Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies English Selection 3 | 2014 On The Tale of Genji: Narrative, Poetics, Historical Context The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period De la place et du rôle des gouverneurs de province à l’apogée de l’époque Heian Francine Hérail Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/658 DOI: 10.4000/cjs.658 ISSN: 2268-1744 Publisher INALCO Electronic reference Francine Hérail, “The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period”, Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies [Online], 3 | 2014, Online since 12 October 2015, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cjs/658 ; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/cjs.658 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period 1 The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period De la place et du rôle des gouverneurs de province à l’apogée de l’époque Heian Francine Hérail EDITOR'S NOTE Original release: Francine HÉRAIL, « De la place et du rôle des gouverneurs de province à l’apogée de l’époque Heian », Cipango, Hors-série, 2008, 291-355. Francine HÉRAIL, « De la place et du rôle des gouverneurs de province à l’apogée de l’époque de Heian », Cipango [En ligne], Hors-série | 2008, mis en ligne le 24 février 2012. URL : http://cipango.revues.org/607 ; DOI : 10.4000/cipango.607 1 The Code provides only a very general view of the role of provincial administrators (kokushi), whose senior official was the head or governor (kami). These men were appointed by the central administration for four-year terms. The governor’s mission was to supervise the cult of deities, register the population, act as a father to the people, foster agriculture and sericulture, rectify wrongs, supervise the police and hear grievances, register households and rice fields, impose taxes and corvée labor, maintain irrigation systems, public buildings, and pastures, and ensure that the province was able to defend itself by means of militias, arms, and signal fires; in short, no aspect of the life of the population was expected to escape his notice. This was predicated, even in sparsely populated provinces, on the presence of a large staff of locally recruited personnel—district administrators (gunji) and junior employees—in addition to the governor, his subordinate officials (comprising from two to six men), and his clerks (shishō), all of whom came from the capital. 2 During the eighth and ninth centuries this program was developed and the very broad directives of the Code supplemented and made more specific by means of regulations Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 3 | 2014 The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period 2 and decrees. Nearly four hundred regulations and decrees survive from these two centuries, suggesting that originally there were more. By contrast, only a few dozen survive from the period between the first third of the tenth century and the end of the eleventh, and many of these concern fairly minor matters. The abundance of repetitive or contradictory decrees does not suggest a smoothly functioning local administration. At the beginning of the tenth century this legislation was perfected in the Regulations of the Engi Era (Engishiki) and the Regulations Relating to Official Replacements (Kōtaishiki). Provincial budgets, calculated in rice, were established for each province. Provincial tax revenues (shōzei), calculated in rice and collected as a land tax (so), were partially loaned out at interest (suiko). The interest was allocated to various budget items intended either for provincial government use or to be sent to the capital. Handicraft taxes (chōyō), an important part of the tax system, were also meticulously fixed and in principle calculated per individual taxpayer. The Regulations Relating to Official Replacements were quite detailed. They dealt with the drafting of annual population registers, the maintenance of public buildings, religious establishments and irrigation systems, and the administration of tax revenues, principally the rice tax (shōzeitō), which was to be sent in full to the capital at a prescribed time. These documents, as many as several dozen, had to be checked and approved by a supervisory body in the capital. In principle no provincial administrator regardless of rank could receive his next appointment without leaving behind a completely clean slate. As a province had between three and seven administrators, individual accountability soon became an issue, as did distinguishing between responsibility and culpability. When, as occurred frequently, taxes fell into arrears and were not sent to the capital, the responsibility was shared: all the concerned administrators made restitution through salary deductions, while the principal official was held criminally accountable. For the central administration, this presented an excellent means of establishing mutual surveillance among officials. Moralizing discourses on an official’s role as father and educator, which were often delivered to eighth-century provincial appointees, gradually grew more sporadic. With the passage of time, two major concerns of the court became increasingly dominant: the tax system, which supported the capital and its population of officials; and court supervision of local government. At this point it became apparent that the immense effort of codification and the restrictive, detailed rules accumulated over two centuries presented an unwieldy, onerous, and highly impractical solution. Paradoxically, no sooner was the legislation completed than it began to be, if not abolished, more or less misappropriated, and entire legislative barriers collapsed of their own accord. The solution was to have only one person in charge and to provide him with substantial initiatives. 3 I will begin by discussing what kind of work a governor actually did in his province, followed by how governors were chosen, their relations with the people they governed, and finally how their work was evaluated by the court. The period under consideration is the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the period in which the Genji monogatari was written. First, a few words about vocabulary. Many officials were invested with one of the kokushi positions, but theirs were pro forma appointments intended to provide a salary or, in junior positions, an exemption. Only one man was considered in charge and accountable: the zuryō,1 he who had received (the meaning of both characters) from his predecessor the governance of the province or, more accurately, of its men and public goods. This person could be called a governor (kami), a supernumerary governor (gon no kami), or even a vice-governor (suke). The three to six other kokushi assigned to Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 3 | 2014 The Position and Role of Provincial Governors at the Height of the Heian Period 3 each province received an appointment—they were called nin’yō kokushi—but over the course of time such officials went increasingly rarely to their provinces and became absentee administrators (yōnin). Our sole object of concern here is with the zuryō governors. The Duties of a Zuryō 4 The Code envisioned a fiscal system founded on the precise knowledge of an eligible population which did not decrease or move; this system was completely disrupted from the tenth century on. Governors were obligated to keep exact records of the people of their province, since the tax burden—handicraft taxes (chōyō) and the corvée labor requirement (zōyō)—was essentially borne by individuals; yet the few surviving fragments of tenth-century civil status registers contain obvious inaccuracies. Certain registers record a population of over 80% women and many old men; in others the proportions are somewhat more normal but the number of non-taxpaying men is either substantial or unknown.2 This suggests that the levying of handicraft taxes could not be carried out according to criteria in accordance with the law, and that it became impossible to allocate “household fields,” lots held by a person for his or her lifetime. Provincial tax revenues (calculated in rice) decreased, as they were increasingly used to make up deficits. The running of a province depended on the interest on that rice, which was lent to proprietors of household fields. The periodic reallocation of household fields is known to have been discontinued in the tenth century, despite Miyoshi no Kiyoyuki’s recommendation in his Twelve Proposals (of reforms, Iken jūnikajō) that accurate population registers be compiled and allocations recommenced. The old lots became the possession of whomever was working them, just as cultivated rice fields were registered under the cultivator’s name. Moreover, the enforced lending of public rice, the interest from which supported the provincial budget, could only be required of those who were able to repay the loan with interest. By the tenth century it was no longer necessary to make real loans with all the attendant procedures. Instead, owners of rice fields were asked to pay interest based on their cultivated area, in effect shifting the basic tax system onto the land. This reduced the burden on provincial storehouse management. In a further measure to obtain revenue to pay the salaries of central government officials, certain rice fields known as “excess fields” (jōden) were declared government rice fields (kanden) and their income allocated to government departments and offices. In certain provinces, rice fields deemed either “excess” or “public” (kōden, so called because they remained under local administrative control after household fields had been allocated), were managed either directly by officials who delegated their cultivation to employees, or indirectly as one-year renewable leases. The proceeds from these rice fields were often used to purchase handicraft produce intended for tax payment, a practice recommended by official decrees.