The Nara period is a relatively short period of
Japanese history in which Chinese culture remained
influential while, at the same time, Japan began to
advance its own unique cultural identity. Empress
Gemmei established the capital at Nara (Heijo kyo),
a planned city laid out on a grid in imitation of the
TANG capital of Changan. Modeling Chinese Confucian practice, the Japanese launched a highly centralized government explained in Prince Shotoku’s
Seventeen-Article Constitution. Concentrated efforts
by the imperial court to record and document itself
produced the first works of Japanese history, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720). Chinese Buddhism continued to be promoted, and Emperor
Shomu (724–749) erected the Todai-ji, a huge
wooden temple that houses an especially impressive Buddha. Because most of Japanese society was
rural and practiced Shinto, it was at this time that
the urban Buddhist ruling class became alienated
from the common people.
A number of distinctly Japanese achievements
occurred during the Nara Period. MAN’YOSHU
(Anthology of a Myriad Leaves) (759) is the first
collection of native poetry in Japanese literature.
It is written using a syllabary in which Chinese
characters serve as phonetic symbols of syllables
rather than of words. Chinese characters were
used to express sounds of Japanese until the Kana
script was invented in the later Nara Period. With
the spread of written language, the distinctly
Japanese poetic form, the waka, appeared. The
traditional methods of hanging and horizontal
Japanese scroll painting, which incorporated both
image and word, were established as well.
Bibliography
Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth
Century. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993.
Sansom, George B. A History of Japan to 1334. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958.
Cynthia Ho