Why NOT Leave Nara? or Nagaoka?

[Ross Bender]

Continuing the discussion in English begun by Ronald Toby (“Why Leave Nara?” 1985) and William Wayne Farris (_Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures_ 1998), Ellen Van Goethem has narrated in painstaking and lucid detail the story of Kanmu Tenno’s transfer of the capital from Nara to Nagaoka and then to Heiankyo.

_Nagaoka: Japan’s Forgotten Capital_ (Brill 2008) draws on a remarkable variety of Japanese primary and secondary sources to tackle still-tantalizing questions: why the shift to Nagaoka? who killed Tanetsugu? what did Nagaoka look like? did Crown Prince Sawara really curse the new capital? why after ten years did Kanmu pull up stakes yet again?

A true bonus of this expensive volume (I had to decide between purchasing it or saving my money for tickets to the next Rolling Stones concert) is the appendix in which she reproduces forty mokkan, and then provides sketches of each with the characters clearly printed. The numerous maps and charts supply a wealth of graphic information never available before in Western-language treatments of Kanmu’s reign.

Her answers to the still-tantalizing questions seem to me to be overdependent on a perception of Kanmu’s personal power which, while meticulously documented and rooted in the arguments of Japanese scholars through the years, smack of what Farris termed in 1998 the “ideology of imperial glory.” Still, a reading of Van Goethem’s presentation of the issues is a prerequisite for further debate on the intriguing puzzles, for which no final answer may be possible.

It has occurred to me while studying the movements of Koken/Shotoku Tenno and her attempts at capital building that perhaps the real question is not “Why leave Nara?” but rather “Why not?” That is, did the archaic impulse of capital shifting ever really come to an end until the realities of demographic and economic stagnation (as Farris argues) put a stop to it?

Van Goethem in her conclusion states that even though the western part of Heiankyo began to sink into the swamp not long after Kanmu’s death, his successors “no longer had the strong personal power required to enforce a transfer of capitals.” Well, maybe. But it seems to me that an examination of the complete picture of roaming emperors and peregrinating palaces up to and right through the Nara period is needed before such a conclusion can be accepted.

(NB: Usa Hachiman was in Buzen Province, not Bungo -- p.111)

Ross Bender
http://rossbender.org