Reconsidering Furojin in the Ritsuryō Period and the Structure of the “Corvée-and-Tax State”
— A Critical Reassessment Prompted by the Scholarship of Reiko Okazaki —
Introduction: Were Furojin People Who Had Withdrawn from the State?
The problem of furō, furojin, and rōnin in ancient Japan has traditionally been understood in the context of people who had escaped from their registered places of origin (honseki) or had otherwise withdrawn from the household-registration and population-registration systems of the Ritsuryō state. Yet one fundamental question deserves to be raised:
Were people who had left their registered place of origin really people who had withdrawn from the state?
It may be worth considering the opposite possibility.
The Ritsuryō state did not simply abandon people who had left their registered place of origin. Rather, it attempted to identify them where they were actually living, record them in administrative registers under certain conditions, and establish anew their relationship to chōyō and other forms of state-imposed obligation.
If this interpretation is not unreasonable, then furojin should not be understood simply as fugitives or runaways. From a different analytical perspective, they may instead be understood as:
people who had lost their former point of connection with the state through their registered place of origin, but whom the state sought to reconnect to its administrative and fiscal order by shifting the point of connection to their actual place of residence.
This is the basic working hypothesis of this paper.
From this perspective, the problem of furojin is no longer merely a matter of controlling fugitives or defining a particular legal status. Rather, it becomes a problem of the state's administrative technology itself: how did the Ritsuryō state identify people who moved, and how did it reconnect them to the system of state obligations?
Reiko Okazaki's research provides an important starting point for considering this problem. Okazaki carefully distinguishes the terms furō, furojin, and rōnin, rather than treating them as interchangeable, and traces the precise legal and administrative contexts in which each term appears. She has demonstrated how the state's methods of identifying and registering people changed between the eighth and ninth centuries. In particular, her clarification of the process by which, following the Tenpyō 8 regulations, furojin came to be identified at their place of residence and institutionally incorporated as people subject to certain obligations is highly significant.
Yet, while fully acknowledging the importance of this achievement, this paper would like to raise three problems. These are not merely objections concerning details. Rather, precisely because Okazaki's institutional-historical analysis is so rigorous, it allows us to see questions that remain outside its analytical framework.
For the sake of argument, I will refer to these as “the three fatal shortcomings remaining in Okazaki's interpretation.”
I. Three Fatal Shortcomings Remaining in Okazaki's Interpretation
1. The First Shortcoming: Why Did the State Have to Change the System?
Okazaki's research carefully traces the changes in terminology and institutions from furō to furojin and then to rōnin. But we must ask a further question:
Why did the Ritsuryō state have to repeatedly revise its institutions concerning furojin in the first place?
The fact that an institution changed and the social and administrative conditions that compelled the state to change it are two different questions.
For example, if the state initially emphasized the return of furojin to their registered place of origin but gradually shifted toward identifying them and imposing obligations where they actually resided, there must have been changes in the real world that cannot be explained simply as the development of legal terminology.
Population movements.
Flight.
Famine.
Epidemics.
Natural disasters.
Changes in people's material foundations of life.
And, above all, the growing discrepancy between the registered place of origin and the place where people actually lived.
How did these changes place pressure on a system of population registration based on the koseki and keichō?
Without asking this question, we may learn how the institution changed, but we cannot understand why the state needed to change it.
This is the first shortcoming.
2. The Second Shortcoming: The Separation of Belonging and Obligation
One of the most important points emerging from Okazaki's research is that people who had left their registered place of origin came to be identified where they actually resided and were placed in a new relationship with chōyō and other obligations.
But the truly important issue is not simply the fact that furojin were identified at their place of residence.
The deeper issue is that:
belonging to a registered place of origin and bearing obligations to the state were no longer necessarily administered in the same place.
The basic structure of the Ritsuryō state's system of population management may be represented as:
Registered place of origin
↓
Identification through the koseki and keichō
↓
Assignment of obligations
In other words:
belonging = identification = obligation
But once people left their registered place of origin and settled in another province or district, this structure began to break down.
The person was no longer physically present at the registered place of origin. Yet, from the state's perspective, that person might still exist in the records of the place of origin, while actual administrative processing had to be carried out at the person's new location.
At this point, a distinction emerged between:
the order of belonging
and
the order of obligation.
This distinction is central to the present argument.
The problem of furojin was therefore not simply a problem of people who had “lost their place of belonging.” Rather, it may have been a problem of:
how the state could reconnect people who had fallen outside the order of belonging to the order of state obligations.
Okazaki's research has carefully traced the institutional mechanisms through which this reconnection took place.
What has not yet been sufficiently developed, however, is the possibility of understanding these institutional changes as a process by which the state separated belonging from obligation.
This is the second shortcoming.
