Human settlement of the archipelago goes back tens of thousands of years, but the first great recognisable culture is the Jomon, which stretches roughly from 14,000 BC to 300 BC. Its name ('cord-marked') comes from the decoration on its pottery, made by pressing braided cords into the wet clay: these are some of the oldest fired clay vessels known anywhere in the world. The Jomon were sedentary hunters, fishers and gatherers, something unusual for a people without full-scale agriculture; they lived in villages of semi-sunken houses, piled up huge shell middens and developed an art of clay figurines, the dogu, with enigmatic shapes.
Around 300 BC — the dating is debated and some studies push the process back several centuries — a decisive transformation arrived from the mainland by way of the Korean peninsula: wet-rice farming in flooded paddies, bronze and iron metallurgy, the loom and new forms of social organisation. This is the Yayoi period (named after the Tokyo neighbourhood where its pottery was found). Rice made surpluses possible, and surpluses made hierarchies: chiefs, warriors, fortified villages and the first marked differences in wealth appeared.
The first written mentions of Japan come from this era, but they are not Japanese — they are Chinese: the chronicles of the Han and Wei dynasties describe the land of 'Wa', a constellation of small kingdoms, and speak of a shaman-queen named Himiko who, around the 3rd century, ruled a country called Yamatai through rites and magic. Exactly where Yamatai was — in Kyushu or in the Kinai region — is one of the great unresolved disputes of Japanese archaeology.
Between the 3rd and 6th centuries a dominant power took shape on the Nara plain: the Yamato clan, from which the Japanese imperial house claims unbroken descent to this day. This is the age of the kofun, monumental burial mounds shaped like keyholes; the largest, attributed to Emperor Nintoku, is more than 480 metres long and rivals the pyramids in volume. These tombs were ringed with terracotta figures, the haniwa.
The 6th century brought a cultural revolution that arrived, once again, from the mainland. Through the Korean kingdoms — especially Baekje — came Buddhism (around 538 or 552, depending on the source), the Chinese writing system, Confucianism, the calendar and bureaucracy. The adoption of Buddhism set off a conflict between clans, won by the Soga family. The key figure was the regent Prince Shotoku Taishi (573-621), to whom tradition credits the 'Seventeen-Article Constitution', the promotion of Buddhism and the sending of embassies to Sui China. In 645, the Taika reform laid the foundations of a centralised state modelled on Tang China.
In 710 the first permanent capital was founded, Heijo-kyo, today's Nara, laid out on a grid copying the Chinese capital of Chang'an. During the Nara period (710-794), the state promoted Buddhism as the kingdom's protective religion: Emperor Shomu ordered the building of Todai-ji with its colossal bronze Buddha, the Daibutsu, completed in 752. The two founding chronicles were also compiled, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720), which set down the myths of the divine origin of the nation and the dynasty. The enormous power the Buddhist monasteries were accumulating eventually pushed the court to move to another city.
In 794, Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyo, today's Kyoto, which would remain the imperial seat for more than a thousand years. The Heian period (794-1185) is the golden age of Japanese court culture. As embassies to China dwindled — they were suspended in 894 — Japan stopped importing models and began producing a culture of its own, extremely refined and enclosed within the court.
Real power, however, gradually drained away from the emperor and became concentrated in the Fujiwara clan, which perfected a brilliant formula: marry its daughters to emperors and rule as regents (sessho and kanpaku) on behalf of underage grandsons and nephews. Its peak is embodied by Fujiwara no Michinaga in the early 11th century. While the aristocracy lived immersed in poetry, calligraphy, perfumes and meticulous etiquette, out in the countryside large tax-exempt estates (shoen) were growing, along with a class of provincial warriors, the bushi or samurai, who would one day inherit the country.
This court produced one of the most remarkable literatures in the world, and much of it was written by women, because they were allowed to write in the Japanese phonetic script (kana) rather than the prestigious Chinese reserved for men. Around the year 1000, Murasaki Shikibu wrote 'Genji Monogatari' (The Tale of Genji), considered by many the first great psychological novel in world literature, and Sei Shonagon wrote the sharp-tongued 'Pillow Book'. Towards the end of the period, two warrior clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, fought for power in the bloody Genpei War (1180-1185).
