Japan's long story, from Jōmon potters and Yayoi rice farmers to the court of Murasaki Shikibu, samurai rule, the Mongol fleets, the Ainu north and the Ryukyu kingdom, Edo's stalls and prints, the Meiji revolution, empire and war, recovery, and the country today.
Stop 01 · c. 14,500–2000 BCE
Clay Before Farms
Our story starts with broken clay. Small fragments from Odai Yamamoto, at the far north of Honshu, have been dated to about 14,500 BCE. That makes them among the earliest pots anywhere, though older ones are known from southern China. Their makers lived by hunting, fishing and gathering. In 1877 the American zoologist Edward Morse found cord-marked sherds, and his 'straw-rope pattern' gave the culture its name: Jōmon. By about 3900 BCE people at Sannai Maruyama had begun a settlement that lasted over a thousand years, with more than 500 pit dwellings and a great building on chestnut posts a metre thick. Jade reached it from about 500 kilometres away. After 2000 BCE the climate cooled and settlements shrank.
Our story starts with broken clay. Small fragments from Odai Yamamoto, at the far north of Honshu, have been dated to about 14,500 BCE. That makes them among the earliest pots anywhere, though older ones are known from southern China. Their makers lived by hunting, fishing and gathering. In 1877 the American zoologist Edward Morse found cord-marked sherds, and his 'straw-rope pattern' gave the culture its name: Jōmon. By about 3900 BCE people at Sannai Maruyama had begun a settlement that lasted over a thousand years, with more than 500 pit dwellings and a great building on chestnut posts a metre thick. Jade reached it from about 500 kilometres away. After 2000 BCE the climate cooled and settlements shrank.
During the first millennium BCE, farmers from the Korean peninsula and nearby lands brought wet rice to Japan. Scholars still argue about when. Many date the start of the Yayoi period to about 300 BCE, radiocarbon tests may push it centuries earlier, and one genetics team works from about 900 BCE. Paddies, wells and granaries spread, and metal followed. Bronze bells and mirrors seem to have been ceremonial, and by the 1st century CE people had iron tools and weapons. Conflict was common too, judging by headless skeletons at Yoshinogari. The newcomers did not simply replace the Jōmon. Ancient DNA suggests later Yayoi people in north-west Kyushu carried roughly half Jōmon ancestry. In Hokkaido, life went on by fishing and hunting.
At last a name steps out of the record, in a Chinese chronicle. The Wei Zhi describes Himiko, queen of Wa, who came to the throne after a great civil war. She lived unmarried, known for sorcery, with a thousand women attendants and one man, while a brother helped her rule. In about 238 her envoys reached the Wei court, and she received a gold seal as 'Queen of Wa, Friendly to Wei'. Where her land of Yamatai lay is still argued, with Kyushu and Nara the rival answers. Soon after her time, vast keyhole-shaped tombs began to rise. The largest, Daisen near Osaka, runs 486 metres. In the 5th century the Yamato clan came to dominate, and its line became the imperial family.
Around the 5th century writing began to take hold at the Yamato court, probably in the hands of bilingual Chinese and Korean officials. Then came a new faith. In 538 or 552, and neither date is secure, King Seong of Baekje sent a Buddha image, banners and sutras. The Soga clan welcomed them. The Mononobe and Nakatomi feared the anger of the kami, the old gods. By one account they blamed the faith for disease and threw the image into a canal. The Soga side won the war that followed. Prince Shōtoku, a half-legendary figure, served Empress Suiko, sent envoys to Sui China around 607 and is tied to the temple of Hōryū-ji. By about 650, scribes were using Chinese characters for their sound.
In 710 the court settled at Heijō-kyō, today's Nara, on a grid modelled on Chang'an, the capital of Tang China. Here Japan began writing down its own past: the Kojiki in 712, the Nihon Shoki in 720, and later the Man'yōshū, about 4,500 poems. Then smallpox struck in 735 and 737, killing by one estimate 25 to 35 per cent of the people. Emperor Shōmu turned to the Buddha. He ordered a seated bronze figure about 15 metres high, weighing some 500 tons and covered in gold newly found in Mutsu. When the temple of Tōdai-ji opened in 752, about 10,000 monks attended, among them visitors from China and India. In 784 the court left Nara, and ten years later it found a new home.
In 794 Emperor Kammu moved the court to Heian-kyō, now Kyoto. Power drifted to the Fujiwara family, whose statesmen served as regents for one emperor after another. The last embassy to China in this era went in 838. Men still wrote formally in Chinese, while noblewomen took up kana, a script grown from Chinese characters. Murasaki Shikibu, whose personal name is lost, picked up Chinese by listening to her brother's lessons, and her father is said to have wished she were a boy. Around 1005 she joined the household of Shōshi, a Fujiwara daughter and empress, and taught her Chinese in secret. Her Tale of Genji runs to 54 chapters, and many call it one of the world's first novels.