3. The Third Shortcoming: What Was the Furojin-chō Actually For?
In Okazaki's research, the furojin-chō occupies an important position as an administrative register used to identify furojin at their place of residence.
Yet here again, we need to take one further step.
Was the furojin-chō simply a register in which the names of furojin were listed?
A register does not exist merely to record people. Administrative registers are devices that transform information about people into information that can be processed administratively.
The same may be true of the furojin-chō.
People from other provinces or districts were present in a locality. Local officials discovered them.
They determined who they were.
They investigated where they had come from.
They established how long they had been living there.
They examined whether they had a stable livelihood.
They determined whether they had families.
Whether they had established marital relationships locally.
And they considered what obligations could be imposed upon them.
Only after this series of processes could the individual become an administratively recognizable entity within the register.
The furojin-chō, therefore, may not have been merely a population list. Rather, it can be understood as:
an information-processing device for reconnecting people who had fallen outside their established administrative point of connection through the registered place of origin to the state's system of identification and obligations through their place of residence.
Okazaki's research has clarified when the furojin-chō acquired particular institutional significance. Yet another question remains:
What kind of “reconnection work” did the register make possible within actual administrative practice?
This is the third shortcoming.
II. The Tenpyō Crisis and the Destabilization of the “Order of Belonging”
In considering this problem, the pandemic of smallpox between Tenpyō 7 and Tenpyō 9 cannot simply be ignored.
Of course, it would be inappropriate to explain the entire problem of furojin solely in terms of the pandemic. Nor can we simply assert that smallpox caused the koseki and keichō systems to collapse completely.
Nevertheless, the possibility must be considered that the massive demographic decline and social disruption placed extraordinary pressure on existing mechanisms of population registration.
The important point is not to treat smallpox as the “sole cause,” but rather to consider the possibility that:
the discrepancy between a system that identified people on the basis of their registered place of origin and the places where people actually lived may have expanded rapidly as a result of the large-scale demographic and social changes of the Tenpyō period.
People registered at their place of origin were not necessarily there in reality.
Some regions experienced population decline.
Other regions received people from elsewhere.
Under such circumstances, the assumption that “the person is where the register says he or she is” itself began to weaken.
The state therefore faced a choice.
Should it make the return of people to their registered places of origin the overriding priority?
Or:
Should it identify people where they actually lived and establish their obligations there?
This choice may have formed part of the background to the series of institutional changes concerning furojin.
III. Reiki, Tenpyō, and Enryaku: What Choice Did the State Make?
When the regulations concerning furojin are viewed as a historical sequence, a particular direction begins to emerge.
It was a shift:
from a system of population identification centered on return to the registered place of origin toward greater reliance on identification and the assignment of obligations at the actual place of residence.
This development was not linear. The content of the regulations differed from one period to another, and their scope and actual administrative application must also have varied.
Nevertheless, viewed over the longer term, there appears to have been a tendency for the state to identify people who had left their registered places of origin where they actually resided and to redefine their relationship to state obligations there.
What is important here is that:
the state did not simply “tolerate” furojin.
Nor did it simply abandon control over the movement of people.
On the contrary.
When the conventional method of connecting people to the state through their registered place of origin ceased to function effectively, the state attempted to incorporate those people into its administrative system through a new method.
This is precisely why there are limits to understanding furojin simply as “fugitives.”
IV. The “Order of Belonging” and the “Order of Obligation”
Let us clarify the basic concepts of this paper.
The Ritsuryō state assigned people to registered places of origin, identified them through the koseki and keichō, and imposed state obligations on the basis of that identification.
Let us call this:
the order of belonging.
The relationship through which people bore obligations such as chō, yō, and zōyō may, for present purposes, be called:
the order of obligation.
Under normal circumstances, these two orders coincided.
But the movement of people produced a situation such as:
Place of registered origin = A
Actual place of residence = B
The state then had two possible options.
The first was to return the person to A and restore the correspondence between belonging and obligation.
The second was to identify the person at B and establish a relationship with state obligations through B.
If the latter approach was adopted, then for the first time:
the order of belonging and the order of obligation became separable.
This does not mean that the state abandoned the person's original affiliation altogether.
Rather, the state sought a means of ensuring that:
even when the original relationship of belonging could not be restored, the individual would not disappear entirely from the system of state obligations.
Here we may see an important element of pragmatism in the Ritsuryō state.
V. What Were Furojin? From “People Who Had Left” to “People Who Were Reconnected”
We can now state the central hypothesis of this paper more explicitly.
Traditionally,
a furojin was a person who had left his or her registered place of origin.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this definition. But it does not explain what the state subsequently did with such people.
The sequence was:
- They left their registered place of origin.
- Yet the state sought to locate them.
