D. Taranczewski
jurist- legates dispatched from the capital, and a bureaucratic system tying together the provinces
and center was established. Historians refer to this new polity as the ritsuryō state.
Censuses were conducted and new household registers prepared every six years (later changed
to every twelve years). A substantial number of these household registers survive today, and have
been heavily mined by historians for information about ritsuryō era demographics. One must be
careful, however, when analyzing these documents. Because the function of household registers
was fiscal, it is difficult to gain a realistic image of the family life based only on these data.^5
Household registers (koseki) served as the base for both taxes (goods in kind and labor service)
and for allotting farmland. One household (ko), comprising twenty to thirty members (kokō),
consisted of one or more nuclear families, a small number of unrelated clients (kikō), and some-
times a few slaves (nuhi). The names, age, sex, physical conditions, and legal status (free or unfree)
of the household members were recorded, along with the name of the household head (henushi),
who was responsible to the authorities, and the name of the community (gō) to which the house-
hold belonged. Taxes were then assessed on the basis of these data.
All adult males without rank aged 17–65 and in good physical condition were subject to taxes.
Tax rolls for collecting the taxes in kind (yō, chō) were drawn up every year. These levies con-
sisted of a great variety of local products (rice, raw silk, cloth, iron and other metals, wood,
products of hunting and gathering, salt or seafood and the like). Tax- eligible households were
compelled to cultivate certain crops, such as mulberry trees for sericulture. Corvée labor (zōyō),
performed in either the capital or in the provinces, included work on public projects, such as
irrigation installations for paddy fields, road construction, public buildings, or the production
and transport of special goods. Obligations varied over time, and with the age of the laborer,
running anywhere from fifteen to sixty days a year.
About 80 percent of arable land (principally paddy fields) was assigned as kubunden (“fields
allotted per person”); the rest was leased to cultivators on a year- by-year basis, for an annual rent
of 20 percent of the assessed yield. The area of kubunden allotted to a household depended on the
age, sex, and status of its members, and field tax (so) was levied on it at a rate of only 3–5
percent.^6
This indicates that “personal taxes” (yō, chō, and zōyō) played a much more important role in
the tax system than “area taxes” (so). We can conclude from this that the main objective for allot-
ting land was stabilization of the economic base—that is, of taxable labor. At the same time,
casting the system in terms of a welfare policy in which cultivators were provided with the means
(i.e., their fields) in exchange for taxes fit nicely with the ethical self–image propagated by the
state in order to promote the acceptance of its rule.
In addition to kubunden, households also controlled homesteads (entakuchi), consisting of living
quarters, barns and granaries and other buildings, the ground they were built upon, and sur-
rounding gardens used as dry fields for cultivating mulberry or lacquer trees for tax crops or the
farmers’ subsistence. Unlike allotment lands, homesteads were not subject to redistribution, and
their inhabitants held relatively stable rights to their use.^7
Households were collected into communities (first called ri, later on gō) of fifty households,
represented by a head (gōchō). Similarly to the households, the gō-communities were conceived as
fiscal units, their scope and actual geographic boundaries were not noted in the records.^8 Between
two and twenty such communities formed a district (gun or kōri), which—unlike gō—had an area
that was clearly described in real territorial units. The head of the district office (gunji) was recom-
mended by the governor of the province, but appointed by the central administration.^9
Gunji terms of office were not clearly delimited. In the early ritsuryō era, they were mostly
recruited from among the traditionally powerful families of the region. Their power and author-
ity in local and regional society made them the decisive link between the tax- paying population