The history of Japan

Japan is an archipelago of four main islands and thousands of smaller ones off the eastern edge of Asia. Its first inhabitants arrived by sea tens of thousands of years ago, and a long era of hunter-gatherer life was followed by rice farming and, from the sixth century CE, a centralised state that borrowed writing, law and Buddhism from China and Korea. For most of the next thousand years an emperor reigned in Kyoto while real power passed to court families and then to warrior governments, the shogunates, whose rule ended only in 1868. The modern state that replaced them industrialised at great speed, built an empire across East Asia and the Pacific, and was defeated in the Second World War, before rebuilding itself as a democracy and one of the world's largest economies.

People reached the Japanese islands at least 38,000 years ago, when lower sea levels narrowed the straits but still required boats to cross them. The acidic volcanic soils have destroyed most of their bones, but stone tools are abundant, including ground-edge axes among the oldest of their kind anywhere, and human remains in caves on Okinawa are about 32,000 years old. These hunters shared the land with now-vanished animals such as Naumann's elephant.

As the Ice Age ended, a distinctive culture emerged that archaeologists call Jōmon, after the "cord-marked" patterns pressed into its pottery. Jōmon potters were making vessels by about 14,000 BCE, among the earliest in the world, and over the following ten millennia their work grew into elaborate flame-rimmed pots and the clay figurines known as dogū. The Jōmon people fished, gathered nuts and shellfish and hunted deer and boar, and the richness of the coasts and forests allowed many of them to live in settled villages of pit houses without farming. Sannai-Maruyama in northern Honshu, occupied for some 1,500 years, had large timber buildings and hundreds of inhabitants. Genetic studies suggest the Jōmon are among the ancestors of all modern Japanese, and most strongly of the Ainu of Hokkaido and the people of the Ryukyu Islands.

Wet-rice farming arrived from the Korean peninsula in northern Kyushu sometime in the first millennium BCE; radiocarbon dates now place its beginning around 900 BCE, earlier than once believed. With it came bronze and iron, new kinds of pottery and weaving, and migrants who mixed with the Jōmon population. This Yayoi culture spread east across Honshu over several centuries, while the far north and Hokkaido kept a hunting and gathering way of life.

Farming brought surplus, warfare and chiefdoms. Moated and palisaded villages such as Yoshinogari in Kyushu reflect constant conflict. Chinese records give the first written glimpses of the islands: the Han dynasty granted a gold seal to a ruler of the land of Na in 57 CE, and a third-century Chinese chronicle describes a queen named Himiko who ruled the land of Yamatai and sent envoys to the Wei court. Where Yamatai lay, in Kyushu or in the Kinai region around Nara, is still debated.

From about 250 CE the elite were buried in enormous earthen mounds, kofun, many shaped like keyholes, ringed with clay figures and filled with mirrors, swords and armour. The largest, attributed to the emperor Nintoku near Osaka, is one of the biggest tombs on earth. The tombs mark the rise of the Yamato confederation in the Kinai plain, whose great kings, the ancestors of the imperial line, extended their authority over much of western Japan and took part in the wars of the Korean kingdoms, including Baekje and Silla.

In the sixth century Yamato adopted much of the culture of the Asian mainland. Buddhism arrived from Baekje, traditionally in 538, and after a struggle between rival clans it was patronised by the powerful Soga family and by Prince Shōtoku, the regent credited with a seventeen-article code of moral and political principles in 604 and with temples such as Hōryū-ji, whose wooden buildings are among the oldest in the world. Chinese characters were adapted to write Japanese, and Confucianism supplied ideals of loyal officials and a virtuous ruler. The native worship of kami, the spirits of nature and ancestors, later called Shinto, continued alongside Buddhism, and the two blended for centuries.

In 645 Prince Naka no Ōe and Nakatomi no Kamatari overthrew the Soga and launched the Taika reforms, which aimed to turn Yamato into a centralised state like that of the Tang dynasty: land was declared the property of the throne and redistributed, taxes were standardised and provinces created. The law codes of the early eighth century completed this system, and the rulers took the title tennō, emperor, and the name Nihon, "origin of the sun", for their country. In 710 a permanent capital was laid out on a Chinese grid at Heijō-kyō, modern Nara. The Nara court sponsored huge Buddhist projects, above all the Tōdai-ji temple and its great bronze Buddha, dedicated in 752, and produced the first histories, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720, which traced the imperial family back to the sun goddess Amaterasu.