The Genpei War ended in 1185 with the victory of Minamoto no Yoritomo, who in 1192 received from the emperor the title of sei-i taishogun ('great general who subdues the barbarians'), shortened to shogun. Thus was born a form of government that would define Japan for almost seven hundred years: the emperor went on reigning in Kyoto as a sacred figure, but effective power was held by a military dictator, the shogun, through his own government, the bakufu. Yoritomo set up his in Kamakura, far from the court.
The Kamakura period (1185-1333) faced an extreme test: the two Mongol invasions of Kublai Khan, in 1274 and 1281. Both times, huge fleets sent from China and Korea were wrecked by typhoons that the Japanese called kamikaze, 'divine winds', and took as proof that the gods protected the islands. The defence ruined the shogunate's finances, leaving it unable to reward its warriors, and that weakened it fatally. In 1333 Emperor Go-Daigo tried to recover real power, but one of his generals, Ashikaga Takauji, turned against him and founded his own shogunate.
The Muromachi period (1336-1573), under the Ashikaga, was politically and militarily unstable but culturally dazzling: it gave us noh theatre, the tea ceremony, Zen gardens of rock and sand, the art of ikebana and pavilions like Kyoto's Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion). Zen Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the shoguns. But central authority was crumbling: in 1467 the Onin War broke out, a succession struggle that devastated Kyoto and broke the country up into a patchwork of independent warlords.
The century running, roughly, from 1467 to 1568 is known as the Sengoku Jidai, the 'age of warring states'. Central power all but vanished and more than a hundred feudal lords, the daimyo, fought relentlessly for control of their domains. It was a time of betrayals, castles, armies of armed peasants and meteoric rises: any capable warrior could overthrow his lord, a phenomenon the Japanese called gekokujo, 'the low overthrow the high'.
In 1543 the arrival of Portuguese merchants on the island of Tanegashima introduced the arquebus, which revolutionised Japanese warfare, and shortly afterwards, in 1549, the Jesuit Francis Xavier began the Christian mission, which went on to count hundreds of thousands of converts. Against that backdrop stand the three men who reunified Japan. Oda Nobunaga, brilliant and ruthless, began subduing rival daimyo and breaking the power of the armed Buddhist monasteries; he died betrayed in 1582 in the Honno-ji incident. A Japanese saying sums up all three: Nobunaga kneaded the dough for the cake of unification.
His successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, born a peasant, completed the conquest of the country around 1590, ordered the 'sword hunt' that disarmed the peasantry and drew a sharp line between warriors and farmers, and launched two disastrous invasions of Korea (1592 and 1597). When he died in 1598 he left a child heir and a council of regents who quickly turned on each other. The third, Tokugawa Ieyasu, crushed his rivals at the Battle of Sekigahara on 21 October 1600, the most decisive in Japanese history. In 1603 the emperor named him shogun. The cake, the saying goes, was eaten by Ieyasu.
The Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) ruled from Edo — today's Tokyo — and gave Japan the longest period of internal peace in its history, more than 250 years. The system was iron-clad: society was divided into four rigid estates (warriors, peasants, artisans and merchants), and the daimyo were kept in check through sankin-kotai, the obligation to spend alternate years in Edo and leave their families there as hostages, a mechanism that also drained their finances on travel and luxury.
The regime's most famous decision was sakoku, the 'closed country'. Alarmed by the spread of Christianity and by the power foreign trade gave certain lords, the shogunate harshly repressed Christians — the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-1638 ended with tens of thousands dead — and between 1633 and 1639 closed Japan to the world. Japanese were forbidden to leave the country on pain of death, the Portuguese were expelled, and only minimal, closely watched trade with the Dutch and Chinese was tolerated through the tiny artificial island of Dejima, in Nagasaki. The country remained virtually sealed for more than two centuries.
Far from being a backward era, isolation incubated a vibrant urban culture. Edo grew to more than a million inhabitants, perhaps the largest city in the world in the 18th century. In its pleasure quarters the culture of ukiyo, the 'floating world', flourished: kabuki theatre, the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, Basho's haiku, sumo wrestlers. Literacy rose, trade prospered and a wealthy merchant class gained clout, even though in theory it sat at the bottom of the social ladder. That balance, however, depended on nobody knocking on the door from outside.
