The Little We Know of the Impact of the Taika Reform Edicts on the Japanese People
Marie Pillsbury
In AD 645, a document was written in Japan by the name of the “Taika Reform Edicts”. This document was written on the heels of another document, “Prince Shōtoku’s Seventeen-Article Constitution”, and while the Constitution was aimed at bringing order to the people’s moral selves, the Reform Edicts were aimed at bringing order and purpose to the lands by way of physical laws. While the Reform Edicts themselves are well documented, there is not a lot of information about the result and affect these reforms had on the people they were meant to help.
The Reforms completely changed the way the government was run, and as such, the implementation took much longer to take effect.[1] It took over 50 years to implement these reforms.[2] The Reform Edicts focused immensely on the role of individual new aldermen and chieftains who would govern different townships and regions.[3] However, the existing chieftains who presided over those lands were not interested in these new rules; they had been ruling on their own without supervision, taking what they wanted and giving nothing in return.[4] This conflict called for prolonged negotiations between the existing chieftains and the government to come up with a compromise.[5] The results of these negotiations made it so that the positions of power were passed down through families, sometimes after a lifetime of one leader, instead of being given to the most qualified person for the position, as the Reforms had originally wanted.[6]
Another goal of the Reforms was to take a census of all free and unfree subjects in the land. This was carried out, and armories were built to house any weapons the people owned.[7] But this census and collection of weapons was not implemented by the new local leaders. The government knew that they would still have a hard time keeping control of the lands, so they sent delegates to each township and region to make sure these reforms were executed.[8] This shows the government’s awareness of the continued power struggle between the local leaders and themselves. The act of taking possession of the people’s weapons was a conscious decision as it served to further the government’s control over the people and the local leaders.
The new Reforms also redistributed and reorganized the land, according to houses and, while not directly taking full ownership of the land, they took control of the politics surrounding the fate of the land.[9] In the histories, it is unclear as to how this affected the everyday people. What is clear, however, is that the government was taking more control, and depending on the leaders of each township, this could affect the individual people in very different ways.
[1] Kan’ichi Asakawa. The Early Institutional Life of Japan: A Study in the Reform of 645 A.D. (Tokyo Shueisha, 1903), 264.
[2] Mikiso Hane and Louis G. Perez. Premodern Japan : A Historical Survey. (Vol. Second edition. Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2014), 25.
[3] David J. Lu, “The Reform Edict of Taika” in Japan: A Documentary History: The Dawn of History to the Late Tokugawa Period. (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 72-73.
[4] Asakawa, The Early Institutional Life of Japan, 259.
[5] Cathleen Boivin and Brian Bonhomme. Milestone Documents in World History : Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped the World. (Milestone Documents. Dallas, Tex: Salem Press, 2010), 358.
[6] Boivin and Bonhomme, Milestone Documents in World History, 359; Asakawa, 277.
[7] Hane and Perez, Premodern Japan, 25.
[8] Asakawa, 265.
[9] Asakawa, 285.
Bibliography
Asakawa, Kan’ichi. The Early Institutional Life of Japan: A Study in the Reform of 645 A.D. Tokyo Shueisha, 1903. https://books.google.com/books?id=K1MuAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA264#v=onepage&q=impact&f=false
Boivin, Cathleen, and Brian Bonhomme. Milestone Documents in World History : Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped the World. Milestone Documents. Dallas, Tex: Salem Press, 2010. http://muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=351513&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Hane, Mikiso, and Louis G. Perez. Premodern Japan : A Historical Survey. Vol. Second edition. Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2014. http://muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=828830&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Lu, David J. “The Reform Edict of Taika” in Japan: A Documentary History: The Dawn of History to the Late Tokugawa Period. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
