from North Korea. The tumuli often had cylindrical pieces of pottery, known as haniwa, arranged on them in rings. Haniwa were often capped with decorative figures, a few of which depicted warriors and horses, but most of which were simple and highly artistic representations of other people, animals, houses, and the like.

Tumulus burials lasted through the seventh century and then ceased abruptly, probably because of the influence of Buddhism, but by that time we have entered fully into the historical period and can shift from archeological to written evidence for our knowledge of Japan. Chinese histories record an emissary coming from Japan as early as A.D. 57, and a late third-century Chinese text gives a fairly detailed and seemingly accurate description of Japan as an agricultural society with sharp class distinctions, divided into a large number of petty countries, presumably tribal units, each ruled over by a semireligious leader, some men and others women, and all under the loose control of what the text calls the queen’s country.

The earliest Japanese histories, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon shoki of 720, start with creation myths reminiscent of Southeast Asia and Polynesia. They also tell of a supreme Sun Goddess, the descent of her grandson to earth, and the founding of the Japanese state by his grandson in 660 B.C.—a date chosen at a much later time, probably around A.D. 600, with the intention of giving Japan a respectable antiquity comparable to that of China. The mythological descent of the imperial line from the Sun Goddess, still worshipped at Japan’s most sacred shrines at Ise, east of the capital region, and the Chinese account of the supremacy of the queen’s country, suggest an originally matriarchal people who became the strongly male-dominated society of later history only through subsequent influences from the highly patriarchal society of China. The histories then go on to recount a confused but somewhat plausible story of conquest from Kyushu up the Inland Sea to central Japan and on to the Kanto Plain. By the fourth or fifth century, Yamato, one of the tribal units in the central area, had clearly established its control over most of the others, and this political unit grew into the completely historical nation of Nihon or Nippon, known to us through its South Chinese pronunciation as Japan.

The concentration of the largest tumuli in central Japan around the modern cities of Osaka and Nara corresponds well with the rise to supremacy of Yamato, and some are traditionally identified with early priest-chiefs of that state. The traditional symbols of authority of these priest-chiefs, the so-called Three Imperial Regalia, also tie in well with the archeological record. They are a long iron sword like those common throughout Northeast Asia, a bronze mirror representing the Sun Goddess but clearly derived from China, and a so-called curved jewel (magatama), a small comma-shaped stone, perhaps originally representing a bear claw and common also in Korean archeological finds.

The Japanese state that emerged into history in the fifth and sixth centuries was clearly a further development of the tribally divided country described in the early Chinese records. Under the leadership of Yamato, the country was divided into a number of local hereditary units called uji, sometimes translated as clans. These had their hereditary chiefs and their own uji deities. Under the controlling family and tied to it by pseudofamily bonds were hereditary functional groups called be, which consisted mostly of farmers but also included pottery makers, weavers, and other specialized groups. The uji were ranked in hierarchical order under the ruling Yamato group, which also had certain uji under its direct control to perform various functions, such as military service, the manufacture of various goods, ritualistic divining, and supervision of the Yamato group’s lands, which were scattered throughout Japan.

Yamato by this time controlled most of modern Japan, except for the northern part of Honshu and Hokkaido, and until 562 it maintained some sort of foothold on the south coast of Korea. Though explained in the Japanese histories as the result of conquest by a warrior empress, the Korean foothold was more probably connected with the movement of peoples from Korea to Japan and the resulting close relations between certain groups on both sides of the straits separating the two countries. In any case, Japanese armies were active on the peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries, and Yamato did not finally give up the attempt to reestablish a foothold in South Korea until 663, shortly before the unification of Korea by the southeastern state of Silla in 668.

Many characteristics of uji society were to remain typical of Japan in its later history. This was certainly true of the strong emphasis on hierarchy and hereditary authority. The aristocratic mounted warrior of the tumulus period was also to emerge again as a dominant figure in feudal times. And of particular significance, the early Yamato priest-chiefs developed into the imperial line, which served as the sacerdotal source of political authority throughout history and is today by far the oldest reigning family in the world.

