ABSTRACT
Power and wealth were concentrated, step by step, in a metropolitan court, a centripetal social order developed, integrating even regions remote from the capital. Rule by a royal court was established through a long series of conflicts, eventually finding acceptance among at least the majority of the old regional elites. In classical Japan, the period spanning the late seventh to the late twelfth centuries, ruling elites were, in fact, divided into several blocks and factions, with antagonistic interests from time to time. District officers were answerable to the province office, which was headed by provincial officials recruited from court nobility, dispatched to their assigned provinces for four years, and obliged to return to the capital after their term of office. The ritsuryō state provisions for oversight of the lands and peoples in the provinces functioned more or less intact for more than two centuries, until the beginning of the tenth century, when periodic land allotments by the state were ended.