In 794 the emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō, the later Kyoto, partly to escape the influence of the Nara monasteries. Over the next four centuries real power passed to the Fujiwara clan, who married their daughters to emperors and ruled as regents for their grandsons; the Fujiwara were at their height under Fujiwara no Michinaga around the year 1000. Later, retired emperors governed from their cloisters to reclaim authority from the regents. Official missions to China ended in 894, and court culture became more distinctively Japanese.

This was the age of the kana syllabaries, which made it easier to write Japanese, and of a brilliant literature written largely by women at court: Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book both date from the early eleventh century. New Buddhist schools, Tendai and Shingon, and later the devotion to Amida Buddha of the Pure Land teachings, spread among nobles and commoners.

Outside the capital, however, the state's control of land was dissolving. Tax-exempt private estates, shōen, multiplied, and provincial families raised their own armed retainers to defend them. Two warrior clans descended from the imperial family, the Taira and the Minamoto, were drawn into court politics in the twelfth century. Taira no Kiyomori dominated the court for two decades until the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185, which ended with the destruction of the Taira at the sea battle of Dan-no-ura.

The victor, Minamoto no Yoritomo, set up a military government in the eastern town of Kamakura and in 1192 received the title of shogun. The Kamakura shogunate appointed military governors and stewards across the provinces alongside the imperial administration, the beginning of nearly seven centuries in which warriors, the samurai, held effective power while the emperors reigned in Kyoto. After Yoritomo's line died out, the Hōjō family ruled as regents for puppet shoguns. The rise of this warrior order, with its ideals of loyalty and its system of lords and vassals, is described further under feudal Japan. New, simpler forms of Buddhism suited the age: Zen, brought from China, appealed to warriors, while Pure Land and Nichiren preachers won mass followings.

The Kamakura regime's greatest test came from the Mongol Empire. Kublai Khan sent invasion fleets, built partly in Goryeo Korea, in 1274 and again in 1281, the second one of the largest seaborne expeditions before modern times. Samurai resistance and storms that wrecked the fleets, later remembered as kamikaze, "divine winds", saved Japan, but the cost of defence without conquered land to reward the warriors weakened the shogunate. In 1333 the emperor Go-Daigo overthrew it, only to be driven from Kyoto by his former ally Ashikaga Takauji, who founded a new shogunate in 1338. For nearly sixty years rival Northern and Southern imperial courts competed until they were reunited in 1392.

The Ashikaga shoguns ruled from the Muromachi district of Kyoto, and their era was one of cultural flowering: Noh drama, ink painting, rock gardens, the tea ceremony and buildings such as the Golden and Silver Pavilions. Trade with Ming China revived. But the shoguns never controlled the provincial lords firmly, and the Ōnin War of 1467 to 1477, fought largely in the streets of Kyoto, left the capital in ruins and opened more than a century of civil war, the Sengoku or "warring states" period, in which regional warlords, the daimyo, fought for territory.

In 1543 Portuguese traders were shipwrecked on the island of Tanegashima, bringing the first European firearms, which Japanese smiths soon copied in large numbers. Merchants of the Portuguese Empire followed, trading Chinese silk for Japanese silver, and in 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier began Christian missions; within a few decades there were perhaps 300,000 Japanese Christians, especially in Kyushu.

Muskets helped the warlords who would reunite the country. Oda Nobunaga seized Kyoto in 1568, deposed the last Ashikaga shogun in 1573 and crushed the militant Buddhist monasteries before he was forced to suicide by a rebellious general in 1582. His commander Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a man of humble birth, completed the unification by 1590, disarmed the peasants and fixed the line between samurai and commoners. He also turned against the missionaries and in 1597 had twenty-six Christians crucified at Nagasaki. Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597 devastated the peninsula but were defeated by the armies of Joseon and Ming China and by the Korean navy, and they were abandoned on his death in 1598.

After Hideyoshi's death, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and took the title of shogun in 1603, establishing the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo, the future Tokyo. The Toyotomi heirs were destroyed at Osaka in 1615. The Tokugawa system balanced central control with the autonomy of some 260 daimyo domains: lords had to spend alternate years in Edo and leave their families there as hostages, and society was officially divided into samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants.

Fearing that Christianity would serve European ambitions and undermine loyalty, the shogunate banned it in 1614, expelled the missionaries and persecuted converts, many of whom were executed. A largely Christian peasant uprising at Shimabara in 1637 and 1638 was crushed, and afterwards the Portuguese were expelled. Under the policy later called sakoku, the "closed country", Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad, and European trade was restricted to the Dutch of the Dutch Republic, confined to the small artificial island of Dejima at Nagasaki. Trade continued with China, with Joseon Korea through the Tsushima domain, and with the Ryukyu Kingdom, which the Satsuma domain had invaded in 1609 while it continued to pay tribute to China.

