Setting the Scene
The Nara period is usually dated to the eighth century, when the court’s capital was at Heijo-kyo, the city now called Nara. It follows the Asuka period of the sixth and seventh centuries, and the two are closely linked. The cultural story of both is one of intense contact with the continent, mainly with China, and with the Korean kingdoms that served as important go-betweens. The period names and dates are conveniences of later historians, and the processes described here began earlier and continued afterward.
How Ideas Arrived
Ideas moved in several ways. Envoys and students traveled to China and returned with books, objects and knowledge. Monks, craftspeople and scholars came from the Korean peninsula and from the continent and settled in Japan. Gifts of Buddhist images and texts also passed between rulers. The court of that time looked on the Tang dynasty empire of China as a model of an organized state, and sought to imitate its administration, laws and capital design.
Writing and Records
Before this, Japan had no widely used writing of its own. Chinese characters were adopted, and educated people learned to read and compose in classical Chinese. Writing Japanese itself was harder, because the two languages are very different, so scribes experimented with using characters for their sounds. This led to the system used in the earliest large poetry anthology, the Man’yoshu, which preserves poems from many levels of society, including court figures, soldiers and ordinary people. Its poems are valued for their directness, and they show a sense of nature and feeling that later poets knew well. Later court poets built on this inheritance in waka poetry.
Chronicles were compiled at the court as well. Two of the earliest, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, collect myths, genealogies and records of rulers. They served to present the imperial line as ancient and legitimate, so they combine history and legend and are read with care today. Regional gazetteers recorded local customs and products.
A Planned Capital
The capital at Nara was laid out on a grid, following the model of Chinese cities, with broad avenues, a palace area at the north and markets. Yet it was smaller and less strictly walled than its models. Governing offices, aristocratic residences and temples filled the city. The planned capital shows an interest in the continental idea of an orderly state, and it set a pattern that the later capital at Kyoto also followed.
Buddhism and the State
Buddhism had been introduced earlier, and in the Nara period the court promoted it as a protector of the country. Provincial temples were established across the land, and a great temple in the capital, Todaiji, housed a huge bronze image of the Buddha, which was dedicated in the middle of the eighth century. The casting of such an enormous statue was a major project requiring wide support and resources. The image has been damaged and restored over the centuries, so what visitors see today is partly later work. Todaiji also holds a storehouse, the Shosoin, which preserves objects associated with the court of the time, including instruments, textiles, mirrors and ceramics. Many show the reach of trade along routes across Asia. Buddhist doctrine was studied in schools centered on particular texts, and monasteries became centers of learning.
Architecture and Sculpture
Temple architecture came from the continent too: tiled roofs, red-painted columns, raised stone platforms and wooden brackets supporting wide eaves. Horyuji, near Nara, is famous for wooden buildings that are often described as among the oldest in the world, dating from the Asuka period with later additions. The adoption of continental building methods marks an early stage in the history of Japanese architecture, though the Japanese ways of using wood and open interiors developed with time.
Buddhist sculpture of the period used bronze, clay, dry lacquer and wood. Dry lacquer, in which layers of cloth are soaked in lacquer over a core, was used for lifelike portraits and devotional figures; this is among the earliest uses of urushi lacquer in large sculptures. Statues of guardians and disciples show expressive faces and fine detail. The Nara period is often seen as a high point of Buddhist sculpture in Japan.
Adapted, Not Merely Copied
It would be a mistake to see the period as simple imitation. The court adopted a Chinese-style legal and administrative system but modified it to suit local conditions and existing clan structures. Shinto beliefs and practices continued alongside Buddhism, and over time the two blended in many places. Poetry in Japanese went on being composed. Even in sculpture and architecture, details changed. Japan kept choosing, adjusting and reinterpreting what it received, a pattern that later periods repeated.
A Foundation for Later Periods
The years of Nara and Asuka set up institutions, languages of design and religious practices that shaped everything afterward. When the capital moved to Kyoto at the end of the eighth century, the Heian court grew from this base, and in time developed its own distinctive taste. For anyone reading about later Japanese arts, the Nara period supplies the vocabulary of temple, image, written word and capital city from which many later stories begin.