Names, Ranks, and Court Caps

Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan

Hitting the last of the Taika reforms, including talk about names, ranks, official duties, and new sumptuary laws for officials.

For more, check out: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-111

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 111: Names, ranks, and court caps.

In the early hours of the morning, the locked gates of the palace were dark against the sky. A few torches provided flickering illumination, as a crowd of officials gathered to the left and right of the doors. As they waited outside, a low murmur could be heard as they made small talk with their co-workers. Stragglers continued to join the crowd as the sky itself began to lighten, and though the sun still rested below the horizon, the stars had already given way. As the light grew, and the torches were extinguished, a few late arrivals rushed up just as sun began to peek over the horizon. At that, the doors were opened from inside, and the officials streamed in, heading to their offices where they would get to work running the country—their main tool in this task being little more than brush and paper, as they worked to bring order to the chaos.

Here we are, still in the second year of Taika, aka 646, and still going through the changes being made to the Yamato government. Last episode we went through many of the edicts made in and around the third month of the year. These include proscriptions on the size and content of various tombs, down to how many people they could have work on them and for how long. Other edicts impacted who could actually control the labor of the people. While it is likely that local officials remained in charge, there was at least a nominal understanding that the people’s labor—whether in the form of corvee labor or rice and similar products of the agricultural labor of the people working the fields—all that labor belonged to the State and, by extension, the sovereign. There were many other, specific edicts, many having to do with marriage and various instances of harai—not to mention the invention of “escrow”.

One of the themes through much of this was at least the nominal extension of the sovereign’s direct authority down to the lowest levels of society. This was accomplished by setting up offices down to the village level that would report up the chain all the way to the court. These “officers” were likely pulled from individuals who were already part of the elites, but instead of being paid by income from their own lands, they now had stipends coming directly from the court.

That was a theme that continued in the edicts that came out in the 8th month, which is where we’re going to start with today’s episode.

Before we get into that, though, a quick caveat: I am still not convinced that I fully understand what is going on with some of these edicts, especially around names. I’m not even sure the Chroniclers fully comprehended what they had put together and pulled from various sources at times, which occasionally seems like it is contradictory or repetitive. So I’ll do my best to explain it as I see it, but if you really want to get into this topic you probably will want to dig into it for yourself.

Now I want to start with Aston’s translation of part of the edict as recorded in the Nihon Shoki. Following a rather flowery introduction talking about sage kings—a topic we should touch on at some point—they get to the heart of the matter:

“Now as to the names of the early Princes: the Omi, Muraji, Tomo no Miyatsuko and Kuni no Miyatsuko have divided their various Be and allotted them severally to their various titles (or surnames). They afterwards took the various Be of the people, and made them reside in the provinces and districts, one mixed up with another. The consequence has been to make father and child to bear different surnames, and brothers to be reckoned of distinct families, while husbands and wives have names different from one another. One family is divided into five or split up into six, and both Court and country are therefore filled with contentious suits. No settlement has been come to, and the mutual confusion grows worse and worse. Let the various Be, therefore, beginning with those of the reigning Sovereign and including those in the possession of the Omi, Muraji, etc., be, without exception, abolished, and let them become subjects of the State. Those who have become Tomo no Miyatsuko by borrowing the names of princes, and those who have become Omi or Muraji on the strength of the names of ancestors, may not fully apprehend our purport, and might think, if they heard this announcement without warning, that the names borrowed by their ancestors would become extinct. We therefore make this announcement beforehand, so that they may understand what are our intentions.

The children of rulers succeed one another in the government of the Realm, and it is well known that the names of the actual Sovereign and of his Royal ancestors will not be forgotten by the world. But the names of sovereigns are lightly given to rivers and plains, or common people are called by them. This is a truly fearful state of things. The appellations of sovereigns, like the sun and moon, will float afar: the names of those of the Royal line will last for ever, like unto Heaven and Earth. Such being our opinion, we announce as follows:--'Do ye all, from those of the Royal line down to the Ministers, the Daibu, Omi, Muraji, and Tomo no Miyatsuko, who do Us service, (in short) all persons of whatever Uji [One book has 'royal subjects of whatever name'], give ear to what We say. With regard to the form of your service, We now abolish the former offices and constitute afresh the hundred bureaus. We shall, moreover, grant grades of rank and confer official dignities.”

