The oldest precisely dated Buddha in Japan is this lacquer, leather, wood and metal sculpture, located at Asuka-dera Temple near Nara. It was made by Kuratsukuri-no-Tori, son of a Korean immigrant, in 609.

This is a temple incense burner with a handle in the shape of a magpie tail.

Discovered only 50 years ago, this restored mural, dubbed Asuka Beauties, was located inside the very late Kofun period Takamatsuzuka burial mound. It is done in a Chinese style with bright, high-quality pigments.

The Hakuhō period brought a series of Taika reforms that strongly centralized the government of Japan under the emperor's family for the first time. It was an orderly and fair system of government modeled on T'ang China. Included in the reforms was the 701 Taiho Ritsuryō Code that created a codified legal system. One of the Taika reforms outlawed the creation of any more kofun, bringing an end to an era.

A Written Language of its Own

Japan's Nara period began in 710 when the Emperor moved his court from Asuka to Nara. The move was mostly to reduce the influence of Buddhist priests wanting to run the government on a religious rather than a secular model. The government used the move in an attempt to bring about greater unity. All power descended from the Emperor, the Buddhist hierarchy as well as secular rule being incorporated in the state. Tōdaiji (Great Eastern Temple) was built in Nara as the central religious authority. It was the largest building in Japan at the time. The Daibutsu (Great Buddha of Nara) was completed at Tōdaiji in 752. It required all the bronze in Japan to build and is nearly 50 feet tall. Shown below is a 17th century replacement for the original Buddha.

A major development early in the Nara period was the creation of a written Japanese language. Japan had had a written language since at least the 4th century, perhaps earlier, but it was Chinese. The problem was that Chinese logograms were not capable of adequately representing the Japanese spoken language because the grammar of the two languages was radically different. By 712, a modified form of Chinese writing called kanbun had been developed that incorporated uniquely Japanese forms and syntactical structures. It is from kanbun that modern kanji and the phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, have evolved.

Japan's earliest history, "Kojiki" (Record of Ancient Matters), was written in kanbun in 712. Another important Nara period work written in kanbun was 759's "Man'yoshu" (Collection of 10,000 Leaves). It was a compilation of 4,500 ancient and contemporary poems from contributors at all levels of Japanese society, from aristocrats to prostitutes.

The first Japanese emaki (painted scroll), "Kako Genzai Inga Kyō" (The Illustrated Sutra of Past and Present Karma) was made by an unknown artist in the mid 8th century. The section shown below is titled "The Historical Buddha Preaching".

For entertainment, musical processions based on a combination of imported Buddhist rituals, local Shintō rites, and popular traditions were performed at court and at temples. These pageants combined religion, morality and burlesque, accompanied by strings, wind instruments and drums. Masks called gigaku (made of wood) or kanshitsu (made of hemp cloth and lacquer) completely covered performer's heads. A gigaku is shown below.

n celebration for a victory over a rebellion in 764, the Empress Shōtoku ordered one million hyakuman tō (small wooden prayer stupas) to be made and distributed to ten major monasteries; 100,000 to each. Examination of the stupas shows lathe marks, and it is believed that relatively few artisans were involved in their production. Each stupa contained a printe Buddhist prayer. These are among the earliest printed works in the world.