The Ishibutai Kofun, newly inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, in Asuka Village, Nara Prefecture. (©Sankei/Kotaro Hikono)
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The Asuka-Fujiwara Capital sites in Nara Prefecture have officially been registered as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. The ruins themselves are buried underground, with none of the visible grandeur of Egypt's pyramids.
But the evidence they hold of exchange with East Asia has earned them global recognition as a site of outstanding universal value—physical proof of a state taking shape more than 1,300 years ago.
The Asuka period (592–710) was one in which Japan, facing threats from China, nonetheless never severed ties and pushed ahead with nation-building by importing advanced technology and knowledge. This shrewd, national-interest-focused diplomacy offers a historical lesson that still resonates today.
An Elegant Image Masks an Existential Crisis
The Asuka ruins tend to evoke an elegant image—the Takamatsuzuka Tomb's murals (vividly colored 7th-century wall paintings of court women, among Japan's most famous archaeological finds), or the palaces that appear as settings in the Manyoshu, Japan's oldest surviving poetry anthology, compiled in the 8th century.
But at the time, East Asia was a region of existential crisis for Wa—the name by which Japan was then known, both to itself and to its neighbors—and for the kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula, all of them peripheral states living in the shadow of China.
The Tang dynasty, founded in 618, unified China into a powerful empire. It extended its reach into the Korean Peninsula, then divided among three rival kingdoms—allying with one of them, Silla, in 660 to destroy another, Baekje, Japan's closest ally on the peninsula.
Wa, bound to Baekje by that alliance, dispatched reinforcements in an attempt to restore it, but suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Baekgang (known in Japanese as Hakusukinoe), fought in 663 off Korea's west coast. Five years later, Goguryeo, the last of the three Korean kingdoms, also fell to the Tang-Silla alliance, and the military threat to Wa became starkly real.
From Mountain Fortress to Centralized Rule
The Asuka government responded by fortifying its front line facing the continent—building mountain fortresses and strongholds on Tsushima, in northern Kyushu, and in the Seto Inland Sea region—placing itself on a war footing.
Notably, the response was not limited to military measures. To avoid being politically inferior to Tang, Japan aimed to build a strong centralized state with the emperor at its apex, developing a bureaucratic system and legal codes.
It vigorously absorbed what it needed even from Tang—ostensibly the very threat it faced—and built a political system that continues into Japan's present-day state.
Masashi Kinoshita, professor emeritus at Tokyo Gakugei University, points to the resilience of this exchange. "What matters is that political and cultural exchange continued even while under pressure from the great empires of Sui and Tang," he explained. He adds that Japan "skillfully fused continental thought and knowledge in its own way to build a unique political system."
Filling the Gap Between Two Eras
Kazue Koike, a councilor from Asuka Village, says the new registration "is meaningful in that it fills the historical gap between the Kofun period (300–538) and the Nara period (710–784)."
Among Japan's existing World Heritage sites are the Nara-period "Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara" (registered 1998) and Osaka's "Mounded Tombs of Ancient Japan" (registered 2019. With Asuka-Fujiwara added, it becomes possible to trace the process of nation-building across ruins spanning the 4th through 8th centuries.
During the Kofun period, the two tomb clusters—Mozu and Furuichi—each built enormous keyhole-shaped tombs, seemingly in competition with one another. Historians read this as evidence of a coalition government, one built around the separate power bases of these two regions rather than a single unified authority.
Such a loose coalition was inherently unstable in the face of a continental power like Tang China. It was this instability that the Asuka period's rulers set out to fix, consolidating power into a single centralized state.
Koike notes that while the designation is "strictly about antiquity," it nonetheless speaks to the present: "In the sense of how Japan tried to protect itself in a time of national crisis, it connects to the present day."
In a world where division is deepening, Asuka-Fujiwara can be said to once again demonstrate the importance of exchange and diplomacy.
Author: Mitsuaki Kobata, The Sankei Shimbun
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