Whew. That is a lot, and I want to try to break it down as best I can.

First off, I believe this ties in to the earlier edict, in the third month, that we mentioned last episode. In that edict, the sovereign abolished the “Iribe”—those families made for the princes and ostensibly around to keep certain names alive, though quite probably they were family groups meant to keep previous princes and others rolling in their rice payments. This new edict is continuing that trend – of abolishing the Be – but is coming at it from a different perspective.

As a reminder, the “Be” and the various “Uji”, while they were longstanding Yamato tradition by this point, were originally imported traditions from the continent. By all accounts the “Be” were the first to be created, with the “family” system creating a hereditary structure through which people would be born into particular jobs, with a familial “head” that would then organize the various members across the realm. The more aristocratic “uji” formed out of that.

Based on this edict, it seems that not only the sovereign of Yamato was using this system. In fact, I suspect that the various local “sovereigns” of other lands had adopted it for their own purposes as well, and it sounds like even the Yamato courtiers had taken to using a version of this system within the lands that they controlled. The Be and Uji system were, by this point, ubiquitous across the archipelago, at all levels, from what we can tell.

Family *names*, however, were not a native system in Yamato. Prior to the introduction of the Be and Uji, as best we can tell people were known by where they were from, what they did and the titles they held, and by their given names. A father and son would not necessarily have shared a name, other than those other factors that they held in common by way of ancestry.

I further suspect that ancestor worship was not so much a thing, either. Not that people in Yamato didn’t revere their parents or remember those that passed on, but there weren’t the same ideas about family as among, say, the ethnic Han, for whom ancestor worship was important, and carrying a family name was tied to larger cultural and ritual implications. In early Yamato, names were tied to jobs and position in society. If that changed, then someone could easily create a new family—a new “Be”—and people placed in that group would have both a new name and new responsibilities.

If a particular elite uji, like the Abe, the Ohotomo, the Nakatomi, or the Mononobe, needed people to set up a new income stream for a particular person—perhaps a son or daughter—or they wanted to start a new industry in their territory, they might just have easily called up various people and reassigned them from one Be to a newly created one. That would surely explain the breaking up of fathers and sons, such that each had a different name.

At the same time, this would have likely been anathema to the Confucian dogma that underlay much of the reasoning behind the reforms. Confucian theory gives much weight to the concept of filial piety, that a son should be loyal to the father. Thus to cause a father and son to be split into different families without good reason was likely at odds with what the elite were telling themselves was the proper way of Heaven.

So now we come back to the edict, which treats the entire traditional naming system as though it was in line with Confucian ideals. Moreover it places the authority to regulate these families and family names in the sovereign. This wasn’t actually a new thing: the Chronicles previously had mentioned regulating names under the reign of Woasatsuma no Ohokimi, aka Ingyou Tennou, in the 5th century. This was covered back in episode 56, where we talked about the importance of names, how they determined who you were and your position in society. This was changing, as was the concept of family, which was, once again, much more closely tied to Confucian notions of family. So controlling the names of the families was another form of power that further emphasized the position of the sovereign. Through the regulation of these corporate families, their labor, was now being brought under the nominal control of the sovereign and the state.

This edict also removed the tradition of naming corporate groups after a person. Previously that traditions seems to have started as a way to create groups that actually supported a given individual with their labor. Those groups would often persist beyond the individual, however, and I suspect that’s where they became thought of as a kind of memorial, maintaining the memory of that individual. And I can see the power in that kind of thing, especially prior to having any kind of decent written records. It is interesting to see how the practice had come to be viewed by the 7th century.

