An emperor, shaken by rebellion, orders his capital dismantled and rebuilt somewhere safer. Workers take apart the Daigokuden -- the Great Hall of State, the most important building in all of Japan -- and haul it piece by piece to a narrow valley between mountains and a floodplain. They lay out a grid of streets, bridge a river, and construct the palace. Four years later, the emperor leaves. The new capital is never completed. By the time the abandoned hall is repurposed into a Buddhist temple, and the temple itself burns, and the ruins are swallowed by farmland, and a school is built on top of it all, more than a thousand years have passed. Today the site of Kuni-kyo, Japan's capital from 740 to 744, lies beneath the grounds of Kuni Elementary School in the city of Kizugawa, Kyoto Prefecture. Fifteen foundation stones are all that remain.
In 740, a man named Fujiwara no Hirotsugu launched a rebellion from Kyushu against the imperial court. The revolt was crushed, but Emperor Shomu was deeply unsettled. On December 15, 740, he issued a decree moving the capital from Heijo-kyo -- present-day Nara -- to a site in Soraku County, Yamashiro Province. The new location was chosen not for its geography, which was far from ideal, but for its politics. It was the stronghold of Tachibana no Moroe, the Udaijin (Minister of the Right) who held effective control of the Great Council of State. By establishing his court in Tachibana's territory, Emperor Shomu placed himself under the protection of the one man who had stood against the Fujiwara faction. The capital was officially named Yamato no Kuni no Omiya, though it became known as Kuni-kyo. In September 741, the layout was formalized and renamed Daiyotoku Kuninomiya.
Building a Japanese imperial capital was an enormous undertaking, even by eighth-century standards. The Daigokuden -- the ceremonial throne hall -- was physically dismantled at Heijo-kyo and transported to the new site, where it was reassembled. The Omiya fence was erected, the palace constructed, and a grid of streets laid out in the Chinese-inspired pattern that defined Japanese capital planning. A large bridge spanned the Kizu River. The resulting palace compound measured approximately 560 meters east to west and 750 meters north to south. But the site had a fundamental problem: geography. A narrow valley pressed in from the west, and the Kizu River's floodplain hemmed it in from the east. The city could never grow to match the scale of Heijo-kyo. There was simply not enough room for a capital worthy of an emperor who already had one.
Emperor Shomu did not stay. In 741, even as construction continued at Kuni-kyo, he ordered the establishment of state-sponsored Buddhist monasteries and nunneries -- the kokubunji system -- in every province, a response to a devastating smallpox epidemic that had swept through Japan between 735 and 737, killing perhaps a third of the population. The spiritual crisis mirrored the political one. By 744, only four years after arriving, Shomu moved the capital again, this time to Shigaraki in what is now Koka, Shiga Prefecture. He would move it once more after that, to Naniwa-kyo in Osaka, before finally returning the capital to Heijo-kyo in Nara. The preference for Shigaraki over Kuni-kyo likely signals a shift in political winds: the rival Fujiwara clan was regaining influence, and Tachibana no Moroe's power was waning. Kuni-kyo, never completed, was left behind.
The abandoned palace did not go entirely to waste. The Daigokuden, rebuilt so painstakingly from components hauled from Nara, was converted into the Kondo (main hall) of Yamashiro Kokubun-ji, one of the provincial Buddhist temples Emperor Shomu had ordered established. A seven-story pagoda rose from a 17-meter-square base nearby, its first floor measuring 9.8 meters on each side. Fifteen large foundation stones from the pagoda's base still survive east of Kuni Elementary School at a spot called To-no-moto-moto. The temple burned in 882 and was rebuilt in 898. By the Kamakura period, it had become a branch of the famous Byodo-in at Uji. A document from 1301 records it as property of Kasuga Shrine. Sometime during the Muromachi period, the temple was abandoned for good. In 1957, the overlapping ruins of both the palace and the temple were collectively designated a National Historic Site of Japan.
Today, the most visible evidence of Kuni-kyo is an earthen platform stretching east to west just north of Kuni Elementary School -- believed to be the foundation of the original Daigokuden. Archaeological excavations have confirmed the Chinese-influenced layout of key palace buildings, including the Daigokuden and the Dairi (imperial residence), but no remains of the planned street grid have been found. The site sits in the Kamo neighborhood of Kizugawa, a quiet city far removed from the tourist circuits of Kyoto and Nara. A thirty-minute walk from Kamo Station on JR West's Kansai Main Line brings visitors to a landscape of rice paddies, low hills, and scattered foundation stones -- the ghost of a capital that existed for barely long enough to matter, yet whose story captures the turbulence of eighth-century Japan in a way that the grander ruins of Nara and Kyoto cannot.
Located at 34.77°N, 135.86°E in the Kamo neighborhood of Kizugawa, Kyoto Prefecture. The site is in a river valley flanked by low hills, with the Kizu River running nearby. From the air, the area appears as a mix of residential development, agricultural fields, and the grounds of Kuni Elementary School, where the palace foundations lie. No dramatic landmarks are visible; the site reads as typical rural Kansai landscape. Best viewed from 2,000-4,000 feet AGL. The nearest major airports are Kansai International Airport (RJBB), approximately 45 nautical miles to the south-southwest, and Osaka Itami Airport (RJOO), approximately 25 nautical miles to the west. Nara is visible approximately 10 kilometers to the south.