Trade, Money, and Merchants in Nara Japan

Abstract

IGHTH-CENTURY Nara was a magnificent city. Even conservative estimates of its population, ranging from seventy thousand to one hundred thouJ..J _sand, make Japan's most famous Chinese-style capital one of the world's great urban centers.' Nara (also known as Heijo) contained a spacious palace compound over one square kilometer in area filled with tiled office buildings and thatched mansions. Outside the palace walls in the city proper lived large concentrations of aristocrats and commoners and people associated with religious institutions. Who provisioned and maintained this large urban populace and physical plant? Almost all English-language analyses, and much of the literature in Japanese, assign the predominant role to adult males making in-kind tax payments.2 The eighth-century law codes ordained a constant flow of goods and labor services as revenues from provincial residents to rank-holders at Nara and elsewhere. To facilitate these payments, a network of official travel arteries linked the capital to sixty-odd provincial headquarters (kokufu RUi)' a few of which were substantial settlements in their own right. Dozens of wooden tablets (mokkan t*N) originally attached to commodity payments have been excavated at Nara since 1961, and many bear the names and addresses of taxpayers. This image of the Nara economy conveyed by the law codes and wooden tablets should not, however, be accepted uncritically. Given the city's size, providing residents with grain, cloth, iron, dried fish, timber, and sundry other goods must have been a vast undertaking. Could Japan's taxpayers have supplied all consumer demands? Or were there other agents involved in provisioning Nara?