There is a mention in the edict of something that runs contrary to how we understand things actually happened, and that was in the comment that lakes and rivers and more had been named after sovereigns. The Chroniclers here are referring to the way that placenames, such as Hatsuse, or Hase, as well as Okinaga or Katsuraki, show up in the names of various sovereigns. Aston notes something that seems obvious to me, when you think about it: These places weren’t named after the sovereigns, but the other way around. Assuming that many of the names we see in the Chronicles were actually titles, they told you things about the person they were attached to, possibly where they were from. Of course, that interpretation doesn’t fit as well into the narrative of the 7th and 8th centuries and the idea that the royal lineage was a largely unbroken line back to the earliest ancestors, instead of a broken lineage of different people from different places.So with all of that, the court abolished the practice of creating all of these different family names. The edict almost makes it sound like they were abolishing those families, as well, though they make a clarifying point about that: there is a note about how some of the tomo no miyatsuko—a general name for those families that served in court—took their position by ‘borrowing the name of a prince’, and how the court didn’t want those people to be worried about how this change would affect them. The meaning would appear to be that courtly families would be unaffected, and this only affected families going forward or those that were created that were apparently below the level of the Tomo no Miyatsuko. That said, this is where it is good to remember that we are reading a Sinified version of the ancient Japanese as told by biased Chroniclers and trying to interpret it through a modern lens, often going through yet another translation in the process.

The second part of the edict mentions abolishing the former offices and constituting afresh the hundred bureaus. This is a bit difficult to parse, but Aston suggests that it refers to abolishing any actual authority attached to the old titles, many of which had become nothing more than names. So when we see things like Wake and Mimi and other such things that appear to be old titles, the court was likely making sure that everyone now understood that those no longer had any actual authority. The kabane or family ranks stayed, at least for now, greater emphasis was placed on the newly established positions that were set up as part of the new state bureaucracy, as well as the rank and stipend that was likewise given out. Aston also suggests that this change means that the rank and the title were not necessarily one and the same, though high rank often did come with a high position.

The edict doesn’t stop there, however. After talking about names and families, it goes on to talk about governors and the kuni-no-miyatsuko handing out rice land per previous edicts. It is noted that the rice land should be handed out equally to the people, and that those who live on or next to the land should be the ones to get it. I wonder about the actual execution, but at first blush, at least, this seems to make sense—don’t make families hike all the way across the village or region to till the field, but try to locate their land near their home.

It also notes that alternate taxes—when it is labor or something else in lieu of rice—should only be collected from men, presumably the head of the household. This was likely part of the shaping of patriarchal attitudes that assumed the men were the head of household and the chief laborers.

The edict went on to call up corvee labor—one from every fifty houses, as had been previously mentioned—to help survey the various provinces and create maps of the provinces and districts. This is a rather monumental task, and it is unfortunate that no actual map survives from this time as far as I’m aware, but it is one more effort to try to bring the entire realm under the control of the state. In this case you are, in a way, capturing the realm on paper and setting up a basis on which to discuss later things like land ownership and use even though the actual land might be far away from the political and administrative center.

Finally, the edict makes note that uniform provision would be made for any canals, embankments, or rice land that needed to be brought into cultivation. This likely varied in each district and province, so there is just a general note that would have required local officers of the court to determine exactly what was needed.

And that was it for the 8th month, and for edicts that year. There was more that we will cover in later episodes—rats marching to the east, the last gasps (perhaps) of Nimna as a consideration, and other such things. But no more edicts.

At least not that year. The following year, Taika 3, or 647, we see the issue of names comes up again. This time the edict came out in the fourth month, and the claims now seem similar but slightly different from before. The issue in the 4th month appears to be that some family names were derived from the names of kami or even sovereigns. Moreover, people were apparently using that connection to claim that they had certain authorities to continue to make people their slaves or to avail themselves of their labor.

In the case of the names related to sovereigns, I suspect that ties in directly with the previous discussions of creating corporate groups to support a given prince or other royal family member. As for the kami, there seems to be some idea that groups that claimed descent from a particular kami would take that kami’s name. So those claiming descent from Oho-kuni-nushi, the Lord of the Great Land, used the name “Oho-kuni-nushi” as their family name. We aren’t given specific examples, however.

There are numerous possible explanations I could see for these, especially given the way that early power structures tied themselves to the ability to appease powerful spirits. The Ohomiwa family name, for example, likely refers to their connection to the religious activities on Mt. Miwa. I also would not be surprised to learn that some of these families were ancient royalty in their own lands—the lands that Yamato now claimed as provinces.

