14
Heian- kyo ̄
From royal center to metropole
Joan R. Piggott
The history of Japan’s old capital at Kyoto, now a favorite venue for world tourism and recently
listed as ninth by The Japan Times (6/25, 2016) among today’s most livable cities, needs more
attention. Kyoto served as the center of the realm of the Heavenly Sovereign (tennō; most com-
monly rendered in English as emperor) from the turn of the ninth century through the late nine-
teenth century, when the monarch moved east to today’s Tokyo.
There is a substantial body of scholarship on Kyoto’s urban history in Japanese, but work in
Western languages remains limited. In French, Nicolas Fiévé has provided the magnificently
illustrated Atlas Historique de Kyoto, which gives readers a good sense of Kyoto’s changing geo-
graphy and built environment through time. In English, Matthew Stavros has published Kyoto:
An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital. The focus of the latter, however, is mostly on the
medieval age, leaving much to be said about Kyoto’s classical era, from its establishment by
Kanmu in 794 up through the twelfth century, when retired monarchs came to function as court
leaders. My purpose here is to discuss prominent themes and trajectories while also pointing
readers toward useful research on Heian- period Kyoto.
Fundamentals of urban history
In The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, urban archaeologist Monica Smith and others discuss
key issues for urban history such as origins, relationships between early cities and states, diverse
urban forms through time and space, and the social transformations experienced by urban dwell-
ers through time. As prominent urban characteristics, Smith lists: aggregation of population;
increasing scale, specialization, and intensification of subsistence needs; visible signs of significant
stratification; and public monuments. As urban functions, Smith describes how provisioning
requires residents to create far- reaching social and economic networks. Cities as the hubs of such
networks generate collective beliefs that influence the hinterland, and their dwellers form what
Smith calls “a moral community” with a long- term investment in consensus. That consensus is
constructed and maintained by activities in spaces where urban residents assemble, such as the
marketplace or at public rituals.^1
Smith and her colleagues also frequently cite detailed criteria articulated by Gordon Childe
(1892–1957) to identify excavated urban sites: a dense population; the presence of full- time