administration became largely an empty shell, a great paper organization with court nobles sporting high titles but with little working personnel, scanty funds, and greatly reduced functions of government. The complex system of rule through eight ministries was for all practical purposes abandoned, and new and simplified organs of government were developed to handle what few political duties the central government still had.
The net result of all this was that centralized government ceased to exist for most parts of Japan. Each estate, freed from encroachment by tax collectors and other state agents, became a small autonomous domain, a semi-independent economic and political unit. The contacts it had with the outside world were not with any government agency but with the great court family or monastery which exercised a loose and distant control over it.
The noble court families and monasteries became, in a sense, multiple successors of the old centralized state. Any centralizing forces in the economic and political life of Japan were represented largely by them and not by the bureaus of the central government. These families and monasteries became to a certain degree states within the hollow framework of the old imperial government, each supported by the income from its own estates and, through family government or monastery administration, exercising many of the functions of government in its widely scattered manors throughout the land.
The imperial family, though retaining great prestige because of its past political role and its continuing position as leader in the Shinto cults, became in fact simply