The religious beliefs and practices of uji times have also continued as one of the main religious streams of Japan. Nameless, at first, these beliefs were subsequently called Shinto, the way of the gods, to distinguish them from Buddhism. The worship of the Sun Goddess and other uji ancestors and deities was part of a much broader worship of fertility and the wonders and mysteries of nature. A waterfall, a mountain crag, a mysterious cave, a large tree, a peculiarly shaped stone, or an unusual person might inspire a sense of awe. Such objects of worship were called kami, a term somewhat misleadingly translated as god but obviously not comparable to the Judeo-Christian concept of God. This simple Shinto notion of deity should be borne in mind when trying to understand the deification in modern times of emperors and of soldiers who died for their country.

Early Shinto had almost no ethical content, except for an emphasis on ritual purity, which may have contributed to the Japanese love of bathing. On the other hand, it had numberless places of worship and countless festivals and ceremonies. Places where people felt a sense of awe became cult spots and eventually shrines. Today tens of thousands of such shrines dot the landscape of Japan, each with its characteristic torii gateway. Some are great institutions dating back to antiquity; thousands are village shrines still identified as the abode of the local uji deity; and others are merely miniature edifices of stone or wood recently erected in front of a gnarled old tree or on a mountain top.

The underlying stream of Shinto today remains little changed since prehistoric times, although much has been done during the past thousand years to make it into a more organized religion. In modern times it was consciously used, through an emphasis on the early mythology connected with it, as an inspiration for national solidarity and fanatical patriotism. But despite these later uses, Shinto remains basically unchanged: It still centers around the worship of nature, fertility, reverence for ancestral deities, and a sense of communion with them and the spirits of nature.

2

THE ADOPTION OF THE CHINESE PATTERN

The peoples of North Europe have always been conscious of their double heritage—their primitive Teutonic roots and the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Similarly, the Japanese have a double heritage—the native culture of early Japan and the higher civilization of classical China. As in North Europe, true history started for Japan only when the broad stream of a highly developed civilization reached its shores and, in a different geographic setting, combined with the simpler traditions of the local people to form a new culture, based directly on the old civilization but differentiated from it by a richer and more complex superstructure.

The Japanese had long had some contact with Chinese civilization. Envoys and traders had gone back and forth between the two countries since at least the first century A.D. Immigrants from Korea brought with them the arts and sciences of the continental civilization. Knowledge of Chinese writing, for example, had become well established in Japan by the fifth century. These early borrowings from China, however, were made only very slowly and almost unconsciously, as has been the usual pattern in the spread of civilization throughout the world. But an abrupt acceleration in the rate of learning from the continent started in the second half of the sixth century, when the Japanese suddenly became conscious of the advantages of the superior continental civilization and the desirability of learning more about it. Why this spurt in the process of learning from China should have come at just this moment in Japanese history is not certain. The Japanese may have reached a level of cultural attainment and political organization that for the first time permitted more rapid and more conscious learning from abroad. And the renewed vigor displayed by Chinese culture at that time may have facilitated the process.

China’s history as a highly civilized part of the world reaches back into the second millennium before Christ. Its first great period as a colossal military empire came during the time of Rome’s greatness, roughly from about 220 B.C. to A.D. 220. The era of political disruption that followed came to an end in the second half of the sixth century, when a new and greater Chinese empire emerged from the chaos of three centuries of civil war and barbarian invasions. This new empire was far richer and stronger than the first. In fact, during the seventh and eighth centuries China was, with little doubt, the richest, most powerful, and technologically most advanced country in the world. This period, which was known by the dynastic names of Sui (581–618) and T’ang (618–907), was a time of unprecedented grandeur, might, and brilliant cultural attainment.

