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The law already referred to in connexion with the Daika era but here cited again for the sake of clearness enacted that all persons, on attaining the age of five, became entitled to two tan of such land, females receiving two-thirds of that amount.
*Tarring, in the "Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan." It may be broadly stated that the Daika reformation, which formed the basis of this legislation, was a transition from the Japanese system of heredity to the Chinese system of morality. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to have extended this adaptation.
Two years later that is to say, in the year after Tenchi's actual accession the census register, which had formed an important feature of the Daika reforms, became an accomplished fact.
Thus, large estates began to fall into private possession; conspicuously in the case of provincial and district governors, who were in a position to employ forced labour, and who frequently abused their powers in defiance of the Daika code and decrees, where it was enacted that all profits from reclaimed lands must be shared with the farmers.* So flagrant did these practices become that, in 767, reclamation was declared to constitute thereafter no title of ownership.
From one point of view, Michizane's overthrow by Fujiwara Tokihira may be regarded as a collision between the Confucian doctrines which informed the polity of the Daika epoch and the power of aristocratic heredity.
*This system was called Sansei-isshin no ho. It is, perhaps, advisable to note that the Daika system of dividing the land for sustenance purposes applied only to land already under cultivation.
All these facts, though already familiar to the reader, find a fitting place in the context of the great political development of the Daika era. For the main features of that development were that the entire nation became the public people of the realm and the whole of the land became the property of the Crown, the hereditary nobles being relegated to the rank of State pensioners.
During the fourteen years of his reign he completed the administrative systems of the Daika era, and asserted the dignity and authority of the Court to an unprecedented degree. Among the men who espoused his cause in the Jinshin struggle there are found many names of aristocrats who boasted high titles and owned hereditary estates.
This was an almost inevitable result of the exceptional facilities given to petitioners under the Daika and Daiho systems. Miyoshi Kiyotsura urged that all petitioning and all resulting inquiries by specially appointed officials should be interdicted, except in matters relating to political crime, and that all offenders should be handed over to the duly constituted administrators of justice.
It has been shown that the Daika reforms regarded all "wet fields" as the property of the Crown, while imposing no restriction on the ownership of uplands, these being counted as belonging to their reclaimers.
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