There have been countless threads in this forum about the possibility of a much earlier expansionist (or at least non-isolationist )Japan. However, a frequent problem with most of these threads is that people always focus on the Sengoku and Edo periods (or in an hypothetical alternate shogunate that replaces the Tokuagawa at the approximate time of the OTL Edo period), during which Japan was, respectively, a hodgepodge of warring feudal-military clans and a loose conferation of feudal-military clans which have reluctantly agreed to stop fighting each other. Naturally, our options are rather limited if we're working within that framework...
So, in this thread, I propose that we take a journey back in time in search of the very root of the problem. In 645, Prince Naka no Ōe (future Emperor Tenji) staged a coup against the powerful aristocratic Soga clan, bringing an end to their long dominance of court politics. Naka no Ōe and his allies, initiated the Taika reforms, a series of administrative, legal and social reforms that transformed Japan into a centralized absolute monarchy modeled in most aspects after its comtemporary, Tang dynasty China. They were surprisingly sucessful considering how much power clans in Japan held at the time, and the Japanese emperors held immense power for some time. However, the Ritsuryō legal code implemented as part of the reforms contained the seed of its own destruction: the land policy. Based on the Chinese equal-field system, it held that all land belonged to the Emperor, and that each subject (according to their rank in the complex caste system of the time) was assigned a certain plot of land to cultivate, with the Emperor taking a portion of their yields as the land was his anyway. The crucial flaw of this system was that it offered no incentive for individuals to invest in land reclamation, seeing as any reclaimed land would belong to the state and be distributed in accordance with the system (independtly who had put in the investment to reclaim it), and after an individual who had been assigned a certain field died, that field would revert back to the state and re-assigned according to the law as opposed to passing down to the former tenant's descendents.
Thus, in order to promote land reclamation, the imperial court passed a law granting idividuals and their decendents ownership (first temporary and then perpetual) of any land they were able to reclaim. This resulted in the formation of the first shōen, or manors, the much smaller precursors of the later feudal domains. The problem with the shōen was that, seeing as they did not belong to the Emperor, they could not be taxed, which increased the incentive for land reclamation even more, but severely incapacitated the countries tax system. With time, more and more land came to be occupied by shōen, effectively killing centralized taxation in the long run. By the end of the Heian period, I believe that nearly all land was composed of shoen. The main consequence of this was the gradual weakening of central authority, as it soon became impossible to maintain a centralised army and the importance of local governors increased as they were the one able to levy the only tax that still mattered (the corvee tax allowing them to recruit peasants to work on the shoen). This did not result in straight-up feudalism right away, though, seeing as the civilian provincial governors (kuni) were still bureaucrats appointed by the court and the military governors that supplanted them during the Kamakura period (the shugo) were direct vassals of the Shogunate. The Kamakura shogunate also prevented the shoen from attaining full administrative authority by appointing jito (stewards) to oversee them, but eventually this position became hereditary and the jito became the de facto owners of the shoen (which still could not be taxed). The Ashikaga shogunate, however, was too weak to actually exert any authority over the provinces, and so the shugo eventually seized full authority and evolved into the first daimyo. Then enter the Onin war, and the Sengoku period began.
Now, my view of this whole mess is that people kept comming up with contrieved mechanisms and political malabarisms to maintain administrative cohesion despite the continuous loss of revenue by the central authority (be it the Emperor, their highly inbred Fujiwara cousins or the Kamakura shogunate). I can perfectly understand why they were unwilling to seek a permanent solution to the problem: when local clans control most of the military power in your country, you don't want to make them mad by withdrawing their privileges (and not paying taxes is a hige privilege!). However, I think that without settling the issue of land and taxation, then it's inevitable that, sooner or later, we'll see a complete collapse of centralized authority liked happened IOTL during the Ounin war, and whatever regime emerges out of that will have a hard time centralizing Japan to any further degree than the Tokugawa (which, even at their peak, had very little authority outside their own lands).
So, in my view, the type of PODs that could potentially give rise to a truly centralised Japan in pre-modern times fall into two categories:
In your opinion, what would be the potential of an early centralized Japan, and how would it affect history?