Far from Kyoto's poets, warriors were rising. In 1185 the Minamoto crushed the Taira in a sea battle at Dan-no-ura, and the child emperor Antoku, about six years old, died alongside his grandmother. Minamoto no Yoritomo governed from Kamakura, and from 1192 he held the title of shogun. Emperors stayed in Kyoto, but Japan now had a second seat of power. When Yoritomo died in 1199, his widow Hōjō Masako and her father took control, and she became known as the 'nun shogun'. Hōjō regents held the real power while the shoguns became puppets. Faith was changing too. Hōnen taught that chanting the Buddha's name brought rebirth in the Pure Land, and samurai took to the austerity of Zen.
In 1266 Kublai Khan sent a letter to Japan through Korea, and no answer came. In November 1274 a fleet built by Korean labour, with an estimated 28,000 to 30,000 men, took Tsushima and Iki and landed at Hakata Bay. Exploding bombs frightened the defenders' horses. Then the fleet left, and a poorly recorded storm may have struck it. Japan raised a stone wall about two metres high around the bay. The second invasion came in 1281, in two fleets from Korea and southern China. Tradition says 140,000 men, a figure historians think inflated. The wall held, and on 15 August a typhoon smashed the ships at anchor. Later generations remembered it as kamikaze, the divine wind.
The Kamakura regime fell in 1333, and in 1338 Ashikaga Takauji became shogun, governing from Kyoto with a weak hold on the provinces. Yet the arts flourished. A retired shogun's estate gained its gilded Golden Pavilion in 1397. From about 1350 the masked drama of Noh won a following, shaped by the actor-playwrights Kan'ami and his son Zeami, with shoguns as major patrons. Zen monks had introduced the custom of tea, and Murata Shukō and the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa helped turn it into a precise and restrained ceremony. The priest Sesshū painted landscapes in black ink. Then a rivalry between the Hosokawa and Yamana clans became the Ōnin War in 1467. It ended ten years later with no victor and most of Kyoto destroyed.
South of Kyushu lay a separate kingdom. Okinawa was split among three rival realms until Shō Hashi conquered the last of them in 1429, uniting the island and building his capital at Shuri. Ties to China ran deep. The Ming had accepted the island as a tributary in 1372, and by tradition in 1392 they sent 36 families from Fujian to manage its sea affairs. For nearly two centuries Ryukyu's ships linked China, Japan and Korea with Siam, Java, Malacca, Sumatra and Luzon. In 1458 a great bell was hung in the main hall of Shuri Castle. Its inscription calls the kingdom a splendid place in the South Seas, a bridge between all nations. The original survives in the Okinawa Prefectural Museum.
With no shogun able to command, Japan broke into the Warring States. Into this turmoil came a Chinese junk in 1543, driven by a storm to the island of Tanegashima with two Portuguese aboard. It was the first recorded European contact with Japan. The local lord bought two matchlock guns and set a swordsmith to copy them. Within six years Oda Nobunaga could order 500. In 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima to begin a mission, and by 1571 the lord Ōmura Sumitada had made Nagasaki a Portuguese port. New tastes followed the traders. Portuguese frying shaped tempura, and missionaries introduced the sponge cake called castella. War and foreign trade were now running side by side.
Three men ended the fighting. Oda Nobunaga seized Kyoto in 1568, burned the monasteries of Mount Hiei in 1571, and at Nagashino in 1575 used massed gunners, perhaps 1,000 to 3,000, to defeat the Takeda. A vassal turned on him at Honnō-ji temple in 1582, and he died there. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, born to peasants, took Odawara in 1590, removing the last great obstacle. He then sent armies into Korea in 1592 and 1597. Both campaigns failed against Ming armies, Korean militias and Yi Sun-sin's fleet, as supplies ran short. After Hideyoshi's death in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the great battle of Sekigahara in October 1600 and became shogun in 1603. At Osaka in 1615 he finished Hideyoshi's heir.
Ieyasu kept his headquarters at Edo, and his family's rule brought about 250 years of peace. From 1635 great lords had to spend alternate years in the city, with their vassals and goods behind them. Christianity, banned in 1614, was crushed under Iemitsu, along with a large rebellion in Kyushu. Edicts from 1633 to 1639 shut out most of the world, and the only Europeans left were Dutch traders on Dejima, an artificial island at Nagasaki. Yet Japan was never sealed. Chinese ships still called at Nagasaki. Tsushima dealt with Korea, Matsumae with the Ainu, and Satsuma with Ryukyu, which it had invaded in 1609, capturing the king. From then on Ryukyu answered to both Japan and China.
To the north lived the Ainu, whose culture took shape around the 12th or 13th century. Their villages stood by rivers full of salmon and trout, and solemn ceremonies sent the spirits of bears back to their world. Ainu traders sent kelp, dried salmon and herring south, along with Chinese goods from Sakhalin, and took iron, lacquerware and sake in return. In 1604 Ieyasu gave the Matsumae clan sole rights to this trade. In 1669 the leader Shakushain called the Ainu to war against Matsumae. He was killed in an ambush at a feast celebrating peace. In the following century many Ainu went from traders to labourers tied to fishing grounds. The last battle, at Kunashiri and Menashi in 1789, ended in executions.
