15 Japan, the island empire

It has been said that all countries are different from each other, but that Japan is “differently different.” Perhaps because of its geographical isolation, on an archipelago of islands off the east coast of Asia, Japan for much of its history kept itself from the rest of the world.

Even its remarkably rapid modernization and industrialization in the later 19th century only touched the surface of Japanese life, and did not alter the country’s strong adherence to its traditional customs, values and outlook on the world.

The islands of Japan were first settled by humans some 40,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, when lowered sea levels created a land bridge from the Asian mainland. These Stone Age Japanese were hunter-gatherers, and from about 10,000 BC began to make pottery—one of the first cultures in the world to do so. However, it was not until around 400 BC that another wave of immigrants—possibly from China or Korea—brought agriculture and metalworking skills. There were certainly contacts with the well-developed Chinese civilization to the west, which by the 1st century AD was exacting tribute from the numerous clans of Japan. It was from China that Japan went on to acquire its written script and Confucian and Buddhist beliefs, which became melded with the native Shinto religion, with its emphasis on ancestor worship and respect for tradition and native land. Despite these connections, the Japanese language is not related to Chinese, and possibly not to any other language.

“Harmony is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition to be honoured … ”

Prince Shotoku, who became regent in AD 593, lays down the imperial law in the Seventeen-article Constitution of 604

Emperors and shoguns From the 3rd century ad Japan was a mosaic of military states, but around AD 400 one of these, Yamoto, began to dominate the others, and all Japanese emperors subsequently claimed descent from the Yamoto dynasty. By 607 the “Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun” (i.e. Japan) was writing to the “Emperor of the Land of the Setting Sun” (i.e. China) as an equal in power and magnificence. In the 8th century the Japanese established an imperial capital along Chinese lines at Nara, and began to adopt the Chinese model of strong, centralized government. A new origin myth evolved, by which the emperors were said to descend from the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, who had, according to the myth, founded Japan in 660 BC and who was himself a descendant of the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu. The claim of the Japanese emperors to divine status was only abandoned after the Second World War.

In 794 the capital moved to Kyoto. Thereafter, contacts with China diminished, and the power of the emperors was eclipsed by the growing power of the noble Fujiwara family, who acted as regents. In the 12th century the Fujiwara were themselves challenged by a number of other aristocratic families. As a result, Japan collapsed into civil war, and a decentralized feudal society emerged, with power divided among a number of regional barons (daimyos), who maintained bands of samurai warriors, an elite military caste regarded as superior in rank to merchants, artisans and peasants. In 1159 a warlord called Yoritomo, of the Minamoto family, seized overall power, and from 1185 ruled from Kamakura (near Tokyo) as shogun (military dictator), while the emperor, secluded in Kyoto, was reduced to a figurehead.

Kamikaze

Such was their isolation during the Middle Ages that the Japanese were unused to facing threats from across the sea. So it came as a terrible shock when in 1274 and again in 1281 the Mongols—who under Kublai Khan had conquered all of China—attempted massive sea-borne invasions of Japan. On both occasions, the Mongol fleet was devastated by a typhoon—known thereafter by the Japanese as kamikaze, meaning “divine wind.” The legend resurfaced toward the end of the Second World War, when, in a hopeless bid to stop the Allied advance on the home islands, Japanese pilots adopted the name kamikaze as they deliberately crashed their bomb-laden planes onto enemy ships.

Shoguns from various families remained the absolute rulers of Japan for many centuries, interrupted in the 16th century by a series of civil wars. By 1600 Japan was reunited, and a noble from the Tokugawa family called Ieyasu established a new shogunate, based in Edo (Tokyo), while the emperor remained powerless in Kyoto.

The Tokugawa shoguns exercised tight control over the daimyos, forcing them to spend much time in Edo, and away from their regional power bases (just as Louis XIV successfully emasculated the turbulent nobility of France in the later 17th century by requiring them to live in his great palace at Versailles). The Tokugawa shoguns also turned their backs on European contact. Traders and Christian missionaries had begun to arrive in the 16th century, and many peasants were converted. The shoguns feared this heralded a European takeover, and from 1635 imposed a policy of isolation, banning all contact between Japanese and foreigners. The only exception was the small Dutch trading concession on an island in Nagasaki harbor.

“If any Japanese attempts to go abroad secretly, he must be executed … If any Japanese returns from overseas after residing there, he must be put to death.”

The shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu issued an edict in 1635 shutting Japan off from foreign contact

Out of isolation This isolation was forcibly ended when on July 8, 1853 four US warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into the bay at Edo. Having demonstrated his ships’ firepower, Perry requested that the Japanese open their doors to foreign trade. Japan was subsequently pressed to sign a number of treaties with Western powers, granting the latter trading rights that effectively compromised Japan’s sovereignty.

These forced changes marked the end of Japan’s long Middle Ages. After a coup by modernizers in 1868 the shogun resigned, and in 1869 the emperor was installed with restored powers in Edo, which was renamed Tokyo. He himself took the throne name Meiji, meaning “enlightened government.” There followed a remarkable period in which Japan underwent in three decades a process of industrialization that had taken nearly two centuries in Europe. It was not only manufacturing that was transformed: education, the armed forces, the economy and the political system were all modernized along Western lines.

As Japan’s power grew, the “unequal” treaties were put aside. Aiming to become the dominant regional power, Japan fought a war with China in 1894–5 and gained Korea and Taiwan. Then in 1904–5 it took on Russia over which of them should control Manchuria. Japan scored a decisive naval victory over the Russians at Tsushima—the first victory in modern times of an Asian nation over a European power. By the outbreak of the First World War, Japan was being treated as an equal, having become an ally of Great Britain. During the war it attacked German bases in China and seized some of Germany’s island possessions in the Pacific. After the war Japanese delegates attended the Paris Peace Conference, and Japan was awarded a League of Nations mandate over all former German colonies in the Pacific north of the equator. Japan had flexed its muscles; more was to come (see The Second World War: Asia and the Pacific).

the condensed idea

A remarkable transformation from medieval to modern