It is small wonder that the Japanese felt the reflected glory of the new Chinese empire and attempted to create a small replica of it in their own isolated islands. Other petty states in Korea, Manchuria, and on the southwestern borders of China, dazzled by the grandeur and might of Sui and T’ang, were attempting to do the same. A millennium or more later, the borrowing of political, social, and economic institutions from more advanced countries was to become commonplace throughout the world; but it is surprising that the Japanese at this early date went about transplanting the more complex Chinese institutions and techniques with such great zeal and in so systematic a way. The result during the next two centuries was a cultural surge forward in Japan that stands in sharp contrast to the slow, fumbling progress of North Europe at this time. This difference may not have been due so much to the tribal people of Japan and North Europe, who were actually somewhat similar, as to the attractiveness of their respective models. While Rome was falling completely to pieces, China was rising to new heights of grandeur.

The start of the heavy flow of Chinese influences to Japan is usually dated as 552, the year the Buddhist religion is said to have been officially introduced to the Yamato court from Paekche, a kingdom in southwestern Korea. Actually, Buddhism had probably entered Japan even earlier, but this official introduction affords a convenient date to mark the time when the Japanese first started consciously to learn from the Chinese. During the next few centuries, Buddhism served as an important vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture to Japan, just as Christianity served as a vehicle for the transmission of Mediterranean civilization to North Europe. Buddhism is by origin an Indian religion, but it had slowly spread to China and won a place of importance in Chinese culture during the troubled era between the two great periods of empire. It was a vigorous proselytizing religion at that time, and missionary zeal carried it beyond China to Korea and from there to Japan. From the sixth to the eighth centuries, continental priests occasionally came to Japan, and scores of Japanese converts went to China to learn more about the new faith. Returning from the continent, these student priests, even more than foreign missionary teachers, took the lead in transmitting to Japan the new religion and many other aspects of Chinese civilization.

In the second half of the sixth century, Buddhism and other new influences from abroad so affected the Yamato court that clashes broke out between a faction favoring the acceptance of Buddhism and other continental ideas and an opposition group that resisted the new religion and all change. More fundamentally, this was a battle between leading uji groups for dominance of the Yamato court and its priest-chiefs. The pro-Buddhist Soga uji, which was closely intermarried with the reigning family, emerged victorious in 587, and under its dynamic leader Umako embarked on a series of significant innovations. Most of these were later attributed to Prince Shotoku, the regent for the reigning empress from 593 to 622, but Shotoku was probably at most only a partner in these enterprises. In large part of Soga blood himself, he was made regent only after Umako had murdered his own reigning nephew and put his niece Suiko on the throne. Umako, until his death in 626, was clearly the most powerful figure at court.

Suiko was the first of several women who reigned between 592 and 770, usually as compromise candidates chosen to head off succession disputes. When the last of these women rulers fell so much under the influence of a Buddhist monk that it was feared he would usurp the throne, feminine leadership was permanently abandoned, except for two much later cases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time the position lacked any semblance of power. Another and probably more basic reason for the switch to purely male rule was growing Chinese influence and the Chinese abhorrence of women rulers. Japanese women, who in earliest times may have enjoyed a position of social and political dominance over men, gradually sank to a status of subservience. Their rights and influence in the early feudal society of medieval times were still considerable, but eventually even these were lost as they were turned into mere handmaidens to men.

Among the most significant innovations carried out by Umako and his associates in the early seventh century was the reinstitution of embassies to China. One may have been sent in 600, and three more certainly went between 607 and 614. These were followed by periodic embassies during the next two centuries, until 838. The immediate political results of these embassies were slight and their economic significance was not much greater, but they were of the utmost cultural importance. Buddhist monks as well as scholars, artists, and technicians of all sorts accompanied these missions, some staying in China for years of intensive study. Upon their return to Japan they became leaders in their respective fields, the men most responsible for the successful transmission to this isolated land of the science, arts, philosophy, and institutions of the great continental civilization. Japanese leaders showed extraordinary wisdom in sending students to China in this way; it was, in a sense, the world’s first program of organized study abroad.

