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A Short History of Japan Christopher Harding

CHRISTOPHER HARDING

A Short History of Japan

A PELICAN BOOK

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PACIFIC OCEAN

Japan and the Korean Peninsula

SOVIET UNION

MANCHURIA

CHINA

BR. INDIA

FR. INDO CHINA

PHILIPINNES (USA) BURMA THAILAND

N. Borneo (Br.)

BR. MALAYA

Sarawak (Br.)

Okinawa

JAPAN

Kuril Islands

Palau Islands

Mariana Islands

Guam (USA)

Iwo Jima Caroline

New Guinea (Austr.)

Papua (Austr.)

DUTCH EAST INDIES

INDIAN OCEAN

AUSTRALIA

Attu (USA) Kiska (USA)

Aleutian Is. (USA)

Japan (1936)

China (Dec. 1941 Japan)

Fr. Indochina (Jul. 1940 Jap.)

Thailand (Dec. 1941 Jap. ally)

Philip. Br. Malaya (Dec. 1941 Jap.)

Pacific Islands, N. New Guinea, D. E. Indies, Burma (Mar. 1942 Jap.)

Allies

Midway (USA)

PACIFIC OCEAN

Wake Island (USA)

Hawaii (USA)

Marshall Islands

Islands

Gilbert Islands (Br.)

Solomon Islands (Br.)

New Hebrides (Br.)

Fiji Islands (Br.)

Samoan Islands (USA/NZ)

The Growth of the Japanese Empire

SOUTH KOREA

RUSSI A

Sea of Japan

Shimane

Tottori

Okayama

Hiroshima

Yamaguchi

Saga Fukuoka

Nagasaki

Kumamoto

KY Ū SH Ū OKINAWA

Kagoshima

Oita

Ishikawa Toyama

Fukui Gifu

Kyoto

Hyogo

Osaka

Shiga

Nara Mie

Kagawa

Tokushima Ehime

Kochi

SHIKOKU

Miyazaki

Akita

Aomori Iwate

Yamagata

Nigata Fukushima

HOKKAID Ō HONSHU

Tochigi Miyagi

Saitama Gunma

Nagano

Yamanashi

Tokyo Chiba Ibaraki

Aichi Shizuoka

Wakayama

Kanagawa

0

0

300 miles

500 km

Japan’s Prefectures (present day)

SOUTH KOREA

Sea of Japan

J A P A N

Matsue

Hiroshima

Yamaguchi

Fukuoka

Toyama

Kanazawa

Fukui

Tottori

Okayama

Takamatsu

Matsuyama

Kumamato Saga Oita

Kagoshima

Sapporo

Aomori

Morioka

Akita

Yamagata

Niigata

HOKKAID Ō HONSHU

Sendai

Fukushima

Nagano

Maebashi

Saitama

Kawasaki

Utsunomiya Mito

Tokyo

Yokohama

Chiba

Kobe Kyoto

Nagoya

Gifu Toyota Shizuoka

Nara

Osaka Matsusaka

Wakayama

Tokushima

Kochi

SHIKOKU

KY Ū SH Ū OKINAWA

Miyazaki

PACIFIC OCEAN

Japan’s Cities (present day)

Introduction

A Japanese passport will get you into 194 countries and regions around the world, visa-free. Only a Singapore passport beats it, at 195. And yet, fewer than 20 per cent of people in Japan own a passport, compared with almost 85 per cent in the UK . One of the biggest reasons given for shunning foreign travel is geography. Why go abroad when the 3,000kilometre-long Japanese archipelago offers such an extraordinary diversity of climate, from the Siberian north down to the sub-tropical south?

Holiday-makers seeking the romance of boreal forests and icy lakes need go no further than Hokkaidō, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Skiers head there, too, celebrating the town of Niseko as the ‘powder capital of the world’. To Hokkaidō’s south lies Honshū, the largest and most populous island in the archipelago, and the enginehouse of its history. Tectonic plates grinding away beneath have left Honshū divided down the middle by a mountainous spine and spurs. Most people live on the island’s temperate, fertile plains, in modern megacities like Tokyo and Osaka, heading into the mountains when they want to ski, hike or soak in a natural hot-spring bath.

Japan’s third main island, Shikoku, can be found tucked

into Honshū’s lower belly, while the fourth, Kyūshū, lies just to the south-west. Japanese tourists love both for their dramatic scenery, hot springs, beaches and food. The diversity of Japan’s climate, combined with strong regional identities, has yielded a culinary culture that prizes local seasonal produce and simple preparation. Kagawa prefecture in Shikoku regards itself as the best place to go in Japan for udon – thick noodles made from wheat. Kyūshū is famous for its Hakata tonkotsu ramen, served in a cloudy broth made by boiling pork bones for hour upon hour.

Anyone in search of surfing, scuba- diving or the white sands of a tropical paradise will head still further along the archipelago’s gentle south-western curve to the island chain of Okinawa –  the westernmost of which, Yonaguni, sits within view, on a clear day, of Taiwan.

The chance to enjoy all this via fast and efficient transport, staying in accommodation where levels of cleanliness and service are dependably high and with people who speak your language and share with you a basic set of assumptions about how to treat one another has helped to turn domestic tourism in Japan into a multi-trillion-yen industry. By contrast, incoming tourists, particularly to traditional cultural centres like Kyoto, are fast gaining a reputation for being insensitive and even rather boorish, failing to understand what is required of good guests.

Critics of Japan look at low levels of passport ownership, a muted role in international affairs –  despite being a major world economy –  and a vexed debate about immigration, and diagnose a classic case of island mentality. Here is a place, they suggest, that is confident in its own virtues and

cautious, even suspicious, in its dealings with the outside world. There is some truth to this. Where landlocked countries have to constantly learn to live with their neighbours, come what may, Japan is separated from the eastern edge of Eurasia by a narrow stretch of water – the Sea of Japan – and from the Americas by the vast Pacific Ocean. Neither is an impermeable barrier, but both have allowed Japan’s rulers, across the centuries, to exercise a degree of control over the people and ideas making their way into the archipelago.

The filtering and creative adaptation of outside influence, combined with a seemingly never- ending struggle to knit the communities of the archipelago into a single whole, represent the central drama of Japanese history. It has so far played out in three great phases. Across the early centuries of recorded history, China and the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula supplied Japan with iron-working and rice cultivation, Buddhism and Confucianism, architecture and a writing system, rules, fashions and a wide range of arts, poetry prime among them. From the 1500s onwards, seafaring Europeans began to have an impact in Japan. Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries brought with them new wealth, weapons, goods, fashions and religious ideals, further enriching and complicating a period of exceptional innovation and turmoil in Japan. Finally, from the mid-1800s onwards, Japan was forced to find its place in a modern, industrialising world whose standards and values were set by the powerful economies of western Europe and North America.

The task of creating and sustaining a single, flourishing society on the Japanese archipelago has changed hands many times. Unity of a kind was first achieved in the early

centuries ce , as the Yamato clan emerged as the paramount power on Honshū and claimed for its leaders the title of tennō , or ‘Heavenly Sovereign’. These emperors and empresses enjoyed real political power only for a few centuries before warriors and later civilian politicians took control. Still, the culture of the imperial court, flourishing in Kyoto in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has continued to exert an impressive gravitational pull across the ensuing thousand years. Whatever their origins, aspiring leaders in Japan sought to immerse themselves in a suite of art forms that were East Asian in origin but Japanese in their perfection: poetry and calligraphy; painting and performance; the art of hospitality found in the tea ceremony.

A medieval warlord might shed blood by day and then by night pen a poem, dance a few steps from a Nō play or lose himself in the sound of a flute wafting on the wind from somewhere in his camp. Wealthy merchants in early modern Edo (now Tokyo) sought out bluffers’ guides to Japanese high culture and some even had theatre stages built inside their homes. Into the modern age, as Japan was flooded with Western ideas and inventions, it found its place in the world both as an aggressive imperial power and as a source of rich and varied forms of culture, from ceramics and Zen to manga and sushi. It is a testament to the remarkable evolution and staying power of Japanese culture that court painting of Japan’s classical Heian era and the piratical adventures of the hit manga One Piece –  the second-best selling literary series in history after Harry Potter –  form part of the same rich tapestry.

Part of the appeal of Japanese culture in the West has been an emphasis on rules, discipline and self- mastery in

perfecting this or that art form. Anything ending in dō, meaning ‘way’, is a part of this world: from judō, the ‘gentle way’, to chadō, the way of tea. And yet these forms owe something of their beauty and sophistication to the insight that human attempts to control the world have their limits: a withered, weathered look is a prized aesthetic in a range of arts and crafts, while the kintsugi method of repairing broken pottery highlights and celebrates cracks with powdered gold or silver. Meanwhile, the price paid for Japan’s inspiring and dramatic topography is a vulnerability to sudden tragedy: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, typhoons and mudslides. The last big earthquake to hit Tokyo, in 1923, killed more than 100,000 people and was read by some at the time as a warning against modernity’s hubris.

A sense of living at nature’s whim underpins Shintō, ‘the way of the gods’ – that is, Japan’s native religion – alongside a storytelling tradition that depicts the natural landscape as home to gods, goddesses and all manner of strange beings, some of whom one might fleetingly encounter at twilight, or on a lonely mountain pass. The Buddhist thread in Japanese history complements this with a keen sense of life’s evanescence: an awareness that everything is constantly passing into existence and out again.

It would be an exaggeration to claim –  and, indeed, unfair to expect – that everyone in Japan possesses a joinedup sense of this rich inheritance. But it is probably fair to say that memories of the past, often heavily idealised, have driven Japanese history onwards more frequently and with greater power than any utopian goal. The influence of Christianity, with its hope of future redemption, has never been

strong in Japan. Shaping people’s aspirations instead we find a Buddhist sense of cyclical time, an emphasis in Shintō on renewal and a Confucian respect for others and for the ways of one’s forebears. One doesn’t need to be schooled in any of these philosophies to feel their effects in everyday life in Japan: the foods and rituals of New Year; the celebration of youth and rebirth that accompanies cherry blossom season in the spring; the greeting of the dead at O-Bon in the summer.

Most people in Japan will also have a good sense of their history’s A-listers: Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji in c. 1000 ce ; Oda Nobunaga, warlord and unifier of Japan; Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of a shogunate that kept Japan for the most part peaceful and stable across two centuries. Television and cinema have played their part in this across the modern era, from the first soundless samurai films of the 1920s through to the time-slip dramas of the twentyfirst century –  one of which features a slightly spoiled and lazy teenaged boy being transported back to Oda Nobunaga’s time, there to learn what it means to be a man. Manga and anime carry the flame of Japanese history and culture, too: often the work of highly sophisticated artists who wear their learning lightly but weave into their stories some of the great figures, symbols and dilemmas of the past.

Manga and anime have become central, too, to how young people around the world encounter and come to fall in love with Japan and its history. The aim of this Short History is to offer a guide to the overall terrain, helping readers to connect their favourite people, products and moments to the bigger story of the archipelago. It is surely one of the most

fertile places on earth for drama, big ideas, great tragedy, superb cuisine and creative achievements of all kinds. By the end, my hope is that readers will have come to sympathise a little with the 80 per cent of Japanese who don’t feel the need for a passport. Why sign up for one when to stay at home is such an adventure?

CHAPTER 1

The First Communities

Some of the first people to arrive on the Japanese archipelago, c. 35,000 bce in the western calendar, probably walked there. Until sea levels rose around 13,000 years ago, the archipelago was connected to the Asian mainland for long periods at a time via a northern land bridge running across from Siberia and a southern bridge from the Korean peninsula. Others most likely arrived via various sorts of watercraft, from dugout canoes to sturdy rafts. They settled in parts of what is now Hokkaidō, alongside the coastal plains of Honshū, down into Kyūshū and further south on some of the Okinawan islands. Life for these palaeolithic hunter-gatherers seems to have consisted of making sorties from temporary tent shelters to forage for food and hunt a combination of giant deer, Naumann’s elephants and woolly mammoths. Their modest armoury included spears and arrows alongside edge-ground stone axes, excellent for felling trees and working with wood.

The first major epoch in the islands’ human history lasted from around 14,500 bce to 500 bce . This era is called ‘Jōmon’ (‘cord-marked’), after the rope-like patterning found on pottery unearthed from this period – some of the oldest pottery to have survived anywhere in the world. The earliest vessels were small and portable, perhaps modelled in size and design