ABSTRACT
Japan’s adoption of Chinese imperial city planning and imperial style architecture was part and parcel of its comprehensive absorption of a well-developed foreign paradigm for its own state formation. Assimilating China’s writing system and legal codes, as well as Chinese-inflected Buddhism, made possible a centralized bureaucracy and religion with a defined distribution and hierarchy of governance. As physical expression of this orderly rule, the capital correspondingly featured a perfect rectangular outer boundary with orthogonally configured city wards; an outsized top centre sector defined a privileged location for the palace city. Despite inevitable differences in scale, proportion, and topographical conditions, the early Japanese imperial capitals have been commonly described as copies of Chinese imperial capitals for their adherence to the same planning principles. The notion of copying is reinforced by the existence of Japanese multiples – Naniwa, Fujiwara, Heijō, Kuni, Nagaoka and Heian, dating from the seventh to the eighth centuries – that successively repeated the original Chinese formula for capital making. 1
