Top Highlights

• AFTER EMPRESS SUIKO, at age thirty-nine, became sovereign of the Yamato clan in Japan in 593, to expand her control over a broader geographical area she sought to import features of the more advanced Chinese civilization that had enabled China’s leaders to govern far larger areas than those that she controlled.1 In 589, four years before Empress Su...
• In 645, after an internal struggle within the Yamato, the Soga clan lost power to the imperial clan, and Emperor Kotoku of the imperial clan came to power. Emperor Kotoku, like the Soga clan leaders before him, wanted to centralize power, but he had the advantage of being able to draw on a greater number of monks by this time who had returned from ...
• Article 1 eliminated the power of the clans and their ability to control the fate of clan members. Article 2 provided for the reorganization of geographical areas that, rather than the clans, would be the local administrative units responsible to the central leadership. The capital was divided into four districts, and the boundaries of more distant...