- It investigated them.
- It recorded them in registers.
- It identified where they were living.
- It established their relationship to state obligations.
What does this sequence mean?
This paper proposes the following interpretation:
A furojin was not necessarily a person who had withdrawn from the state.
Rather, a furojin was a person who had lost the conventional point of connection to the state represented by the registered place of origin, and whom the state sought to reconnect to its administrative and fiscal order by establishing a new point of connection at the person's actual place of residence.
From this perspective, furojin should not be understood solely as a fixed status or social category.
What matters instead is:
the individual's state of connection to the state.
An ordinary registered person was in the following condition:
registered place of origin = actual residence = identification = obligation
A furojin, by contrast, occupied a situation in which:
registered place of origin ≠ actual residence
The state then established a new route:
actual residence → identification → register → obligation
In this sense, it would not be unreasonable to describe furojin as:
people whose mode of connection to the state had been altered.
VI. The Furojin-chō as an Instrument of Reconnection
From this perspective, the meaning of the furojin-chō also changes.
According to the conventional interpretation:
The furojin-chō was a register listing furojin.
But, as argued above, this is insufficient.
The furojin-chō may instead be understood as:
a device for transforming information about people's whereabouts into administratively usable information.
People who had fallen outside their original administrative framework were difficult to process solely through existing registers. Local authorities therefore had to generate new information about them.
Who were they?
Where had they come from?
When had they arrived?
Did they possess a stable livelihood?
With whom were they connected?
What obligations could be imposed upon them?
Such information was investigated, recorded, classified, and reorganized into an administrative register.
Here we can identify a sequence of administrative processing:
identification → recording → classification → assignment of obligations → collection
From this perspective, the furojin-chō was not merely a “status register.”
It was:
an administrative instrument for reconnecting people who had fallen outside their original point of connection through their registered place of origin to the state through their place of residence.
This raises a series of questions that future research must address:
Who collected the information?
At what stage were individuals entered into the furojin-chō?
What local records existed before their registration?
How was information in the furojin-chō transmitted from the local administrative level to the provincial government and ultimately to the central government?
These questions require us to reconstruct the administrative practice itself.
VII. The “Corvée-and-Tax State” as a Working Hypothesis
On the basis of the preceding discussion, this paper proposes another working concept for understanding the Ritsuryō state:
the “Corvée-and-Tax State.”
This concept does not mean that the ancient state could collect nothing other than corvée and taxation. Nor is chōyō being used here merely as a narrowly defined legal category.
The issue is rather:
How did the state identify people and maintain their connection to the system of state obligations?
For the Ritsuryō state, keeping people attached to their registered places of origin was undoubtedly important.
But what may have been even more important was preventing people from disappearing completely from the system of state obligations.
People moved.
They left their registered places of origin.
They fell outside the administrative processes of the existing koseki and keichō.
At that point, what did the state truly fear?
Perhaps it was not movement itself.
Perhaps what it feared was:
the complete disappearance of those people from the system of state obligations.
The state therefore sought to identify them where they were living, enter them into new registers, and establish a new relationship between them and state obligations.
In this sense:
the Ritsuryō state may be understood as a state that maintained and reproduced itself by identifying people and continually reconnecting them to the system of state obligations.
To emphasize this dimension, I propose the term “Corvée-and-Tax State” as a working hypothesis.
VIII. Categories of Human Connection to the State
If this hypothesis is adopted, it may become possible to reconsider not only furojin but a variety of groups in the Ritsuryō period along a common axis:
their state of connection to the state.
For example:
1. People whose registered place of origin, actual residence, and obligations coincided
These were ordinary registered persons:
registered place of origin = actual residence = state identification = obligations
They occupied the most stable position within the system.
2. People who moved but maintained their connection to the state through recognized or official procedures
Their movement did not necessarily mean withdrawal from the state.
Their new location could be administratively recognized, and their relationship to state obligations maintained.
3. People who left their registered place of origin and were newly identified at their place of residence
This represents the typical furojin situation.
The original point of connection had weakened or ceased to function.
But a new process of identification was undertaken at the place of residence.
4. People who settled locally and were connected to state obligations through their place of residence
Here, administrative processing at the place of residence could become more important than return to the original place of registration.
5. People who fell outside existing registers and required new forms of administrative processing
The problem of people outside the registers (chōgai-sha) should be reconsidered in relation to this category.
Falling outside an existing register did not necessarily mean disappearing from the state.
It may instead have meant:
becoming a person who could no longer be processed through the existing mode of connection.
6. The heterogeneous category of rōnin
By the ninth century, the range of people designated as rōnin had become more diverse.
Okazaki herself points out that people with causes and forms of existence different from those of eighth-century furojin came to be included within the category of rōnin.
