A New Challenge to the Study of the Ancient Japanese State: Working Hypotheses

 

1. A Clear Critical Stance and a Willingness to Challenge

My aim is to pose a rather fundamental question to the discipline of history itself:

Does ancient history really have to be understood solely within the frameworks of political history, institutional history, and the history of ideology?

This is the fundamental question that I would like to pursue.

2. “The Logic of Practice at the Operational Level”

What makes this perspective possible is my focus on the actual sites of administrative practice.

When we study political history, we tend to ask:

What did the emperor decide?
What did the central government order?
Which political faction prevailed?

I would instead place greater emphasis on another question:

How did the people working on the ground actually process and implement those orders?

How many bundles of rice did they count?
Where did they store them?
What did they spend?
Who transported them, by what route, and how?
How much did transportation cost?
How did they deal with what remained?
Did the figures in one account correspond with those in another?

In other words, my approach is to look not simply at the institution, but at the moment when the institution actually operated.

This is what I mean by “the logic of practice at the operational level.”

3. Not Simply Imposing Modern Concepts on Ancient Sources

This is precisely why I do not want to fall into anachronism from the outset by simply declaring:

“This is internal control.”
“This is cost accounting.”
“This is logistics.”

Instead, I want to reverse the usual procedure:

Read the historical sources exhaustively.
Calculate the numbers.
Cross-check one account against another.
Trace the movement of goods.
Trace the movement of personnel.

Only then, I believe, may structures emerge that become remarkably clear when described using concepts from modern management studies.

In other words, the direction of analysis should not be:

Concept → Historical source

but rather:

Historical source → Discovery of structure → Explanation through concepts

By adopting this method, I believe it is possible, at least to some degree, to mitigate the criticism of anachronism.

That is why I would formulate my approach as follows:

Begin with a clear critical stance and a willingness to challenge established interpretations; place the logic of practice at the operational level at the center of the analysis; and demonstrate through empirical examination of the sources that the argument is not simply an imposition of modern concepts.

More fundamentally, my purpose is not to import modern management theory into antiquity.

Rather:

The purpose is to use the unfamiliar lens of modern management studies to discover structures in ancient administration that conventional historical scholarship may have overlooked.

If we add another perspective—the local or provincial level—we obtain an entirely different entry point into the ancient state.

Instead of:

Central official histories
↓
Politics, institutions, and ideology

we can approach the ancient state through:

Fragmentary local documents
↓
Practice, accounting, logistics, and information
↓
The logic of practice at the operational level
↓
How the state actually functioned

I believe this provides a completely different way of approaching the ancient Japanese state.

I would not go so far as to grandly call this a “paradigm change.” Rather, I would say:

I want to introduce one additional way of looking at the ancient state and, through it, explore the diversity and complexity of ancient Japanese history.

For example, in the case of interest-bearing rice (rishi), it is relatively easy to calculate that the treatment of a fixed interest rate of approximately 50 percent could have functioned as a mechanism for preventing irregularities. However, whether this figure of around 50 percent was, as a result, a standardized accounting norm, or whether it represented an institutional design intended for risk management, requires further demonstration from the historical sources.

This therefore suggests an analytical perspective and a working hypothesis:

To what extent did this numerical norm allow discretion on the part of local officials, and from what point onward did it function as a benchmark for detecting anomalies?

In short, if my research is to make any contribution to the study of ancient Japanese history, I would like that contribution to be represented by the following three goals.

1. Reassessing the Administrative Capacity of the Bureaucratic State: From an Ideological State to an “Operational State”

The conventional image of ancient history

The ritsuryō system has often been understood as a system in which the idealized written institutional framework, modeled on Chinese institutions, preceded actual administrative practice. The system is sometimes regarded as having become largely nominal or hollow at the local level, or simply as an apparatus of extraction.

I do not wish to reject this image of an ideological state outright. Rather, I would like to accept it as a starting point and then look beyond it toward another landscape.

My contribution

I believe it may be possible to demonstrate that provincial governors, scribes, and other officials working at the local level operated sophisticated forms of practical administrative logic involving such things as cost calculation, location management, the distinction between stock and flow, and internal control through key management.

If this can be demonstrated, it would suggest that the ritsuryō state was not merely an ideological construct, but an operational administrative state equipped with substantial practical capabilities, and that this can be demonstrated through concrete documentary data.

2. Elucidating the Ritsuryō State’s Systems of Crisis Management and Internal Control

The conventional image of ancient history

Misconduct or negligence by local officials has often been discussed primarily in terms of political punishment or individual ethics.

