BETWEEN THE SEVENTH and ninth centuries, Japan experienced sudden and intense economic and cultural growth. Situated at the eastern terminus of the silk roads, the archipelago participated both actively and passively in a cosmopolitan East Asian sphere of influence. It received most directly innovations in art, architecture, law, and religion from its immediate neighbours in China and on the Korean Peninsula as well as influences from Central Asia and trade goods from as far away as western Asia. The disruption was so extreme that some have compared this period to that of the modern Meiji era (1868– 1912), when Japan opened itself to Western stimuli and rapidly transformed itself into a modern state. To paraphrase Eric Havelock, in the late seventh and through the eighth centuries, the muse of Japan learned to write. David Lurie in particular has emphasized the sudden burst of literacy in the late 600s CE, when orthography employing Chinese characters was first utilized on a broad scale. It might well be said that in the eighth century the nation transitioned from orality to literacy, producing its very first written collections of mythology, history, and poetry. The elite of a nation that heretofore had no writing system of its own began dynamic experiments in writing both classical Chinese and using Chinese characters to express the native tongue.

These centuries were an era of tremendous political consolidation and concurrent disruption in East Asia, and Japan was not the only polity affected by sweeping change. In China, the Sui dynasty, founded in 581 CE, unified the empire after centuries of conflict among warring states. The successor Tang dynasty, established in 618, is recognized as a high point in Chinese political and cultural history, when the metropolis of Chang’an, the capital, was the largest city in the eighth-century world. The territorial reach of the Tang as it expanded to the east, west, and south, was the most extensive to date of any Chinese empire. Tang's cosmopolitan culture revived and refined classical Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist elements from earlier centuries of Han dynastic rule as well as the period of disunion. However, it also welcomed Arab, Indian, and Central Asian traders including Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and Nestorian Christians. The resulting pluralistic cultural dynamism radiated throughout northeast Asia as the kingdoms of Manchuria, Korea, and the Japanese archipelago acknowledged Tang's political and intellectual hegemony.