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This prince, a great-grandson of the Emperor Temmu, enjoyed high reputation as a scholar, was looked up to as a statesman of great wisdom, and possessed much influence owing to his exalted official position. He urged that neither precedent nor law sanctioned nomination of a lady of the Shimbetsu class to the rank of Empress. The Daiho code was indeed very explicit on the subject.
Nevertheless Japanese legislators did not find it possible to apply fully these excellent principles. Habits of a millennium's growth could not be so lightly eradicated. Traces of the old obtrude themselves plainly from between the lines of the new. It may indeed be broadly stated that the potency of the Daiho code varied in the direct ratio of the centralization of administrative authority.
The Daika and Daiho legislators alike laid down the principle that rice-fields thus allotted should be held for a period of six years only, after which they were to revert to the Crown for redistribution, and various detailed regulations were compiled to meet contingencies that might arise in carrying out the system.
Another objection to the Daiho code and its correlated enactments was that, being written with Chinese ideographs solely, they were unintelligible to the bulk of those they concerned. Confucius laid down as a fundamental maxim of government that men should be taught to obey, not to understand, and that principle was adopted by the Tokugawa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In the days of Shomu and Koken administrative abuses were not limited to the capital, they extended to the provinces also. Among the Daika and Daiho laws, the first that proved to be a failure was that relating to provincial governors. At the outset men of ability were chosen for these important posts, and their term of service was limited to four years.
Among the Daiho statutes was one providing that periods of mourning should be of five grades, the longest being one year and the shortest seven days. Foremost among the pastimes of the Japanese people in all epochs was dancing. The tendency of the Japanese has always been to accompany their feasting and merry-making with music, versifying, and dancing.
The land laws of the Daiho era, like those of the Daika, were based on the hypothesis that all land throughout the country was the property of the Crown, and that upon the latter devolved the responsibility of equitable distribution among the people. Rice being the chief staple of diet and also the standard of exchange, rice-lands that is to say, irrigated fields were regarded as most important.
This "Code and the Penal Law" accompanying it went into full operation from the Daiho era and remained in force thereafter, subject to the revisions above indicated.
Scions of noble families down to the fifth rank had the right of entry, and scions of nobles of the sixth, seventh, and eighth ranks were admitted by nomination. Remuneration to officials took the form of revenue derived from lands and houses, but this subject can be treated more intelligently when we come to speak of the land. According to the Daiho laws one family constituted a household.
There is no reason to doubt that the highly artificial organization of society which such statutes indicate, existed, in outline at all events, from the reign of Kotoku, but its plainly legalized reality dates, so far as history is concerned, from the Daiho era.
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