J.R. Piggott
to replicate the eastern extension at eighth- century Heijō where official temples such as Gangōji,
Kōfukuji, and Tōdaiji had been built in that earlier capital.
In 1088 the satellite- building process moved on when Shirakawa initiated construction of his
new retirement palace at Toba. And then several decades later the retired Go- Shirakawa
(1127–1192; r. 1155–1158) built his Hōjūji-dono palace on the east side of the Kamo River at
Seventh Ward Avenue. He moved in 1161, and subsequently added the Rengeōin chapel (alt.
Sanjūsangendō), famed for its 1000 individually sculpted images of Kannon, Bodhisattva of
Mercy. Nearby was the twenty- chō site of Rokuhara, where many of the Ise Taira chieftain
Kiyomori’s (1118–1181) armed followers were headquartered near Kūya’s Rokuhara Mitsuji.
Rokuhara was said to have had 3200 roofs by Kiyomori’s time.^51 In contrast, across town to the
northwest the remains in the old palace precincts across town were so dilapidated that it was
being called “the royal- palace field” (uchino). Indeed when Toba asked his Council of State min-
isters to advise him as to whether the original palace should be rebuilt in 1112, they told him that
town palaces were the norm. And by 1142 a literatus proclaimed that anyone important was by
then residing east of the Kamo River.^52
Where then was the work of government done in this era of town palaces and palace- temple
satellites for the retired monarchs who led the court? Researchers have discovered from courtier
journal entries that ministers worked at home. And after the young Toba monarch’s accession in
1103, meetings of his senior nobles took place at the retired Shirakawa’s palace, since he was the
child’s guardian and head of the royal family. Provincial governors worked in home offices as
well—in 1102 the governor of the rich province of Ōmi was said to have had an office and five
storehouses at his residence.^53
None of this was particularly new in the twelfth century—the lieutenant governor described
in Shinsarugakuki was described as having storehouses full of treasures at his home. Records indi-
cate too that many such warehouses were destroyed in a cataclysmic fire of 1177, when 180 chō
burned in the Left Capital.^54 That is undoubtedly why the retired monarch Go- Shirakawa main-
tained clusters of storehouses at several different sites inside and outside the capital.
High standards of consumption by kenmon and lesser aristocratic households drove the economy
of the twelfth- century metropole and the provinces that provisioned it. The viceroy Fujiwara
Tadazane (1078–1162), for example, was the proprietor of a host of estates in nineteen provinces
that produced or procured a wide variety of rents for him, in the form of all sorts of laborers, food-
stuffs, timber, food for livestock, matting, cushions, salt, silk, paper, clothing, lamp oil, and torches.
Sachiko Kawai has demonstrated as well how the household of Go- Shirakawa’s daughter,
Senyōmon’in (1181–1252), depended on goods shipped to her regularly from various estates.^55
It is this provisioning system that gave rise to what Toda has called “the estate- based city,”
that is, the metropole as economic hub.^56 Senior retired monarchs, regents, and their associates
had the power and wealth to call on resources and labor from all strata across the realm. So they
were able to build grand homes roofed with tiles shipped from distant Sanuki in the Inland Sea;
they ate their meals on prized ceramic ware from Owari (today’s Nagoya); and they consumed
delicacies from distant parts and served on imported Chinese porcelain. Commoners too gained
from the lack of constraints in this more open capital: they expanded their homes and shops over
once- sacrosanct paths and ditches, and they even worshipped in Buddhist chapels meant for com-
moners such as the Rokkakudō and Inabadō, despite earlier prohibitions against such temples in
the capital.^57
The lack of firm controls and hierarchy, while liberating some residents of the twelfth- century
metropole, also increased tensions within and between the vertical factions that constituted the
kenmon blocs; and the threat of violence made capital residents, powerful and not, more dependent
on military commanders like Taira Kiyomori and his rival, Minamoto Yoshitomo (1123–1160).