When Emperor Kanmu (737-806) founded Heian-kyo in 794, the new capital was meant to be the permanent bureaucratic and ritual seat of a strong, centralized, Chinese-style state. The scale and opulence of the plan was grand and ambitious, in fact probably too much so. Some of the key traits meant to define Heian-kyo’s appearance were never entirely realized, while many of those that were rapidly disintegrated. Not only did the Japanese polity function very differently from its Chinese prototype, real power, even from the outset, rested more with private political actors than the state. Before examining how these factors contributed to Heian-kyo’s failure to materialize as planned, we must begin by exploring the plan itself as well as its founding principles and prescriptions. As we shall see, these principles retained their relevance with remarkable resilience well into the succeeding eras, long after the city and its polity had changed dramatically. To be sure, for those who sought to possess the kind of orthodox authority the capital was meant to represent, Heian-kyo’s founding ideals remained more than relevant. They were elemental to their engagement in the pageantry of legitimized power.
Heian-kyo’s urban plan and architecture have been examined previously in English, and Japanese scholarship on the topic is vast.1 While some detail can therefore be abbreviated, the broad outlines need to be drawn in order to set the stage for the narrative of change that follows.
The statutory government that Heian-kyo was built to accommodate was based on a body of criminal (ritsu) and administrative (ryo) codes adapted from Tang China in stages leading up to formal codification in the eighth century. The so-called “Ritsuryo” system defined the i nstitutions of imperial government and created an official hierarchy composed of formal status ranks (kurai) and bureaucratic posts (kan-shoku). As a supreme sacerdotal ruler, the emperor was at the top of the Ritsuryo system, but it was a narrow population of high-ranking civil aristocrats who administered the institutional organs of the statutory state. Access to high office was a matter of rank, and in Japan (unlike China), rank was a matter of birth rather than merit. In striking detail, Ritsuryo codes advised on a sweeping repertoire of elite customs, practices, and rituals, as well as the material infrastructure necessary to realize them. The numerous events that punctuated the official calendar— including such things as the bestowal of ranks and posts, new year’s celebrations, ablutions, prayers for the protection of the body of the emperor and state, and a plethora of additional “annual observances”— were all carefully scripted affairs, following a strict regime of codes, customs, and precedents that dictated what people did, how, and in what setting. It was the strong relationship between function and form as first codified in Ritsuryo laws that made the capital and its official architecture elemental to the infrastructure of the classical state system.
Heian-kyo was conceived as an inert venue of Ritsuryo statecraft. It was to be a capital in the purest sense of the word: the seat of the statutory government, home and ritual center of the emperor and the civil aristocracy, and the location of numerous official buildings and monuments that facilitated imperial pageantry, bureaucratic administration, and diplomacy. Buddhist temples and shrines were excluded, and the presence of warriors in the city was, in principle, taboo. Due to their polluting effects, killing and burial were also formally pro-scribed.2 Commercial activity was limited, while farming was generally not allowed. All land within the capital’s formal boundaries was planned for urbanization. Heian-kyo was meant to be a mononuclear capital: the imperial institution was the political, economic, and social center of gravity, and every constituent element of the city was oriented—physically and philosophically—around a single, unified, public core embodied in the emperor and his palace compound. Formal codes and indelible social customs dictated everything from the location of the city itself to the width of its roads and the styles of
Official architecture. Where people lived, what they built, and how they interacted with the cityscape were guided by principles of status, propriety, and precedent.
As the seat of a large and complex government bureaucracy, Heian-kyo became home to a diverse population of officials numbering between five and seven thousand. Estimated allowances for their families and household servants put the number of people whose fulltime presence was justified through an affiliation with the state near seventy thousand.3 For the dozen or so individuals who constituted the highest echelon of the civil aristocracy, residence in Heian-kyo was more than a convenience; it was an obligation. From the foundation of the Japanese imperial polity, a key objective of those seeking to make the state and emperor the sole sources of political legitimacy was to sever the ties that bound the regional, landed elites to their provincial bases of private wealth and familial influence. Nationalizing all land through the Taika reforms of 646 was one important step. Physically removing those regional elites from the provinces, endowing them with public ranks and posts, then compelling them to live permanently in the capital were others.4 It was because of this basic principle of mandatory residence that, for much of Kyoto’s premodern history, a sudden and unsanctioned departure from the city was interpreted as an unambiguous act of rebellion. In sum, housing the aristocracy was not just one of Heian-kyo’s functions, it was one of the primary reasons for establishing a permanent capital in the first place.5
And yet residence in the capital city was also a privilege. As Spiro Kostof has shown, throughout history and in various settings, the “luck of first ownership” served to reinforce aristocracy through the concentration of property rights.6 The relationship between physical space and the aristocracy was on ubiquitous display in Heian-kyo because the aristocracy—who were the only ones initially permitted to engage in a real estate market—frequently took family names from the locations of their first official urban residences. It is for this reason that the documentary record is replete with mention of such people as the “Lord of Sanjo” (Sanjo-dono) or the “Lord of Kyogoku” (Kyogoku-dono). While the Japanese aristocracy was not unlike its European counterparts in this respect (the Duke of Orange Nassau or the Prince of Wales are just two of many examples), it is unique that in the Japanese case so many family names come from the names of roads in the classical capital.
World History
