Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
The Taika Reforms rid the country of the Soga family, which had ruled by intrigue and murder. "Laws were codified and government departments were staffed with officials, many of whom had been trained in China." [Furtado: 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." [Bauer: Medieval World, p. 327-30]