BattlesHidaka: Shakushain's land · Kunashiri, 1789
By the 1730s Edo is widely believed to have held over a million people, its markets fed by the lords' households. Peace made room for pleasure. Kabuki had begun around 1603, when Izumo no Okuni performed on Kyoto's dry riverbed, though women were barred from it in 1629. In 1689 the poet Bashō left Edo on a journey of about 2,400 kilometres, mostly on foot, and turned it into The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Night stalls sold sushi and tempura. Hand-pressed nigiri replaced box-pressed sushi in the early 1800s, an invention credited to Hanaya Yohei, who opened his shop at Ryōgoku in 1824. A piece cost about 8 mon. Around 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave broke across the print shops.
On 8 July 1853 the American commodore Matthew Perry led four ships into the bay below Edo. He came back the next spring with a larger force. On 31 March 1854 the Treaty of Kanagawa promised protection for stranded American sailors, allowed a consul, and opened two ports for supplies, Shimoda and Hakodate. It was not yet a trade deal. That took until 1858, after the American consul Townsend Harris had worked for two years from Shimoda without Perry's warships behind him. For two centuries the shogunate had set the terms of foreign contact, and now it could not. In 1866 two great domains, Satsuma and Chōshū, secretly joined forces. The next blow would come from inside Japan.
In January 1868 Satsuma and Chōshū took the palace in Kyoto and declared imperial rule restored. The Boshin War ended at Hakodate in June 1869, and Edo became Tokyo. What followed remade the country. The 261 domains became prefectures, soon merged into 72 plus three cities. Conscription from 1873 made men of all classes liable, with many exemptions. Samurai lost their stipends and the right to show their rank with a sword, and Saigō Takamori's Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was put down by the new army. An embassy led by Iwakura Tomomi spent nearly two years studying America and Europe. Trains ran from Tokyo to Yokohama from 14 October 1872, with the emperor aboard on opening day. A constitution followed in 1889. All this came within about twenty years.
The new state drew its lines hard. In 1869 it renamed Ezochi as Hokkaido, making it part of Japan by its own decision, and began banning the Ainu language and way of life. Land and resources were taken and sold. Salmon fishing and deer hunting were forbidden, and some Ainu did not have enough to eat. A treaty with Russia in 1875 traded Sakhalin for the Kurils, and Ainu from both were forcibly relocated. Many died. In the far south, Japan abolished the Ryukyu domain in 1879 and created Okinawa Prefecture. The last king, Shō Tai, was forced to abdicate and relocate to Tokyo. An act of 1899 offered Ainu farmland and pushed assimilation, and schools forbade the Ainu language.
Japan now looked outward. War with China in 1894 and 1895 left Taiwan and the Penghu Islands in Japanese hands. In 1904 Japan attacked Russia's fleet at Port Arthur, and the 1905 peace gave it control of Korea, much of South Manchuria and southern Sakhalin. Korea was annexed in 1910. Later, Koreans were pressed to give up their names, many were moved for war work in very poor conditions, and women and girls were forced into sexual slavery. In 1931 Japanese officers staged a railway blast near Mukden to justify invading Manchuria. Full-scale war with China began in 1937. At Nanjing that December, Japanese troops massacred civilians and prisoners.
As the United States tightened its embargo and Japan refused to leave China, talks stalled. On 7 December 1941 Japanese planes attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan's southern advance, begun in Indochina, had become a war across the Pacific. By 1945 that war had reached Japan's own islands. On Okinawa, in fighting from April to June, local authorities count at least 149,425 Okinawans killed, driven to suicide or missing. Of 240 Himeyuri students and teachers sent to an army hospital, 136 died. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August and on Nagasaki on 9 August, as the Soviet Union entered the war. Well over 100,000 people died in the two cities.
BattlesOkinawa, April–June 1945 · Hiroshima, 6 August · Nagasaki, 9 August
An American-led occupation under Douglas MacArthur set about remaking the country. The constitution, promulgated on 3 November 1946 and in force from 3 May 1947, made the emperor a figurehead, renounced the right to wage war and widened women's rights. Land reform helped tenant farmers. A peace treaty was signed in September 1951. Orders during the Korean War helped revive heavy industry, and from 1957 to 1973 growth ran at around 10 per cent a year. On 1 October 1964 the Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened between Tokyo and Osaka, timed for the Tokyo Olympics, and the Hikari trains made the trip in four hours. In 1968 Japan's economy passed West Germany's to rank second. In 1972 the United States returned Okinawa.
The boom ended when an asset bubble began to collapse in 1990, opening what came to be called the Lost Decades. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and its tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people, and three reactor cores melted at Fukushima Daiichi. A new imperial era, Reiwa, began in 2019. Meanwhile, older Japans were winning recognition. UNESCO listed washoku, the traditional food culture, in 2013. A law of 2019 was the first to recognise the Ainu as an indigenous people, and the Upopoy national museum opened at Lake Poroto in 2020. In July 2021 UNESCO listed the Jōmon sites of the north, among them Sannai Maruyama, where people had settled almost 6,000 years ago.