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Concept
Nara period
Summary
The Nara period of the history of Japan covers the years from CE 710 to 794. Empress Genmei established the capital of Heijō-kyō (present-day Nara). Except for a five-year period (740–745), when the capital was briefly moved again, it remained the capital of Japanese civilization until Emperor Kanmu established a new capital, Nagaoka-kyō, in 784, before moving to Heian-kyō, modern Kyoto, a decade later in 794.
Japanese society during this period was predominantly agricultural and centered on village life. Most of the villagers followed Shintō, a religion based on the worship of natural and ancestral spirits named kami.
The capital at Nara was modeled after Chang'an, the capital city of the Tang dynasty. In many other ways, the Japanese upper classes patterned themselves after the Chinese, including adopting the Chinese writing system, Chinese fashion, and a Chinese version of Buddhism.
Concentrated efforts by the imperial court to record its history produced the first works of Japanese literature during the Nara period. Works such as the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were political, used to record and therefore justify and establish the supremacy of the rule of the emperors within Japan.
With the spread of written language, the writing of Japanese poetry, known in Japanese as waka, began. The largest and longest-surviving collection of Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū, was compiled from poems mostly composed between 600 and 759 CE. This, and other Nara texts, used Chinese characters to express the sounds of Japanese, known as man'yōgana.
Before the Taihō Code was established, the capital was customarily moved after the death of an emperor because of the ancient belief that a place of death was polluted. Reforms and bureaucratization of government led to the establishment of a permanent imperial capital at Heijō-kyō, or Nara, in AD 710.
The capital was moved shortly (for reasons described later in this section) to Kuni-kyō (present-day Kizugawa) in 740–744, to Naniwa-kyō (present-day Osaka) in 744–745, to Shigarakinomiya (紫香楽宮, present-day Shigaraki) in 745, and moved back to Nara in 745.
Official source
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