really integrate Buddhism firmly into the Japanese state, along with many Chinese organizational ideas. Although he boasted a degree of Soga blood, which helped him in his dealings with that clan, Shōtoku was also a member of the imperial family. His reforms were aimed at slapping down the continued meddling in government by the feuding Soga and Mononobe families. The imperial family needed to maintain its link to the Sun Goddess by keeping its blood as pure as possible. This was already developing into a tradition in which each emperor’s chief wife was liable to be his own half-sister. Many emperors hence only had a single imperial grandfather, with inbreeding often even closer, depending on the families of the grandmothers.
Such dangerous family planning seems to have been designed to keep non-imperial relatives from exercising undue influence, although instances inevitably arose when a direct-line heir was not available, occasionally presenting the threat of outsider bloodlines sneaking in.
Kinmei’s son, for example—the thirtieth emperor, Bidatsu (r. 572–85)—was married to his own half-sister, whose mother hailed from the Soga family. After a messy series of intrigues over his successors, and the assassination of an emperor who tried to stand up to the Soga family, Bidatsu’s widow-sister was enthroned as Empress Suiko (r. 592–628).
Her accession masked ugly competition behind the scenes, with her chief minister and uncle, Soga no Umako, in an uneasy standoff with her nephew-regent Prince Shōtoku. It would erupt again after her death, but for as long as she was in power, Japan enjoyed thirty-five years of peace, concurrent with renewed and strong contacts with China’s Sui dynasty, the first family in centuries to claim overlordship over all of China.
Suiko’s reign got off to a bad start, with an earthquake in Nara that led to further mutterings about grim portents. Before long, however, increased contacts with a resurgent China brought powerful influences to her court.
Her leading adviser, Prince Shōtoku, is one of the iconic figures of Japanese history—his image graced the 5,000-yen banknote for much of the later twentieth century. In any other state, he might have been ideal sovereign material, but he lacked the double imperial-line descent required of an unassailable ruler. He is the subject of breathless hero-worship in ancient chronicles, although his real-world achievements are difficult to pin down. If we are to believe the chronicles, Shōtoku was an unearthly child prodigy who had the power of speech at birth, and who grew up to become a multitasker who could somehow hear ten petitions at once and rule on them simultaneously. Shōtoku was intimately associated with the arrival of Buddhism in Japan, and also with the establishment of firmer contacts with China. It is this latter achievement that is liable to have caused much of his popularity, as he would have been seen as the figurehead of an era that flooded Japan with new inventions, sophisticated luxuries, and the beginnings of literature. Chinese civilization, previously glimpsed only in the form of mirrors and tall tales, seems to have spread throughout Japan at a fast rate, spearheaded and remembered today as “Buddhism,” but likely to have been associated at the time with uncountable trade goods, new toys, and fads.
Buddhism itself offered a radically different set of beliefs from those previously practiced by the locals—not the least with its offer of a concept of salvation rather than a nebulous, unappealing eternity in the underworld. Shintō—which seems to have only been adopted as a term at all around this point in order to distinguish it from the new import—was still very much concerned with reverence for spirits and the placating of supernatural forces. Buddhism, however, introduced the notion of karma, and the idea that all living creatures were living a cycle of life after life, the state of their being largely determined by whatever merit they had won for themselves in their previous existence. To new aspirants, such claims might be misread as the offer of eternal life and an improvement in personal circumstances—for women to be reborn as men, for men to return wealthier or more powerful, so long as they appeased the Buddhist deities, soon to be seen as incarnate within the many new temples springing up all over the country. None of this had much to do with true Buddhist philosophy, but as in China itself, translation errors and philosophical misunderstandings would characterize much of Buddhism’s early dissemination. Meanwhile, Buddhist practices would override much of the old order. As cremation replaced burial as the prevalent funeral practice, giant grave mounds fell out of fashion, with much of the effort previously expended on tombs redirected into the construction of elaborate Buddhist temples. The very architecture that defined the era became a matter of temple precincts and palaces inspired by Chinese designs.
Shōtoku’s love of things Chinese also extended to managerial strategies. It was under his tenure that the archipelago stopped being an inefficient, haphazard federation of occasionally hostile states and was transformed into a single unified polity with a reigning sovereign. The old tribal rivalries and ethnic tensions would, arguably, endure for another thousand years, but they would henceforth happen below the throne, acted out as a matter of loyalty to the emperor.
It was Shōtoku’s reforms, inspired by China and aimed at reducing the powers of the great families, which truly forced an organizational structure on the Japanese state. He established a court ranking system with a dozen grades, which clearly stipulated that positions were not hereditary; henceforth, it would theoretically be easier to keep nepotism from the government.
He also introduced a seventeen-point constitution, which was less a blueprint for government and more a set of requirements for loyal courtiers. Drawing heavily on Confucianism, Shōtoku insisted that courtiers avoid open conflict, adhere to their job descriptions, and offer true and full obedience to imperial commands. “In a country, there are not two lords,” he writes sternly; “the people have not two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of the whole country.” This might have set the tone for the rule of an absolute monarch, although Shōtoku immediately undermined himself by also insisting on the power of consultation and consensus. “Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.” Although it might have seemed like a contradiction, Shōtoku’s maxims, taken as a whole, would eventually come to imply that the emperor was a divine, inscrutable, and symbolic head of state whose assent—tacit or otherwise—was required for all decisions to be made by his court, but whose ministers were no longer necessarily hereditary nobles. Shōtoku introduced a Chinese-influenced sense of decorum, demanding that all entrants to the palace should drop to their knees and press their hands to the ground before walking on.
Several parts of Shōtoku’s constitution were overwritten by the clearer wording of later decrees, but even in modern Japan, legal scholars have been heard to argue that if his words have not been contradicted by a later revision, they still stand after nearly fourteen centuries.
Some words endure even more obviously. Until the regency of Shōtoku, the sovereign had been known as a king, great lord, or similar title. Following on from his constitution’s insistence that the ruler was the symbol of heaven, Shōtoku began using the term tennō, “heavenly sovereign,” usually translated as “emperor.” All previous sovereigns were upgraded retroactively.
Shōtoku also wedged Buddhism firmly into the state organization by demanding that officials recognize the “three treasures”—not the mirror, sword, and jewel of ancient legend, but the Buddha, the law, and the [Shintō] priesthood, establishing a tripartite appeal to divine authority. Shōtoku promoted further contacts with Chinese Buddhists, inaugurating several major temples and offering tax breaks to selected artists who were able to paint devotional icons. Empress Suiko, as his mouthpiece, commanded her subjects to make large images of the Buddha in copper or embroidery, but also decreed that the gods of “heaven and earth” should not be neglected. She might have been a figurehead, but Empress Suiko still enjoyed some power, and took the opportunity to remind her subjects of the country’s ancient collaboration between male and female powers. It was Buddhism, however, that attracted the attention of neighboring states—the sections of the Nihongi referring to her reign and Shōtoku’s regency are riddled with references to grand embassies from China and Korea arriving with golden gifts and holy scriptures and being greeted by fleets