The two and a half centuries of peace that followed brought population growth, internal trade and urbanisation. Edo grew to around a million people in the eighteenth century, one of the largest cities in the world, and Osaka became a great commercial centre. A lively urban culture produced kabuki theatre, puppet drama, the haiku of Matsuo Bashō and the woodblock prints of the "floating world". Neo-Confucian scholarship was the official ideology, while the National Learning school studied ancient Japanese texts, and "Dutch learning" introduced Western medicine and science. In the north, Japanese traders and the Matsumae domain increasingly dominated Ezo, now Hokkaido, and exploited the Ainu, who rose in revolt under Shakushain in 1669 and were defeated. By the nineteenth century the shogunate faced famines, peasant protest, debts among the samurai and the growing appearance of Western ships.

In 1853 the American naval officer Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay with steam-powered warships and demanded that Japan open its ports. The shogunate, aware of China's defeat by Britain in the First Opium War, signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with the United States in 1854, followed by "unequal treaties" with the Western powers that gave foreigners legal immunity and fixed low tariffs. The humiliation discredited the shogunate. Samurai from the south-western domains of Satsuma and Chōshū rallied behind the slogan "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians", and after brief clashes with Western fleets concluded that Japan had to modernise to resist them. In January 1868 they declared the restoration of imperial rule in the name of the young Emperor Meiji, and defeated the shogunate's supporters in the Boshin War of 1868 and 1869.

The Meiji Restoration began one of the fastest transformations of any society in history. The emperor moved to Edo, renamed Tokyo. The domains were abolished in 1871 and replaced by prefectures, the samurai class lost its privileges, and a conscript army was created; the last great samurai revolt, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, was defeated by it. The government sent missions to study Western institutions, built railways, telegraphs and factories, introduced universal schooling and a new land tax, and promoted State Shinto centred on the emperor. Hokkaido was formally annexed and colonised, with the Ainu forced to give up their land, language and customs, and in 1879 the Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished and turned into Okinawa Prefecture. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 created an elected Diet with limited powers under a sovereign emperor. By 1911 Japan had revised the unequal treaties.

Japan was the first non-Western country to undergo its own Industrial Revolution, and its new strength was soon turned outward. The Empire of Japan defeated Qing China in 1894 and 1895 over influence in Korea and took Taiwan. An alliance with the British Empire in 1902 strengthened its position, and in 1904 and 1905 it fought the Russian Empire for control of Korea and Manchuria, destroying the Russian Baltic fleet at Tsushima; the peace was mediated by Theodore Roosevelt. Korea became a protectorate and was annexed in 1910, beginning 35 years of colonial rule marked by land confiscations, forced assimilation and the suppression of independence movements such as the March First protests of 1919.

Under the emperor Taishō (1912 to 1926), Japan joined the Allies in World War I, seized Germany's Pacific islands and its concession in Shandong, and pressed the Twenty-One Demands on China in 1915. At home the "Taishō democracy" brought party cabinets and, in 1925, the vote for all adult men, although the same year a Peace Preservation Law gave police wide powers against the left. The Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed more than 100,000 people; in its aftermath vigilantes and police murdered thousands of Koreans and some political radicals.

The Great Depression devastated rural Japan and discredited the parties. Nationalist officers of the Kwantung Army staged an explosion on a railway at Mukden in 1931 as a pretext to occupy Manchuria, where Japan set up the puppet state of Manchukuo; when the League of Nations condemned it, Japan left the League in 1933. Assassinations and attempted coups by young officers, including the uprising in Tokyo of 26 February 1936, pushed the government steadily toward military control under the emperor Hirohito. In July 1937 a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing escalated into full war with the Republic of China of Chiang Kai-shek. Japanese forces took Shanghai and then Nanjing, where in December 1937 and the following weeks soldiers massacred tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners and raped huge numbers of women; the death toll remains disputed, and the massacre is denied by some Japanese nationalists.

With the war in China at a stalemate and the United States imposing an oil embargo after Japan moved into French Indochina, Japan's leaders, now headed by General Tōjō Hideki, chose to seize the oil and resources of Southeast Asia. Having joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact in 1940, on 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and simultaneously invaded Malaya, Hong Kong and the Philippines, bringing the United States into World War II. Within six months Japan had taken Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Burma and much of the western Pacific, proclaiming a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".

