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The Nara Period covers the History of Japan from about A.D. 710 to
784. The Empress Gemmei established the capital at Nara, also known as Heijo
kyo, where it remained the capital of Japanese civilization until the
Emperor Kammu established the new capital at Nagaoka.
Most of Japanese society during this period was agricultural in
nature, centered around villages. Most of the villagers followed the Shinto
religion, based around the worship of natural and ancestral spirits (kami).
The capital at Nara was modeled after Chang'an (Xian), the capital
city of Tang China. In many other ways the Japanese upper classes patterned
themselves after the Chinese, including the Chinese written characters
(kanji) and the religion of Buddhism.
 Concentrated efforts by the imperial court to record and document its
history produced the first works of Japanese literature during the Nara
period. Works such as Kojiki (古事記) and Nihon Shoki (日本書紀) were political in
nature, used to record and therefore justify and establish the supremacy of
the rule of the emperors within Japan itself and to China and Korea.
With the spread of written language, Japanese poetry, known in
Japanese as waka, started to be written. Over time, personal collections
were referenced to establish the first large collection of Japanese poetry
known as Man'yoshu (万葉集) sometime after 759. Chinese characters were used to
express sounds of Japanese until Kana was invented. The Chinese characters
used to express the sounds of Japanese is known as manyougana.
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