The ritsuryo ̄ statefundamentally different—in size, social organization, historical experience, economy, and
worldview—from that of China. This raises the essential question of how and why, despite these
differences, Japan was able to adopt Chinese legal codes at all. This inquiry becomes particularly
interesting, in light of the extent to which, and the pace at which, governing institutions and
practices in Japan evolved during centuries following the inception of the ritsuryō state.
Earlier generations of historians, particularly those publishing in English, were less than gen-
erous in their assessments of the ritsuryō system, casting it as an overly ambitious, malapropos
structure slavishly copied by Japanese aristocrats in awe of the Sui and Tang. Scholars from
Asakawa Kanichi, writing in the early 1900s, to Robert Reischauer and George Sansom, working
in the 1930s, to John W. Hall, writing in the 1960s, viewed the reforms of the sixth and seventh
centuries as an attempt to transplant to Japan what “was very near to a faithful copy of the T’ang
system,” although they did also call attention to important points of difference between the Jap-
anese and Chinese systems—most notably the Japanese addition of a Council of Shrines (jingikan)
in parallel or superior to the Council of State (daijōkan) and a fusion of Japanese theories of sover-
eignty into an otherwise Chinese structure.^29
In more recent decades, however, historians analyzing ritsuryō institutions have emphasized
the points of departure that distinguished the Japanese polity from those of China, and main-
tained that the Taihō and Yōrō ritsuryō represented careful adaptations, rather than simple adop-
tions, of Chinese practices. Richard Miller’s posthumously published Japan’s First Bureaucracy, for
example, completely rejected the notion of the ritsuryō system as a naïve attempt to force square
Chinese pegs into round Japanese holes. Indeed, in Miller’s view, the Chinese legal and adminis-
trative apparatus introduced in the seventh century amounted to little more than a façade that
cloaked time- honored Japanese modes of thinking and ways of functioning, and “did not funda-
mentally alter ... traditional social and political dynamics.”^30
Two decades earlier, James Crump, Jr. had offered a less radical assessment of the degree to
which Japanese ritsuryō codes departed from their Tang models, and discussed the key reasons for
the modifications. In addition to the influence of traditional institutions and entrenched interests,
and to Japanese aspirations toward improving on less successful elements of the Tang codes,
Crump cited the influence of Korean modifications of Chinese institutions, and infatuation with
earlier Chinese titles and practices.^31
Yoshida Takashi has pointed out three features of the Tang legal codes that facilitated adapta-
tion to Japanese realities and priorities: First, the codes were promulgated alongside principles of
propriety (li) circumscribed by traditional (Chinese) notions of etiquette and ceremony. Second,
codes derived mainly from imperial regulations. And third, these codes did not contain any regu-
lations that directly defined or limited royal prerogatives.^32 Hori Toshikazu has further sug-
gested that these Chinese codes were readily accepted into Japanese society by virtue of containing
prominent elements of aristocratic culture inherited from the Wei, Jin, and Nanbei Dynasties
(184–589).^33
Elaborating on the concept of aristocratic elements within the Japanese ritsuryō state, Seki
Akira and Ōtsu Tōru stress the prominent role of powerful regional families based in the Kinai
region near the capital in the new regime, contending that the centralized government estab-
lished after the Taika Reforms amounted to nationwide domination by these highly influential
Kinai families.^34 And, indeed, when one considers that provincial governorships—which were of
key importance to the functioning of regional government—were awarded exclusively to
members of Kinai aristocratic families, and that collection of taxes from areas outside the capital
region retained strong overtones of ritual submission to pre- Taika provincial patriarchs (kuni no
miyatsuko), it does seem plausible to view the Japanese ritsuryō state as a continuation of the earlier
Yamato polity, reordered into bureaucratic form by powerful Kinai families.