D. Taranczewski
to 200,000 in less than a century, posed another immense challenge for state finance. Expansion
into the northeastern frontier was yet another: military campaigns, military settlements, and
other infrastructure had to be financed, as did the transfer by force of large groups of Emishi into
regions under the control of the central authorities. The northeast remained a largely auto-
nomous region, full of internal and external conflicts with a strong autonomy and a continuous
challenge to the center, until the late twelfth century.
Political solutions centered on strengthening the economic potential of agriculture. As early
as in the formative stage of the ritsuryō system, measures were taken by state authorities in order
to enlarge the area of paddy fields. As incentives to promote the exploitation of land, the central
administration conceded tax reductions and more stable rights to the developers of new fields.
One of the measures of this kind was encouraging non- state actors to exploit land and to install
irrigation facilities. In a decree in 723, exploiters of arable land under certain conditions were
guaranteed the use of this land for their lifetime; henceforth it was not to be subject to periodical
redistribution. When new irrigation facilities were installed, the developer’s household was to
enjoy the use of the exploited land for even three generations (san’sei isshin no hō). Such incentives
were extended in 743 when the three- generation limitation on the usufructury rights of the
exploiter’s family was abolished. In 765, however, the court reversed itself, interdicting any
exploitation of arable land by non- state actors, except exploitation by Buddhist temples. Such
oscillations of prohibiting and allowing non- state exploitation continued until at least the begin-
ning of the tenth century; decrees allowing development of new fields, together with rights on
arable land more stable than rights on land subject to redistribution or leased for rent issued in
772, 807, 879, and 931 were rescinded again in 784, 806, 812, 850, 896, and 902. All in all, we
can discern the target of central land policy to have been keeping the land in the hands of tillers,
as well as under the strict control of the administration. On the other hand, direct access of
members of the central elites to the resources in the provinces had to be prevented, because some
had already began exploiting land to the disadvantage of local farmers and in contradiction to the
principle of common use of wasteland. Such developments could easily have threatened state tax
income, and the government reacted sensitively when its direct control of the empire’s resources,
its raison d’être as a distributor of the wealth of the empire, was jeopardized.^25
Land policies closely interacted with a long- term change in the tax system that began in the
early ninth century. At the root of this change, we have to take into account a rapidly proceeding
social differentiation within local society. In the face of a growing problem of tax evasion, the per
capita tax system, levied on all males qualified as taxable in the household registers, was replaced
by a system wherein subjects became liable for taxation (payment of goods and performance of
statute labor) only by tilling taxable land. Real estate was more easily controlled than mobile
men, and so the area and quality of the land tilled became the new basis for the assessment of
services and goods. The system of household registers was abolished; the composition of house-
holds became irrelevant under the new tax system. We can suppose that the new social units of
production were more- or-less nuclear farming family households, and that the former kubunden
remained mutatis mutandis under the plough of the previous handen- tillers.^26 During the tenth
century, all taxes in kind were integrated into a single category (kanmotsu or “official goods”),
while all labor services were amalgamated as zatsuyaku or zōeki (“manifold services”). All taxable
farming land—irrespective of origins—was registered under the category of kōden (“public
fields”).^27
Together with the changes in the tax system, the central administration developed by trial and
error new ways of providing central elites with goods and services. We can discern a process
wherein the originally centralized collection and distribution of goods and labor services based
on a direct and strict control over people and land divided into separate forms of control over the