During the fifty years that followed the Great Reforms of 645, Japan's central government enacted laws and established bureaucratic procedures (strongly Chinese in character) that were meant to strengthen its control over, and increase its revenue from, the country's land and people. Scholars agree that these arrangements, commonly referred to as the ritsuryō (penal and administrative law) system, were closely intertwined with economic and social change in the Nara period (710 to 784). At the base of the ritsuryō order, periodic reallocations of rice land (handen shūju) were linked with an enforced registration of individuals in every household: Laws stipulated that every registered householder be allotted rice land in accordance with his or her age, sex, and social position.

The Taihō penal and administrative codes of 701 seem to have been quite well enforced during the first half of the eighth century. But then violations became more numerous and allocations more sporadic as the state's control over land and people weakened. Ostensibly the ritsuryō system continued to function as intended, but an increasingly large number of conditions and practices were beginning to subvert its effectiveness. Historians generally agree, nevertheless, that Japan's ritsuryō state structure reached its apogee during the Nara period and that only in the last half of the period, particularly after 740, were its foundations undermined by changing social and economic conditions.