ABSTRACT
The matter at hand begins with the coup d’état of 645, followed by the Taika Reform engineered by Imperial Prince Naka no Ōe (Emperor Tenchi after 668) and his advisor Nakatomi Kamatari (614–69). With respect to the issue of shrines and temples and their relation to political authority, the Taika Reform represented a major change: the government’s Chinese-inspired technology of power, combined with both a thoroughly revamped set of institutions specialising in ritual and with Buddhist institutions, radically transformed Japanese concepts of ownership and techniques of fiscal management. Imperial territoriality was being formed, and I will follow Maurice Godelier in defining territory as ‘the portion of nature and space that a society revendicates as that space where its members will permanently find the conditions of, and the material means for, their existence.’ 1 Territory was also the object of representation, a representation that is clearly stated in the first official records of the imperial state, and which proposed that the universe was in part a ‘visible’ realm consisting of the material world, and, in another part, an ‘invisible’ realm consisting of ‘forces’ that suffused that material world. These latter forces were considered the most important and, thus, became the object of what today we would call ‘symbolic behaviour,’ namely, ritual.