There is the possibility, though, that all of this is just people taking names for themselves and putting on airs—trying to be important. After all, in a time before documentation, whos to say when you actually arrived at a particular name and how. This is a phenomenon seen in parts of America, especially in the early days, when many people struck off to make a life, often without the baggage attached to a previous identity. Prior to more rigorous systems of documentation, how would you know if the person you met really was “Mr. Underhill” and not someone entirely different?

Most important, to me, is the act of the sovereign, as head of the state, in actively claiming authority over these issues as well as putting a stop to the way that people were using such names to apparently make claims to certain entitlements. The message seems clear: Moving forward, everything has to go through the sovereign and the court. The previous systems of rule and governance will no longer be tolerated.

Of course, it isn’t exactly clear how this was enforced. Was it purely through the court? Or was there also some threat of force and violence if people didn’t conform? Or was it enough to make the edict and then have local governors handle it? Other than the example that was made of several of the governors, which we talked about over the last couple of episodes, I’m not sure that we fully know how it all went down.

There were a few other edicts mentioned that year, but apparently the chroniclers didn’t know exactly when they had been instituted, and so just claimed that it occurred during that year. It seems that there was a new palace built, replacing the old government offices at Wogohori, in Naniwa, and there were new rules for how the court would operate. That entry is placed between the entries of the 4th and 10th month, suggesting it was instituted around the summer period. Then, after a few more entries, including one for the last day of the year, there was the the institution of a new rank system.

As for the new court rules: all courtiers were to show up to work at the Hour of the Tiger—the period of roughly 3 to 5 AM by modern standards—and they were to stand at the gates of the palace until dawn, at which point the doors would be open and people would be allowed in. Once everyone was in, the doors would be shut, and anyone who was late, well, I guess you were calling out for the day.

We talked a little bit about this practice back in Episode 95, when we were going over Umayado’s 17 article constitution, which exhorted the court officials to arrive early and stay late. This was clearly based on continental models, and as I mentioned back in that episode, it was likely done to make sure that officials had the most daylight possible to complete their tasks.

Not that there were so many tasks. The workday ended around noon—the Hour of the Horse, which technically spanned 11 AM to 1 PM. A bell would be rung, letting everyone know that it was time to go home. Realistically this means that you are lining up at 4 AM and going home at noon—roughly an 8 hour day, not including the commute. And if 4 AM seems early, this was not an uncommon time for people to get up and prepare for the day when they didn’t have artificial light to keep them going so much later. In Medieval Europe it wasn’t uncommon for servants to be up and about by 3 or 4 am to go get food to start cooking. If you consider that it was dark by 6 or 7 pm, and you go to bed around 8 pm, you just might wake up at 4 in the morning—going to bed a little earlier, or just going with a bit less sleep, and you can be up and about by that time.

This also gave the court officials time for everything else they would need to do. From noon until sunset would have been time for the social functions; what we might consider “networking” in a modern corporate environment. Today we can shift these considerations to much later due to electricity, but when light meant fire and fire meant the possibility of burning down your entire house, then using the light you had makes sense. In fact, one has to wonder if this is what led to the fire that destroyed Naka no Oe’s own mansion—but we’ll probably want to save the rest of that story for another episode.

The other thing happening this year, and in many ways closely tied with the new court ceremonies, was the implementation of a new rank and cap system.

The previous rank system from the time of Umayado was replaced with a system of seven kinds of court caps and 17 grades. It is often assumed that court caps and clothing were instituted for the earlier system, though there isn’t a clear mention of uniforms and colors associated with the earlier ranks are largely conjecture. It isn’t clear that the court had yet picked up the continental clothing styles. By 647, however, it seems that the court was considering official court clothing.

The Tang Dynasty had instituted color regulations for clothing in the the 4th year of Zhen Guan. The style of robe, the panling lanshan, was borrowed from the Xianbei—a robe with a round-necked collar that originally appeared in the Northern dynasties. It had been previously adopted by scholars and officials in the Tang dynasty, and in the edict of 630 the Tang emperor dictated specific colors that could be worn based on the rank of the individual. Coincidentally, 630-632 is when Inugami no Mitasuki was there as an envoy of the Yamato court. He would have seen the style of the imperial Tang court.