Japanese occupation was brutal. Prisoners of war and Asian labourers died in great numbers building the Burma railway, Unit 731 carried out lethal human experiments in Manchuria, and tens of thousands of women from Korea, China, the Philippines and elsewhere were forced into military brothels as so-called comfort women. Millions of Chinese and other Asian civilians died during the war years from massacres, famine and forced labour.

The tide turned at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. American forces advanced island by island across the Pacific, and from late 1944 bombers burned Japan's cities; a single firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed around 100,000 people. The battle of Okinawa from April to June 1945 killed perhaps a quarter of the island's civilian population. On 6 August an American atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, on 8 August the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria, and on 9 August a second bomb fell on Nagasaki; together the two bombs had killed well over 100,000 people by the end of the year. On 15 August Hirohito announced Japan's surrender in a radio broadcast, and it was formally signed on 2 September 1945.

Japan was occupied by the Allies, in practice by the United States under General Douglas MacArthur, until 1952. The empire was dismantled, the armed forces disbanded and war crimes trials held in Tokyo, where Tōjō and six others were executed; the emperor was kept on the throne and not tried. A new constitution, in force from 3 May 1947, made the emperor a symbol of the nation, guaranteed civil rights and votes for women, and in its Article 9 renounced war. Land reform broke up the great estates and the industrial conglomerates were partly dissolved. As the Cold War began, American policy shifted toward rebuilding Japan as an ally. The Treaty of San Francisco restored Japan's sovereignty in 1952, and a security treaty allowed American bases to remain; Okinawa stayed under American administration until 1972.

The Korean War brought American procurement orders that revived industry, and from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s the economy grew at around ten per cent a year. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party, formed in 1955, governed almost without interruption. The renewal of the security treaty in 1960 provoked the largest protests in the country's history, but the government then turned the nation's energy toward the goal of doubling incomes. The Tokyo Olympics and the first high-speed Shinkansen line in 1964 symbolised Japan's recovery, and by 1968 it was the world's second-largest economy. Firms such as Toyota, Sony and Honda conquered world markets in cars and electronics. The costs included severe industrial pollution, such as the mercury poisoning at Minamata, and lasting tensions with China and South Korea over the memory of the war, kept alive by disputes over textbooks and visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are among those honoured.

A speculative bubble in shares and land burst in 1990, shortly after Hirohito's death in 1989 and the accession of his son Akihito, whose reign took the name Heisei. Banks were left with enormous bad debts, prices fell, and the following years are remembered as the "lost decade"; growth remained weak for long after, and the stock market did not regain its 1989 peak until 2024. The Liberal Democrats briefly lost power in 1993 and again from 2009 to 2012. In 1995 the Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,000 people, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. The population, ageing faster than any other, peaked in 2008 and has been declining since. In 2010 China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy, while Japanese popular culture, from anime and manga to video games, became a major global export.

On 11 March 2011 one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck off north-eastern Honshu. The tsunami it raised left about 18,000 people dead or missing and caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, forcing the evacuation of a wide area. Shinzo Abe, prime minister from 2012 to 2020, the longest-serving in Japanese history, pursued an economic programme of monetary easing and spending known as Abenomics and reinterpreted the constitution in 2015 to allow the Self-Defence Forces to fight alongside allies in limited circumstances. In 2008 the Diet recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people, and a 2019 law gave that status legal force.

Akihito abdicated in 2019, the first emperor to do so in two centuries, and his son Naruhito began the Reiwa era. The Tokyo Olympics were postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic and held without spectators in 2021. In July 2022 Shinzo Abe was shot dead while campaigning in Nara, a profound shock in a country where gun crime is very rare. Concern over China, North Korea and Russia, which Japan sanctioned after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, led the government that December to announce a large increase in defence spending and the acquisition of counter-strike capabilities.

A scandal over undeclared party funds cost the Liberal Democrats their majority in the lower house in October 2024, under prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, and they lost the upper house in 2025. In October 2025 Sanae Takaichi, a conservative protégé of Abe, became the first woman to lead the party and the country, governing in alliance with the Japan Innovation Party. Remarks she made about Japan's possible response to a Chinese attack on Taiwan provoked a diplomatic crisis with Beijing. In a snap election on 8 February 2026 the Liberal Democrats won 316 of 465 seats, a two-thirds majority and the largest total for any party in post-war Japan. The country she leads remains the world's fourth-largest economy, with a population of about 123 million that is ageing and shrinking.