Sakaue Y., with K.L. Reeves
that emphasized a dichotomy between “native” and “foreign” ideals, scholars focused their atten-
tion on the demise—often characterized as the collapse—of key ritsuryō institutions and prac-
tices, to spin narratives that described the resurgence of the former as both cause and consequence
of the failure of the latter.
In the English- language literature on the subject, this approach is epitomized in Kozo Yama-
mura’s revealingly titled article, “The Decline of the Ritsuryo System,” which appeared in the
premier issue of the Journal of Japanese Studies, in 1974. Yamamura, an economic historian, largely
equated “the ritsuryō system” with its provisions for state ownership of agricultural lands, which
he characterized as “inherently unstable and bound to collapse.”^49 Created to enhance the power
and reach of the throne, the system eroded and crumbled when it could no longer keep pace with
the needs of a growing cultivator population for expansion of the agricultural base, and the
opportunities this situation afforded court nobles and provincial elites to enlarge their sources of
income—and, ultimately, of control over people—outside the ritsuryō economic structure.
In recent decades, there has been a marked shift of focus away from the decline of early insti-
tutions toward the beginnings of new ones. In the 1970s, Sakamoto Shōzō pointed to the rise of
the zuryō, the reorganization of taxable lands into new units known as myō, and the emergence of
tax- exempt proprietary rights over land in the early tenth century, and argued that these devel-
opments signaled the advent of a new ōchō (“royal court”) polity. He further argued that restruc-
turing of the village and district system and of the tax rates on public lands that occurred in the
second quarter of the eleventh century—in response to the proliferation of land reclamation and
local resistance to the authority of provincial officials—marked the beginning of a second, mature
stage of this ōchō state.^50
While no historian to date has disputed the assessment that, by the tenth century, govern-
ance in Japan had become something substantially different from the ritsuryō polity of the early
eighth century—a changed order of things that ought to be recognized as a distinct polity—
most publications since the 1970s have emphasized gradual adjustment, enduring continuities,
and changing needs and circumstances, rather than failure and sharp breaks with the past. Thus
Ōtsu Tōru, citing the persistence of rule grounded in central authority, has suggested that the
political and socio- economic order from the late eighth to the early tenth century is best char-
acterized as a second phase of the classical polity, a “late ritsuryō state” (kōki ritsuryō kokka). On
the other hand, Yoshikawa Shinji, focusing on hierarchical relationships among emperors,
regents, provincial governors, and other members of the ruling elite, would rather have us
view this era as one of “nascency of the power bloc polity” (shōki kenmon taisei) that spanned the
interval between the end of the ritsuryō state and the consolidation of the early medieval kenmon
taisei polity.^51
Scholarship in English has largely followed this trend. The early work of G. Cameron Hurst
and Cornelius Kiley, for example, called attention to the persistence of the ritsuryō structure,
even as operations of governance within its framework were assuming forms radically different
from those of the Nara period, and to the durability of relationships among elites and funda-
mental tenets of power- sharing throughout the classical epoch.^52 A decade later, Dana Morris,
William Wayne Farris, and Bruce Batten argued that enduring priorities and goals on the part of
the court shaped ongoing development of institutions and practices for revenue extraction and
provincial governance across the span of the eighth to twelfth centuries; while Farris and Karl
Friday emphasized the tenacity of core ideals, principles, and even principals, within the evolu-
tion of the military system from the pre- Taika era through the early medieval period.^53 More
recently, the fifteen Japanese, European, and Amer ican contributors to a volume that grew out of
a series of conferences at Harvard University in the early years of the new millennium collec-
tively contend that, far from devolving from its ritsuryō roots into a kind of proto- feudalism that