Another innovation of this period was the creation in 603 of twelve court ranks for courtiers. This probably was an effort to strengthen central power by emulating the system of bureaucratic rule in China and lessening the prestige of the uji ranks. Eventually, uji ranks, along with the uji themselves, shrank into insignificance, while the court ranks gained in importance, becoming an exceedingly complex system of twenty-six grades that was to last, at least in outward form, until modern times. The Chinese calendar was adopted in 604, and in the same year a so-called Seventeen Article Constitution, consisting of general Buddhist and Chinese Confucian precepts, was issued. Although the remaining text is probably of later date, the original document, like the remaining one, probably manifested the desire of the leaders for more centralized political power and the adoption of Buddhist concepts.

Prince Shotoku appears to have had a genuine interest in Buddhism, and some of the Buddhist writings attributed to him may be genuine. He definitely was associated with the founding of the beautiful Horyuji monastery near Nara. Some of its present buildings, which date from late in the seventh century, are the oldest wooden buildings in the world, and they are crammed with superb Buddhist art from those early times. While the Japanese were perhaps slow in grasping all the intricacies of Buddhist doctrine, they showed an amazing skill in mastering the continental art that accompanied these teachings and soon were producing masterpieces to rival those of their Korean and Chinese teachers.

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with Soga dominance and fear of a Soga usurpation of the throne mounted at the Yamato court and resulted in a coup d’état in 645, in which the Soga were destroyed. There were two leaders of this coup. One was Nakatomi Kamatari (the surname is always given first in Japanese), whose family, under the newly acquired name of Fujiwara, was in time to dominate the court completely.

The other was a prince of the reigning family who, though occupying the throne only briefly from 668 to 672 under the name of Tenji, was one of the few Japanese emperors who seems to have ruled as well as reigned. Among the very few others were Tenji’s brother Temmu (reigned 673–686), who also had to fight to gain the throne, and Tenji’s great-grandson Kammu (reigned 781–806). In fact, it was not until Tenji’s time that the part played by the Yamato priest-chiefs began to mirror the role of Chinese emperors. Although the idea of the centralization of power around an emperor in the Chinese manner had obviously been present in Umako’s time, and the embassies of 607 and 608 to China bore messages referring to the Japanese ruler on equal terms with the emperor of China, it was only in the second half of the seventh century that an effort was made to convert the Yamato priest-chiefs into the all-powerful monarchs of the Chinese system. They did not, however, lose their religious role in the process, but combined thenceforth the two roles of Japanese high priest and Chinese secular ruler. In the long run, the religious role was to reemerge as the dominant one.

The coup d’état of 645 was called the Taika (Great Change) Reform. The name Taika was the first Japanese attempt to adopt the Chinese system of counting years by arbitrarily named year periods. In 1368 the Chinese made their year periods correspond to reigns, and the Japanese followed suit in 1868. According to this system, the first few days of 1989 are known as Showa 64 for Hirohito, whose reign was the longest in authenticated history, and with his death 1989 became Heisei 1 for Akihito, his son and successor.

Later historians attributed to the years 645–646 a series of great political and economic changes that remade Japan according to the Chinese model, but these reforms were actually achieved only piecemeal over the remainder of the century and into the next. The chief motivation for these reforms was the desire to make Japan a more centralized and powerful state, but a certain urgency was given to this task by China’s invasion of Korea at this time and the destruction of a large Japanese army and fleet dispatched there in support of Japan’s ally, Paekche. In this stimulus to change produced by an external military menace one can see a small parallel to the much greater change forced on Japan by the threat of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

In the seventh century the Japanese sought to create a theoretically all-powerful emperor surrounded by an elaborate bureaucratic government modeled after that of T’ang China, which was the most highly developed and complex system of government the world had as yet seen. They made some conscious adjustments, however, to fit their own special circumstances. Outranking the Central Council of State, with its prime minister and ministers of the left and right, which paralleled the Chinese secular government, they created an Office of Deities to represent the religious functions of the emperor. Also, instead of the standard six ministries of the Chinese system, they created eight to include one for the imperial household and another for a central secretariat. These ministries and many other bureaus and offices were staffed with officials, each with an appropriate court rank.

The creation of a central government based on Chinese models was an easier task