Emperor Kammu
Emperor Kammu moved the capital twice in ten years to get away from the monasteries of Nara, and the second move, to Heian-kyō in 794, gave Japan the city that was its capital for a thousand and seventy years and its name to the age; he also sent the armies north against the Emishi that gave the country the title of shogun, and the monks Saichō and Kūkai to China that gave it two new Buddhisms. He was born in 737, the son of a minor prince and a mother of Korean immigrant descent. He was not expected to reign. His father was made emperor in 770 in the reaction against the empress Shōtoku and the monk Dōkyō, whom she had nearly made her heir, Kammu succeeded in 781 at forty-four, a grown man with a programme. The programme was to get the court out from under the temples. In 784 he moved it from Nara to Nagaoka, and when the official in charge was murdered and the crown prince implicated and starved to death on the way to exile, the plagues and floods that followed were laid to the prince's angry spirit. He moved it again in 794 to a site between rivers he called the capital of peace and tranquillity, laid out on a Chinese grid, with the great temples forbidden inside the walls. He reformed the provinces with inspectors, cut the conscript army that had failed and put the sons of the district gentry on horseback instead. He sent Sakanoue no Tamuramaro against the Emishi of the north with the title sei-i taishōgun, barbarian-subduing generalissimo, which later men wanted for other reasons, and Tamuramaro took the Kitakami valley by 802. The embassy of 804 carried Saichō and Kūkai to Tang China, and they came back with Tendai and Shingon and the mountains, Hiei and Kōya, on which to put them, outside the city as the emperor wished. He died in 806 having decided, the chronicle says, that the military campaigns and the building had cost the people too much, and stopped both.
- Lived: 737 CE – 806 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: emperor, monarch
