J.R. Piggott
marshaling the labor to dig out latrines: Yamanaka Akira has concluded that “a flushing culture”
developed at official venues by the late eighth century, but keeping it functioning proved
challenging.^24
Another serious concern for His Majesty and capital officials was that then as now a perma-
nent urban population needed a safety net to protect it from disruptions in provisioning. Kushiki
Yoshinori considers records of frequent official almsgiving as proof of the court’s emerging con-
sciousness of the need for urban policy.^25 Threats to law and order were also increasingly fre-
quent in the mid- ninth century—even the royal processional Suzaku Boulevard was blighted by
crime. When the use of official guards failed, in 895 the court ordered noble households to assist
the capital police office (kebiishi- chō) in overseeing the peace of streets and neighborhoods.^26 Kita-
mura has pointed out that this resort to help from noble households signified weakening official
control.
Moving into the tenth century the record reveals how urban residents were organizing and
participating in activities to seek spiritual protection: they were assembling for festivals at shrines
just outside the capital—specifically those of the Kamo, Hirano, and Inariyama shrines. These
events functioned as “generative venues,” in Monica Smith’s parlance, for new urban com-
munities of belief and consensus. Ichikawa Rie has noted, for instance, how the Inariyama Shrine
festival on the southern perimeter of the capital brought capital dwellers together in the third
month—participants included middling and lower officials as well as non- officials residing
between the Fifth and Ninth wards.^27 The mixing of official and non- official residents during the
celebration gave capital dwellers opportunities to meet while creating their own networks of
status and wealth beyond those led by court government.
Another occasion at which urban residents came together for their own rituals were Departed
Spirit Rituals (goryōe). After the court initiated the practice in the Shinsen’en garden in 863, sub-
sequent events—including sutra- reading, prayers, and various sorts of entertainments for the
deities—were organized by and for capital residents in the spring and summer months, when fear
of flood- borne illnesses was great. Goryōe can be seen as replacing earlier codal banishing rites
(ōharae) that had been planned and performed quite visibly in the streets by ritsuryō officials during
the sixth and twelfth months to cleanse the royal center of spiritual pollution. By the later ninth
century, however, such rites were being performed inside the palace, and specifically for the
monarch himself.^28 In contrast the goryōe were for the well- being of urban residents high and
low; and they brought the residents out of their homes to pray together for their own delivery
from disease. Such events would certainly have stimulated a sense of community for
participants.
Although the court tried to assert its control over all such religious events with patronage,
splendid displays of its wealth and status, and controlling laws, the frequent complaints in court
records about crime and carnivalesque behavior make it clear that at least some participants saw
themselves as outsiders from His Majesty’s courtly society during festival time.
The mid- Heian capital—the tenth and eleventh centuries
Toda Yoshimi and Hotate Michihisa have characterized tenth- and eleventh- century Heian- kyō
as a “court- centered city” (ōchō toshi). Therein aristocratic households became ever more influen-
tial due to the powerful patronage networks they built up to administer absentee landholdings
called estates (shōen). For Toda and Hotate, this was the time when the royal center of Heian- kyō
became a “city” with a more developed economy.
Toda provides this narrative. During the tenth century, monarchs, ministers, and official reli-
gious institutions lacked adequate support from the ritsuryō command economy. In response, by