From the perspective proposed here, this suggests that rōnin may not have been a single social status. Rather, it may have represented:
a group of administrative categories used to process people whose ordinary relationships among registered affiliation, actual residence, and state obligations had broken down in various ways.
I would therefore propose to Okazaki that furō → furojin → rōnin might be understood not merely as a change in terminology, but as:
a transformation and diversification in the ways the state connected people to its administrative system.
IX. From a “State of Belonging” to a “State of Reconnection”
The foregoing discussion also invites us to reconsider the nature of the Ritsuryō state itself.
In conventional interpretations, the Ritsuryō state is often depicted as a state that assigned people to registered places of origin, managed them through the koseki and keichō, and sought to establish their location in a relatively fixed manner.
But people move.
They flee.
They migrate.
They marry.
They move in search of a livelihood.
They lose their established means of living because of famine, epidemics, or natural disasters.
The state could not completely prevent such movements.
It therefore faced not simply the problem of preventing movement, but the problem of:
how to reconnect people who had moved to the administrative network of the state.
Could this be one of the contexts in which the category of furojin emerged?
If so:
The system concerning furojin was not simply a system for punishing people who had withdrawn from the state.
It was rather:
an institutional mechanism for incorporating people who had fallen outside the existing system of population identification into the state's administrative and fiscal order through a new point of connection at their place of residence.
The Ritsuryō state was therefore not merely a state that fixed people within a system of belonging.
It was also:
a state capable of creating new forms of connection when existing forms of belonging became unstable.
X. How Should We Understand “Collapse” and “Reorganization”?
This perspective also offers a new way of approaching the problem of the “collapse of the Ritsuryō system.”
It is easy to interpret the increase in furojin simply as evidence of the collapse of the koseki system.
But such an interpretation cannot by itself explain the administrative measures subsequently undertaken by the state.
The existing system began to fail.
People moved away from their registered places of origin.
Yet the state attempted to identify them through new procedures.
Here we can see two processes occurring simultaneously:
the breakdown of an existing system
and
the administrative practices attempting to repair or replace it.
The important question is therefore not simply whether the Ritsuryō system “collapsed” or “survived.”
Rather, we should ask:
What was breaking down, and what was the state attempting to preserve until the end?
From the hypothesis advanced here, what was beginning to break down was:
the order of belonging that sought to bind people to fixed registered places of origin.
What the state attempted to preserve through new administrative procedures was:
the order of obligation that prevented people from disappearing completely from the system of state obligations.
Here we can see the Ritsuryō state as a “Corvée-and-Tax State.”
Conclusion: What Was a Furojin?
This paper has not sought merely to propose an alternative interpretation to Reiko Okazaki's research on furojin. Rather, it has attempted to reconsider the administrative principle underlying the institutional and conceptual changes that Okazaki has clarified.
Three major problems remain.
First:
Why did the state repeatedly have to revise its institutions concerning furojin?
Second:
How did the relationship between belonging to a registered place of origin and bearing state obligations become separated?
Third:
What did the furojin-chō actually make possible as an information-processing device within local administrative practice?
By considering these questions, this paper seeks to place furojin in a different position from that traditionally assigned to them.
That is:
A furojin was not necessarily a person who had withdrawn from the state.
Rather, a furojin was a person who had lost the conventional point of connection to the state represented by the registered place of origin, and whom the state sought to reconnect to its administrative and fiscal order by establishing a new point of connection at the person's actual place of residence.
From this perspective, furojin can be understood not as a fixed status but as:
an administrative category expressing a particular state of connection to the state.
This perspective may also allow us to reconsider rōnin, people outside the registers, and ryūjū from a common analytical standpoint:
How did people fall outside the existing system of state identification, and by what means did the state attempt to reconnect them?
The Ritsuryō state that emerges from this perspective is not simply a state that fixed people within their registered places of origin.
It was also:
a state that sought to reconnect people when their existing relationship to the state became unstable.
Indeed, it is possible that what the state ultimately sought not to lose was not the registered place of origin itself, but:
the state's relationship of obligation with the individual.
This paper has expressed this dimension through the working concept of the “Corvée-and-Tax State.”
Naturally, this hypothesis requires further testing against individual historical sources.
But if furojin can be understood not simply as “fugitives” but as:
people whom the state continued to identify and pursue by changing the way in which they were connected to the state,
then the study of furojin takes on a very different character.
The central question is no longer merely:
“Who were the furojin?”
Rather, it becomes:
“How did the Ritsuryō state reconnect people who moved to the state?”
The furojin were not simply people who escaped from the net of the Ritsuryō state.
They may instead have been evidence of something more interesting:
the state's attempt to create new meshes in its administrative net for people who had slipped outside the old ones.
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