Uniforms at the Tang court would have been quite the sight, especially if you weren’t used to it. People in the same style and cut of robe, not just for fashion purposes, but coordinated, like a modern sports team. You could immediately tell someone’s rank, and when they lined up, it would have been particularly striking.

It is unclear to me just how similar the Yamato implementation of this system was to the continental version. This may have been more like the “we have a rank system at home” version of courtly outfits. It also must have been quite the task to have all of the proper caps made from different materials for all of the various ranks and individuals. And these weren’t caps you wore all the time—only at major court ceremonies, including when official dignitaries were visiting or during various Buddhist ceremonies.

What’s more, only two years later they would change it again. This time we have the edict pegged to the second month of the year 649, with 19 court cap-ranks initiated. I’ll put the ranks themselves up on the podcast blog at sengokudaimyo.com if anyone is interested in the specifics, but a few notes.

First, the names of the ranks were based on various things, such as the color of the cloth of the cap itself and whether it was plain or embroidered. Some of the classes are based on things like “Flower”, “Mountain”, or “Tiger”, though they possibly meant “Kingfisher” for that last one. The first three classes are broken up into Greater and Lesser, or Dai and Shou, while the lower classes—ranks 7 to 18—were further broken into Upper and Lower. So you would have Upper Daikwa, Lower Daikwa, Upper Shoukwa, and Lower Shoukwa, as an example. That method of breaking the lower classes of ranks into more was something that would persist into later rank systems. The last rank, “Risshin”, just meant “Advancement” and seems to refer to the lowest grade on the scale.

In addition to the ranks, in the 2nd month of 649 Takamuku no Kuromaro and the Buddhist Priest Bin presented their work on the 8 Ministries—or Departments—and the 100 bureaus. This is work they had been tasked with at the beginning, and the eventual structure is definitely based closely on the Tang dynasty’s court, but is not necessarily a one for one adoption. At the top of it all are the 8 Ministries, or Shou, which oversaw the various bureaus—the text says one hundred, but they aren’t actually enumerated and so I think we can assume that they just meant that there were a lot of them.

The actual 8 Ministries are as follows:

Nakatsukasa Shou – the Ministry of Central Affairs

Shikibu Shou – the Ministry of Civil Office

Jibu Shou – the Ministry of Ceremonies

Mimbu Shou – the Ministry of Popular Affairs

Hyoubu Shou – the Ministry of War

Gyoubu Shou – the Ministry of Justice

Ohokura Shou – the Ministry of the Treasury

Kunai Shou – the Ministry Imperial Household

Many of these ministries would last for centuries, even as their power was eclipsed by other government institutions. Still, they would continue to be important, and today the Kunai Shou still exists, though now it is the “Kunai CHO”, often translated as the Imperial Household Agency.

These ministries each had officials at their head who reported up to the Ministers of the Left and Right. These 8 ministries would make up the core of what would come to be known as the Daijo-kan, sometimes referred to as the Great Council of State, which operated the secular government, as opposed to the Jingi-kan, which would come to oversee national Shinto, or kami-related, affairs and ritual.

And with that, we largely come to the end of what appears to be the Taika reforms. The rest of the reign could be thought of as a “burn in” period, I guess, as we assume that they continued to implement these reforms and build up this new government. It is likely relevant that the following year, in 650, they changed the era name, something that we’ll eventually want to talk about.

For now, I think we should call it here. Next episode we’ll backtrack a bit and go back to some of the other, non-edict related events in this period. It wasn’t exactly clean. There was intrigue, murder, and more. Politics at the time were anything but dull.

Still, the reforms had brought about a real change in the administration of Yamato, a change that would influence the entire nation for centuries to come. The centralization of power and the adoption of continental models would not stop simply at administrative tasks, but would find their way into many different facets of life. Naka no Oe himself would continue to refine the system, as would those who came after him. The reforms touched just about every facet of life across the archipelago, and in many ways it finally brought the archipelago under the control of the State, with the sovereign at its head.

And so, until next time, thank you for listening and for all of your support.

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And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.