An Older Capital
A Story of Nara: Chapter One
In this map, Tokyo is circled in blue, Kyoto in red, and Nara in black. Nara is too insignificant to appear on Google Map in this scale.
Today the capital city of Japan is Tokyo, which has been so since the Meiji Restoration (1868). Before that, Japan’s legal capital was Kyoto, because the emperor lived there, but the Shogun, the person with real power, had ruled for 200 years from Edo, which we now call Tokyo. The name Tokyo (Tōkyō, 東京) literally means “the eastern capital”, which is named in relation with Kyoto (Kyōto, 京都), “the capital”. In ancient Chinese, 京 (Chinese: jing / Japanese: kyō) and 都 (Chinese: du / Japanese: to) both mean capital but they are a bit different: 京 is the apparent capital where the emperor is supposed to live, while 都 is another city with a legal hierarchy only slightly inferior to 京, where the emperor can stay for long, and sometimes has its back-up bureaucracy. So it is safe to say that Tokyo is the apparent capital of Japan, while Kyoto is some sort of vice-capital with the name “capital”, although no law in Japan clarifies this and many would argue against this.
Kyoto deserves its unique name. It had been the emperor’s home for more than a millennium (794~1868). People were so used to the concept of it being the capital city that they called it “kyō no miyako”. Miyako is a pure Japanese word (not influenced by Chinese) for “capital”, literally meaning “the place of palaces/princes (miya)”. In China, capital cities can change with the change of the dynasty, and former capital, though used the name “京” in one way or another, would often just restore its former name. This doesn’t quite fit in the case of Kyoto. 1000 years of being the capital is long enough for people to feel awkward to call it anything else. Indeed it has an alternative name “Heian Kyo” (meaning the peaceful capital), but Heian is just a strange name to call.
However, Kyoto is not the oldest capital city in Japan. There are others before it, and the one that it inherited was Heijo Kyo (平城京), or today’s Nara (奈良), which was capital from 710 to 784. When Heian Kyo (Kyoto) was built, it was sometimes referred to as “Hoku Kyo” (北京, “the northern capital”, the kanji is the same as today’s Beijing) because Nara was “Nan Kyo” (南京, “the southern capital”, the same as Nanjing), or more often “Nanto” (南都). So just like Kyoto is considered by many Japanese today as the “should-be” capital, Nara had the same position for many Japanese twelve centuries years ago.
Compared with Tokyo, a metropolis of 37 million people, and Kyoto, a 1.5-million-population city, Nara is a relatively small city of 359 thousand. However, its stories are no less intriguing.
