Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Before the Taika era, Japan had been controlled by numerous warring clans and the imperial court was dominated by the Soga family, which had maintained its grip on power by strategic use of intrigue and murder. By freeing the court from the domination of the Soga, Kotoku was able to organize an effective, centralized imperial government. The four key articles of the Taika era brought about a revolution in government [Abolished private ownership; New administrative and military organizations; Census introduced; Equitable tax system;]. . . . A network of roads was built to augment centralized control." [1001 Days] "The world that the Great Reform attempted to create is modelled after the ancient Chinese map of the world, a set of concentric rings with the emperor’s power all-encompassing at the center and executed by proxy at the distant edges; . . . In his effort to become the orienting point of Japanese culture, heavenly Sovereign Tenji brought historians and poets to his court and founded a university. He and his court read the Chinese classics, which had arrived in the hands of a travelling Buddhist monk in 660."