Regulating mobility
Roaming horses and liminal spatial orders in Heian Japan (794–1185)
Keywords:
Heian Japan, spatial governance, roaming horses, animal agency, liminalityAbstract
This paper examines the spatial regulation of human–animal relations in Heian Japan (794–1185), focusing on the role of free-ranging horses in shaping political authority and social order. Building on scholarship in animal geography and historical animal studies, it argues that space has long been central to the governance of animals, yet such spatial regimes were neither fixed nor uncontested. Through an analysis of legal codes, court records, and literary sources, the paper demonstrates how the Taihō Code (703) sought to impose rigid spatial hierarchies aligned with centralized state power, attempting to regulate movement, land use, and social organization. However, these efforts were persistently undermined by both commoners and roaming horses, whose everyday transgressions exposed the limits of legal enforcement. This paper introduces liminality as a key analytical framework to reinterpret early medieval Japan, suggesting that the marginalization and regulation of animal movement began much earlier than typically assumed in studies focused on early modern or modern Europe. In Heian-kyō and beyond, horses occupied ambiguous positions, neither fully domesticated nor wild, and frequently disrupted spatial and symbolic boundaries. Drawing on relational approaches influenced by Actor-Network Theory, this paper conceptualizes agency as distributed and emergent within human–animal assemblages. It argues that horses, without deliberate intent, exerted political force by destabilizing administrative systems and reshaping power relations. It further contends that unintentional animal agency played a significant role in reconfiguring spatial governance and state authority in Heian Japan.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Sese Ma

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
