刑部(忍壁)親王
Shinnō Osakabe was a son of Emperor Temmu. At the time of the Jinshin uprising in 672, when Emperor Tenji’s son, Prince Otomo, was engaged in a struggle for succession to the throne with Emperor Tenji’s younger brother, Prince Oami (the future Emperor Temmu), he accompanied his father and was active in the fighting in the east, which ended in victory for his father.
At the command of Emperor Temmu, he undertook an enlargement and revision of the previously devised system of laws, known as the ritsuryo, or penal and civil code, presiding over the compilation of the so-called Taiho ritsuryo, Penal and Civil Code of the Taiho era, which was completed in 701 and put into effect the following year. The purpose of the code was to make Japan, both in name and fact, a bureaucratic state after the Chinese model. From the time of its promulgation, therefore, Japan was, institutionally speaking, under the rule of a single central government headed by the emperor and guided by the laws of the ritsuryu, and though changes in the way in which power was actually exercised came about later with the founding of the Kamakura, Muromachi, and Edo shogunates, in name at least, the shoguns were regarded as merely acting on the delegated authority of the emperor, who remained the ruler and actual head of the state.