My contribution

The treatment of fixed interest rates at approximately 50 percent, the centralized management of keys by the Ministry of Popular Affairs (Minbushō), and the tracing of shortages or missing stocks from previous years can be understood as elements of a risk-management structure designed by central administrators on the assumption that human beings are capable of fraud, error, and forgetfulness.

These mechanisms may reveal the state’s struggle to control local administration not through trust alone, but through institutional mechanisms of internal control.

3. Making Visible the Economic System Surrounding Rice: Toward a History of Ancient Logistics

The conventional image of ancient history

Research has tended to focus on the large-scale economic system of the storage and redistribution of rice as taxation.

My contribution

By analyzing the micro-level trade-offs visible in such practices as conversion rules (furii) and the collection and valuation of skins from dead horses, as well as the accounting treatment of intermediate costs such as transport labor and corvée payments, I believe it may be possible to elucidate the actual mechanisms—the practical “algorithms,” so to speak—by which goods and values were transported and converted between the central and local levels.

At the very least, I believe that this approach may allow scholars specializing in Japanese economic history to recognize the potential of this line of research.

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Therefore

Rather than focusing on the dramatic political upheavals characteristic of political history, I would like to emphasize the fascination of reconstructing the structure of the ancient state from the “unglamorous but durable sources” represented by local administrative accounts such as Shōzeichō, Gun-inchō, and Keikaichō.

In this sense, the enterprise is remarkably similar to deciphering “ancient systems engineering.”

In Conclusion

The ultimate purpose of my research is therefore not to place the terminology of modern management studies alongside ancient historical phenomena.

Rather, I want to use such concepts as analytical questions and, through them, reconstruct the enormous quantity of accounting information that conventional political and institutional history has tended to treat as isolated fragments, bringing those fragments together as a single functioning system.

Beyond this reconstruction lies a more fundamental question:

What, in actual practice, was the ritsuryō state?

The ancient state did not function simply because emperors and bureaucrats issued commands.

It functioned only through the accumulation of countless practical operations: transmitting orders to local sites; collecting physical goods; checking quantities; mobilizing personnel; storing supplies; transporting them to where they were needed; recording expenditures; preserving the results in accounts; and finally reporting those results to higher authorities.

In this sense, Shōzeichō and Gun-inchō should perhaps not be regarded merely as peripheral accounting documents of the ancient state. Rather, they may be core historical sources recording the actual sites and processes through which the state functioned.

If this perspective is valid, then some of the important questions in ancient historical research also change.

Instead of asking only:

Who ruled the state?

we can also ask:

How did the state actually function from day to day?

To answer this question, it is necessary to draw not only upon political history, but also upon insights from accounting, logistics, information management, organizational theory, and risk management.

This is precisely where I want my research to go.

I want to take sources such as Shōzeichō and Gun-inchō—documents that at first sight appear to consist of nothing more than mundane lists of numbers and minor administrative details—and read them one by one, reconstructing the movements of the people, institutions, goods, and information that lay behind those numbers.

In this sense, the enterprise is, in effect, an attempt to decipher “ancient systems engineering.”

Rather than explaining the ancient state through major political events, I want to work backward from the everyday operating records of the state and reconstruct its underlying structure.

And even if this undertaking ultimately proves to have been a futile endeavor, I intend to continue walking this path.

The reason is simple.

When we carefully follow a single account, a single number, or a seemingly minor entry concerning “miscellaneous expenses,” “unserviceable horses,” or “skins of dead horses,” we begin to see, little by little, the administrative world on the ground that has remained largely invisible in conventional interpretations of the ancient state.

Ultimately, what I hope to achieve is to reconstruct the ritsuryō state not merely as a system of political power, but as an administrative system that actually functioned by measuring, recording, cross-checking, and redistributing goods, personnel, and information.

If this perspective can be established, Shōzeichō, Gun-inchō, and the other documents preserved in the Shōsōin will come to occupy a new position in ancient historical research. They will no longer be seen merely as accounts recording the “results” of ancient administration, but as some of the most important “field-level sources” for understanding how the state itself actually operated.

There remain, of course, an enormous number of challenges.

These include not only refining the present analysis through more precise numerical verification of the historical sources, but also addressing questions such as the historical background in which this accounting system emerged, and why and how the system subsequently broke down, including the transition toward myōden-based estate management.

I intend to continue, step by step, walking the ancient roads of this administrative world and pursuing these questions.