Dynastic History | Nagaya-ō Residence Site 長屋王邸跡, Nara — The Rice Dockets Under the Department Store

In 1986 clearance began on four blocks of the old capital's eastern half for a department store, and the rescue excavation that Japanese law requires went in first. It ran to 1989. In August 1988 a single ditch inside the east gate of an eighth-century aristocratic compound gave up wooden slips in bulk: the excavating institute reports some 35,000 from the household group, Nara city puts the site total near 40,000, and a second deposit in the road ditch outside yielded roughly 74,000 more.

The slips identified the compound as the residence of Nagaya-ō 長屋王, a grandson of Tenmu and a senior figure at court. Most are requisition dockets — rice issued, and to whom. The household office ran bureaux for the hall, for brewing and for sewing; potters, seamstresses and a chair-maker worked on the premises; dogs, horses and cranes were kept and fed, and the dogs appear on the dockets by the head, four at a time. The people staffing this private establishment were state officials, which is why the institute describes the household as the ritsuryō state in miniature.

The dockets date from about 710 to the mid-710s. In the second month of 729 Nagaya-ō was denounced by two officials and died; the tablets stop long before that, and tell us about his kitchen rather than his fall.

The store opened in 1989 and, because the remains lay directly beneath, was built without the basement food hall Japanese department stores normally have. It closed in 2000, reopened in 2003 as a general-merchandise store, closed again in 2017, and has traded since April 2018 as a shopping centre with the municipal art museum on its fifth floor. An explanatory board marks the site.

📸 Cover: the Nara City Museum of Art on the fifth floor of the shopping centre now standing on the residence site — representative of the site today, not the excavation; photograph by Rebirth10, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons