History of Japan
The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to the Paleolithic, around 38–39,000 years ago. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC when new inventions were introduced from Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese Book of Han in the first century AD.
Around the 3rd century BC, the Yayoi people from the continent immigrated to the Japanese archipelago and introduced iron technology and agricultural civilization. Because they had an agricultural civilization, the population of the Yayoi began to grow rapidly and ultimately overwhelmed the Jōmon people, natives of the Japanese archipelago who were hunter-gatherers.
Between the 4th and 9th centuries, Japan's many kingdoms and tribes were gradually unified under a centralized government, nominally controlled by the Emperor of Japan. The imperial dynasty established at this time continues to this day, albeit in an almost entirely ceremonial role. In 794, a new imperial capital was established at Heian-kyō, marking the beginning of the Heian period, which lasted until 1185. The Heian period is considered a golden age of classical Japanese culture. Japanese religious life from this time and onwards was a mix of native Shinto practices and Buddhism.
Over the following centuries, the power of the imperial house decreased, passing first to great clans of civilian aristocrats – most notably the Fujiwara – and then to the military clans and their armies of samurai. The Minamoto clan under Minamoto no Yoritomo emerged victorious from the Genpei War of 1180–85, defeating their rival military clan, the Taira. After seizing power, Yoritomo set up his capital in Kamakura and took the title of shōgun. In 1274 and 1281, the Kamakura shogunate withstood two Mongol invasions, but in 1333 it was toppled by a rival claimant to the shogunate, ushering in the Muromachi period. During this period, regional warlords called daimyō grew in power at the expense of the shōgun. Eventually, Japan descended into a period of civil war. Over the course of the late 16th century, Japan was reunified under the leadership of the prominent daimyō Oda Nobunaga and his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. After Toyotomi's death in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu came to power and was appointed shōgun by the emperor. The Tokugawa shogunate, which governed from Edo, presided over a prosperous and peaceful era known as the Edo period. The Tokugawa shogunate imposed a strict class system on Japanese society and cut off almost all contact with the outside world.
Portugal and Japan came into contact in 1543, when the Portuguese became the first Europeans to reach Japan by landing in the southern archipelago. They had a significant impact on Japan, even in this initial limited interaction, introducing firearms to Japanese warfare. The American Perry Expedition in 1853–54 ended Japan's seclusion; this contributed to the fall of the shogunate and the return of power to the emperor during the Boshin War in 1868. The new national leadership of the following Meiji era transformed the isolated feudal island country into an empire that closely followed Western models and became a great power. Although democracy developed and modern civilian culture prospered during the Taishō period, Japan's powerful military had great autonomy and overruled Japan's civilian leaders in the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese military invaded Manchuria in 1931, and from 1937 the conflict escalated into a prolonged war with China. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 led to war with the United States and its allies. During this period, Japan committed various war crimes in the Asia-Pacific ranging from forced sexual slavery, human experimentation and large scale killings and massacres. Japan's forces soon became overextended, but the military held out in spite of Allied air attacks that inflicted severe damage on population centers. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
The Allies occupied Japan until 1952, during which a new constitution was enacted in 1947 that transformed Japan into a constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary democracy it is today. After 1955, Japan enjoyed very high economic growth under the governance of the Liberal Democratic Party, and became a world economic powerhouse. Since the Lost Decade of the 1990s, Japanese economic growth has slowed.
Prehistoric and ancient Japan
Paleolithic period
Hunter-gatherers arrived in Japan in Paleolithic times, with the oldest evidence dating back to around 38–40,000 years ago. Little evidence of their presence remains, as Japan's acidic soils tend to degrade bone remains. However, the discovery of unique edge-ground axes in Japan dated to over 30,000 years ago may be evidence of the first Homo sapiens in Japan. Early humans likely arrived in Japan by sea on watercraft. Evidence of human habitation has been dated to 32,000 years ago in Okinawa's Yamashita Cave and up to 20,000 years ago on Ishigaki Island's Shiraho Saonetabaru Cave. Evidence has been found suggesting that Japan's Paleolithic inhabitants interacted with and butchered now extinct megafauna, including the elephant Palaeoloxodon naumanni, and the giant deer Sinomegaceros yabei.Jōmon period
The Jōmon period of prehistoric Japan spans from roughly 13,000 BC to about 1000 BC. Japan was inhabited by a predominantly hunter-gatherer culture that reached a considerable degree of sedentism and cultural complexity. The name Jōmon, meaning "cord-marked", was first applied by American scholar Edward S. Morse, who discovered shards of pottery in 1877. This is a technique where a potter would roll clay into the shape of a rope, coil it upwards until it formed a jar or a bowl, and then bake it in open fire. The pottery style characteristic of the first phases of Jōmon culture was decorated by impressing cords into the surface of wet clay. Jōmon pottery is generally accepted to be among the oldest in East Asia and the world.Pottery may have originated earlier, as Jōmon period hunter-gatherers crafted the world's oldest known ceramics around 14,500 BC.
Yayoi period
The advent of the Yayoi people from the Asian mainland brought fundamental transformations to the Japanese archipelago. The millennial achievements of the Neolithic Revolution took hold of the islands in a relatively short span of centuries, particularly with the development of rice cultivation and metallurgy. Until recently, the onset of this wave of cultural and technological changes was thought to have begun around 400 BC. Radio-carbon evidence now suggests that the new phase started some 500 years earlier, between 1,000 and 800 BC. Endowed with bronze and iron weapons and tools initially imported from China and the Korean peninsula, the Yayoi radiated out from northern Kyūshū, gradually supplanting the Jōmon. They also introduced weaving and silk production, new woodworking methods, glassmaking technology, and new architectural styles. The expansion of the Yayoi appears to have brought about a fusion with the indigenous Jōmon, resulting in a small genetic admixture.These Yayoi technologies originated on the Asian mainland. There is debate among scholars as to what degree their spread can be attributed to migration or to cultural diffusion. The migration theory is supported by genetic and linguistic studies. Historian Hanihara Kazurō has suggested that the annual immigrant influx from the continent ranged from 350 to 3,000.
The population of Japan began to increase rapidly, perhaps with a 10-fold rise over the Jōmon. Calculations of the increasing population size by the end of the Yayoi period have varied from 1 to 4 million. Skeletal remains from the late Jōmon period reveal a deterioration in already poor standards of health and nutrition, whereas contemporaneous Yayoi archaeological sites possess large structures suggestive of grain storehouses. This shift was accompanied by an increase in both the stratification of society and tribal warfare, indicated by segregated gravesites and military fortifications.
During the Yayoi period, the Yayoi tribes gradually coalesced into a number of kingdoms. The earliest written work to unambiguously mention Japan, the Book of Han, published in 111 AD, states that one hundred kingdoms comprised Japan, which is referred to as Wa. A later Chinese work of history, the Book of Wei, states that by 240 AD, the powerful kingdom of Yamatai, ruled by the female monarch Himiko, had gained ascendancy over the others, though modern historians continue to debate its location and other aspects of its depiction in the Book of Wei.
Kofun period (c. 250–538)
During the subsequent Kofun period, Japan gradually unified under a single territory. The symbol of the growing power of Japan's new leaders was the kofun burial mounds they constructed from around 250 AD onwards. Many were of massive scale, such as the Daisenryō Kofun, a 486 m-long keyhole-shaped burial mound that took huge teams of laborers fifteen years to complete. It is commonly accepted that the tomb was built for Emperor Nintoku. The kofun were often surrounded by and filled with numerous haniwa clay sculptures, often in the shape of warriors and horses.The center of the unified state was Yamato in the Kinai region of central Japan. The rulers of Yamato state were a hereditary line of emperors who still reign as the world's longest dynasty. The rulers of the Yamato extended their power across Japan through military conquest, but their preferred method of expansion was to convince local leaders to accept their authority in exchange for positions of influence in the government. Many of the powerful local clans who joined the Yamato state became known as the uji.
These leaders sought and received formal diplomatic recognition from China, and Chinese accounts record five successive such leaders as the Five kings of Wa. Craftsmen and scholars from China and the Three Kingdoms of Korea played an important role in transmitting continental technologies and administrative skills to Japan during this period.
Historians agree that there was a big struggle between the Yamato federation and the Izumo Federation centuries before written records.