The Most Powerful Manor Restriction Ordinance Ever

     Unlike other emperors in the later Ancient Japan, the maternal grandfather of Emperor Go-Sanjo (1034-1073) was not a member of the Fujiwara Clan.  So the emperor took a bold stance against the clan, whose chief at the time was Fujiwara Yorimichi (992-1074).

     In 1069, he issued his hard-line manor restriction ordinance, and, at the same time, established a central manor registry office to put the ordinance into practice in a rigid and centralized manner.  Unlike previous ordinances, the ordinance included detailed rules which prohibited:

     1.  To exchange fertile state-owned rice paddy fields for manor rice paddy fields of inferior quality.

     2.  To count state-owned rice paddy fields among manor rice paddy fields even when they were cultivated by manor farmers.

     3.  To classify state-owned rice paddy fields allocated for the maintenance of religious institutions into their manor rice paddy fields.

     We can easily guess how central powerful clans and the central powerful religious institutions had eroded state-owned rice paddy fields.

     The ordinance and its measures seem to have been very effective.  Yorimichi’s grandson, Moromichi (1062-1099) lamented in his journal their loss of Doi Manor in Kozuke Province.  Iwashimizu-Hachiman-gu Shrine still keeps an official document dated September 5, 1072, with the signature of Oe Masafusa (1041-1111), a famed poet and scholar at the time.  The document was issued to the shrine, informing that 13 out of their 34 manors were to be confiscated.