So, in this thread, I propose that we take a journey back in time in search of the very root of the problem. In 645, Prince Naka no Ōe (future Emperor Tenji) staged a coup against the powerful aristocratic Soga clan, bringing an end to their long dominance of court politics. Naka no Ōe and his allies, initiated the Taika reforms, a series of administrative, legal and social reforms that transformed Japan into a centralized absolute monarchy modeled in most aspects after its comtemporary, Tang dynasty China. They were surprisingly sucessful considering how much power clans in Japan held at the time, and the Japanese emperors held immense power for some time. However, the Ritsuryō legal code implemented as part of the reforms contained the seed of its own destruction: the land policy. Based on the Chinese equal-field system, it held that all land belonged to the Emperor, and that each subject (according to their rank in the complex caste system of the time) was assigned a certain plot of land to cultivate, with the Emperor taking a portion of their yields as the land was his anyway. The crucial flaw of this system was that it offered no incentive for individuals to invest in land reclamation, seeing as any reclaimed land would belong to the state and be distributed in accordance with the system (independtly who had put in the investment to reclaim it), and after an individual who had been assigned a certain field died, that field would revert back to the state and re-assigned according to the law as opposed to passing down to the former tenant's descendents.
Thus, in order to promote land reclamation, the imperial court passed a law granting idividuals and their decendents ownership (first temporary and then perpetual) of any land they were able to reclaim. This resulted in the formation of the first shōen, or manors, the much smaller precursors of the later feudal domains. The problem with the shōen was that, seeing as they did not belong to the Emperor, they could not be taxed, which increased the incentive for land reclamation even more, but severely incapacitated the countries tax system. With time, more and more land came to be occupied by shōen, effectively killing centralized taxation in the long run. By the end of the Heian period, I believe that nearly all land was composed of shoen. The main consequence of this was the gradual weakening of central authority, as it soon became impossible to maintain a centralised army and the importance of local governors increased as they were the one able to levy the only tax that still mattered (the corvee tax allowing them to recruit peasants to work on the shoen). This did not result in straight-up feudalism right away, though, seeing as the civilian provincial governors (kuni) were still bureaucrats appointed by the court and the military governors that supplanted them during the Kamakura period (the shugo) were direct vassals of the Shogunate. The Kamakura shogunate also prevented the shoen from attaining full administrative authority by appointing jito (stewards) to oversee them, but eventually this position became hereditary and the jito became the de facto owners of the shoen (which still could not be taxed). The Ashikaga shogunate, however, was too weak to actually exert any authority over the provinces, and so the shugo eventually seized full authority and evolved into the first daimyo. Then enter the Onin war, and the Sengoku period began.
Now, my view of this whole mess is that people kept comming up with contrieved mechanisms and political malabarisms to maintain administrative cohesion despite the continuous loss of revenue by the central authority (be it the Emperor, their highly inbred Fujiwara cousins or the Kamakura shogunate). I can perfectly understand why they were unwilling to seek a permanent solution to the problem: when local clans control most of the military power in your country, you don't want to make them mad by withdrawing their privileges (and not paying taxes is a hige privilege!). However, I think that without settling the issue of land and taxation, then it's inevitable that, sooner or later, we'll see a complete collapse of centralized authority liked happened IOTL during the Ounin war, and whatever regime emerges out of that will have a hard time centralizing Japan to any further degree than the Tokugawa (which, even at their peak, had very little authority outside their own lands).
So, in my view, the type of PODs that could potentially give rise to a truly centralised Japan in pre-modern times fall into two categories:
- PODs set in the late Heian and Kamakura periods, where extraordinary circunstances lead to a reintroduction of centralized taxation. What PODs could these possible be? Maybe the threat of an external enemy. A possibility would be having the Mongol invasions do more damage, maybe even take control of southern Japan for a while. Or maybe some Korean of Chinese dynasty decides to invade Japan for some reason. In any case, the existance of a credible threat could possibly allow a central authority to claim that it needs tax revenue to raise an army to protect Japan from that threak. Another category of potential extraordinary circunstances that could allow this to happen would be a regime change where whoever gains power does it only with the support of smaller and poorer clans, which somehow are able to rise to the occasion and overcome their larger rivals which formed the core of the previous regime. Such a "lower class"-based revolutionary regime could potentially seize the opportunity to massively redistribute land using a new system where all land is meant to be taxed, as the newly empowered minor clans might not complain so much as they would become better off than they were before.
- PODs in the Nara and early Heian periods, where the ritsuryo system is designed differently from the start, or is changed relatively early on, to promote land reclamation without making the reclaimed lands tax free. As long as those who reclaim them are still able to cultivate them and that right passes down to their decendents, there will still be enough incentive even if they have to pay taxes. These PODs are oviously safer bets, as they do not force us to conjure a such convuluted political situation, but they are very earlier and so butterflies will be hard to contain.
In your opinion, what would be the potential of an early centralized Japan, and how would it affect history?