For the majority of the 8th century, Nara was home to Japan’s first permanent capital. Known as Heijō-kyō it was a massive planned city with somewhere between 100,000-200,000 inhabitants. But it was suddenly abandoned when the court moved to what would become Kyoto. Buried under farmlands for over 1,000 years, many remains of this lost city have now been excavated, and some of its most important buildings are being reconstructed. This video showcases several of these projects.
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While making this video I kept finding interesting things I wanted to include in the script, but in the end had to cut out a lot because it was getting way too long and because a lot of it wasn’t strictly necessary in order to talk about the reconstructions (which was the intended topic). So I thought I’d briefly mention some of the things I read here instead:
Heijō-kyō wasn’t the first Chinese-style capital built in Japan. That distinction goes to the city of Fujiwara-kyō, about 20 km to the south, at the other end of the Nara Basin. It is actually believed to have been larger than Heijō-kyō in terms of area, but only lasted for sixteen years, between 694 and 710. One of the main roads of this city extended in a straight line all the way to Nara. It had a total width of almost 35 m, and upon reaching the main gate it widened even further, transforming into Suzaku Avenue. As mentioned in the video, the gate was called the Rajō-mon. An equivalent of it also existed in Heian-kyō (Kyoto), which provided the setting and title for Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "Rashōmon". In 1950 it was adapted into the classic film of the same name by Akira Kurosawa.
Before these cities were created, Japanese capitals had consisted of a series of ever-grander 'palace complexes', courts that moved with changes of reign. More than a dozen such transfers of the court have been identified for the period from 593 to 710. There were probably a number of practical reasons for this custom, but it has also been attributed to the Shinto belief that the death of a ruler caused his palace to become polluted. So, to avoid bad luck, it became necessary for his heir to transfer the court to a new, ritually pure location.
The fact that Nara had once been the capital of Japan was never forgotten, but the exact size, layout, and location of major buildings were unknown until the 1850s, when a scholar and government official called Kitaura Sadamasa began to survey the area. He discovered that parts of the grid still survived on the ridges of rice fields and on local roads, and managed to compile a map, estimating what Heijo-kyo had looked like. Sadamasa correctly guessed the location of the Imperial Palace, where Sekino Tadashi would later find the remains of the Second Daigoku-den.
Not long thereafter, in the early 1900s, a preservation movement began to take shape. One of its leaders was a gardener called Tanada Kajūro, who planted many of the old trees that can now be seen in Nara Park (famous for its free-roaming deer). He would dedicate his life to commemorating the Heijō Palace ruins, and at one point advocated the idea of rebuilding the palace as a Shinto shrine. This idea came from Heian Shrine, a copy of the ancient palace in Kyoto, that had been rebuilt in the 1890s as a shrine dedicated to the first and last Emperors that reigned from the city. This scheme never gathered enough support however, and while the preservation efforts were making steady progress in the 1920s, Tanada became embroiled in a controversy related to the project, and chose to commit seppuku to prove his innocence. A statue of him can now be found along the reconstructed Suzaku Avenue, near the entrance of the Palace Complex.
The true scale of the palace was only understood when ongoing excavations began in the 1950s. Before then, a railway line had unknowingly been built over the southern part of the ruins, which still remains today. There have recently been plans to relocate it, but they were put on hold last year by the new governor of Nara Prefecture, over doubts about the financial viability of the project.
That’s already how I use regular forks.