Chapter 8 Japan 319The efforts to reform the state are tied up with the fortunes of the Soga
clan. They rose with the coming of Buddhism in 552 and exercised powerful
behind-the-scenes control over seven emperors, except during the regency of
Prince Shotoku from 593 to 621. After his death, the Sogas again showed their
claws, making and deposing rulers and committing murder when necessary.
Meanwhile, the Nakatomi, pushed off center stage, had a brilliant son in
Kamatari, who devoted his time to studying the political doctrines of the Chi-
nese sages and eyeing the various imperial princes for an ally. He made friends
with Prince Naka no Oe, and in 645 they moved against the Soga. In an assas-
sination attempt, Prince Naka no Oe attacked Soga no Iruka with a spear in
the presence of the empress, and when the empress left the room, palace guards
finished the job. The events led to the empress abdicating and to the burning of
the imperial residence where all the state papers were being held. Eventually in
661, Prince Naka no Oe became emperor, and now it was through him that
Kamatari was the supreme power, continuing a pattern—which already had
several hundred years precedent and would continue for a millennium more—
where real power was exercised in the background.
Kamatari passed the Taika Reforms of land tenure to bring everything
under the ownership of the emperor, at least theoretically. Local magnates were
deprived of their estates and serfs. Provinces were divided into districts and
townships, with governors appointed from the local gentry. Townships con-
sisted of 50 households under a headman who was responsible for crops, main-
tenance of order, and levying and collecting taxes. Population registers were to
be drawn up and account books maintained so that more taxes could be col-
lected more reliably. Land was redistributed among the cultivators depending
on the number of mouths in a family to be fed; the system was called literally
the “mouth-share fields.” The registers were necessary to ensure that peasants
didn’t escape payment of taxes and that officials didn’t embezzle any. All of
these reforms were attempts to centralize the country under the control of the
emperor and raise revenues for the state, collected by appointed officials
accountable to him; it was the Chinese system.
But it did not work in Japan, for two reasons. First, the great aristocratic
families were too powerful at court and too much in control of their territories
to be easily shoved out. Second, a great deal of rice land was made exempt
from payment of taxes. Rice land owned by shrines and temples and rice land
granted to officials in lieu of a salary, which included large amounts to support
great families, made for huge exemptions from tax rolls. Over the next two cen-
turies, the system slowly collapsed. At every level of the hierarchy, from peas-
ant to local official to regional lord to the central government, people managed
to take shares from below without passing them up. The throne’s share
decreased, demands on peasants increased, and a larger and larger nonproduc-
tive, exploitive middle class prospered. “Despite all the efforts of the central
authority to check the expansion of tax-free estates, there grew up once more a
class of hereditary chieftains whose power rivaled that of the throne and in the