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Updated: August 24, 2024
But by the Daika reforms the interest of the hereditary nobility in the taxes Avas limited to realizing their sustenance allowances; while as for the land, it was removed entirely beyond their control and partitioned among the people, in the proportion already noted, on leases terminable at the end of six years.
Whatever hopes these conservatives entertained of a reversion to the old-time-order of things, they were signally disappointed. The Daika reformers had invariably contrived that conciliation should march hand in hand with innovation. Temmu relied on coercion. He himself administered State affairs with little recourse to ministerial aid but always with military assistance in the background.
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.
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.
The Daika reforms, copying the Tang polity called into existence a cabinet and a body of officials appointable or removable by the sovereign at will, each entrusted with definite functions. But almost before that centralized system had time to take root, the Fujiwara grafted on it a modification which, in effect, substituted their own family for the o-omi and the o-muraji of previous times.
The Daika principle that the land was wholly the property of the Crown had thus to yield partially to the urgency of the situation, and during the third decade of the eighth century it was enacted that, if a man reclaimed land by utilizing aqueducts and reservoirs already in existence, the land should belong to him for his lifetime, while if the reservoirs and aqueducts were of his own construction, the right of property should be valid for three generations.* From the operation of this law the provincial governors were excepted; the usufruct of lands reclaimed by them was limited to the term of their tenure of office, though, as related already, legislation in their case varied greatly from time to time.
When the Daika reforms were undertaken, the metropolitan magnates looked down upon their provincial brethren as an inferior order of beings, but in the closing days of the Nara epoch the situations were reversed, and the ultimate transfer of administrative power from the Court to the provincials began to be foreshadowed.
Nothing could have been more complete than the exclusion of the Kyoto Court from the whole realm of practical government; nor could any system have contrasted more flagrantly with the theory of the Daika reforms, according to which every acre of land throughout the length and breadth of the empire was the property of the sovereign.
Tenchi did not wish that his reforms should be directly associated with the Throne until their success was assured; Temmu desired that the additions made by him to the Daika system should be consolidated by the genius of his wife before the sceptre passed finally into the hands of his son.
From the megalithic tombs of old Japan to the little urn that holds the handful of ashes representing a cremated body, the transition is immense. It has been shown that one of the signal reforms of the Daika era was the setting of limits to the size of sepulchres, a measure which afforded to the lower classes much relief from forced labour.
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