The one who knocked was the United States. In July 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay with a squadron of steam-powered warships — the 'black ships' — and demanded, at gunpoint, that Japan open its ports to trade. Unable to resist, the shogunate signed a series of 'unequal treaties' in 1854 and the years that followed, which humiliated the country and sparked a political crisis. Under the slogan 'sonno joi' ('revere the emperor, expel the barbarians'), several domains in the south and west — above all Satsuma and Choshu — rose up against a shogunate that had shown its weakness.
In 1868, after a brief civil war (the Boshin War), the last shogun stepped down and power formally returned to the young Emperor Mutsuhito, whose reign was named Meiji ('enlightened rule'). This is the Meiji Restoration, one of the fastest and most radical modernisation processes in history. The new leaders made a pragmatic and bold decision: instead of resisting the West, they would imitate it so as to be able to resist it. The slogan became 'fukoku kyohei', 'rich country, strong army'.
Within a few decades Japan remade itself completely. The feudal domains and the samurai class were abolished — their privileges and the right to wear a sword were scrapped, which triggered revolts such as the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 — a conscript army was created, railways and telegraph lines were laid, factories went up, foreign experts were brought in and young people were sent to study in Europe and the United States. In 1889 a constitution was promulgated, inspired by that of Bismarck's Germany, with a parliament (the Diet) and a sovereign, sacred emperor. Japan became the first non-Western country to industrialise, and it did so at a speed that astonished the world.
Once strong, Japan did what the powers of the time did: build an empire. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 brought it Taiwan and China's humiliation; the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, with the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, was the first victory of an Asian country over a major European power in the modern era and earned it control of Korea, which it formally annexed in 1910, along with interests in Manchuria. Japan took its seat at the victors' table in the First World War, on the Allied side, and gained territories in the Pacific.
The 1920s brought a democratic opening — the so-called 'Taisho democracy' — with universal male suffrage in 1925, but the Great Depression, the growing weight of the military and an increasingly aggressive nationalism smothered it. In 1931, the Kwantung Army staged an incident to invade Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo; in 1937, a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge triggered all-out war with China. That conflict left atrocities that historians have documented in detail, such as the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-1938, in which an enormous number of civilians and prisoners are estimated to have been murdered and raped — the figures are debated, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to more than 300,000 depending on the source — an episode that still strains Japan's relations with its neighbours.
Allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Tripartite Pact of 1940, Japan sought to expand into oil-rich Southeast Asia. On 7 December 1941 it launched a surprise attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor, dragging the United States into the Second World War. After a lightning initial expansion, the tide turned from the Battle of Midway (1942) onwards, and Japan was pushed back island by island in a brutal war that included forced labour, the system of sexually enslaved 'comfort women' and the firebombing of its cities. The raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed some 100,000 people in a single night.
By the summer of 1945, Japan was militarily defeated but would not surrender. On 6 August 1945, a US bomber dropped on Hiroshima the first atomic bomb used in war; three days later, on 9 August, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Death toll estimates vary because records were destroyed and because of later deaths from burns and radiation: it is calculated that by the end of 1945 around 90,000 to 166,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki, the vast majority of them civilians. Many more died in the following years from radiation-related illnesses. These are the only two uses of nuclear weapons against populations in history.
The historical debate over whether the bombs were needed to force surrender and avoid an even bloodier invasion, or whether Japan was already on the brink of capitulating — especially after the Soviet Union entered the war on 8 August — remains open and legitimate; it is best to set out the positions without closing it off bluntly. What is not in dispute is the scale of the horror inflicted on the civilian population. On 15 August 1945, in an unprecedented radio address, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender. On 2 September the formal capitulation was signed aboard the battleship Missouri.
The Allied occupation followed — American in practice — led by General Douglas MacArthur (1945-1952). It was a profound transformation: the military apparatus was dismantled, war leaders were tried at the Tokyo Tribunal, land reform was carried out, the big conglomerates (zaibatsu) were broken up and the country was given a new constitution, in force since 1947, which turned the emperor into a symbol with no political power, gave women the vote and, in its famous Article 9, had Japan renounce war forever as a sovereign right. In 1951 the Treaty of San Francisco restored sovereignty, effective from 1952.
From a country in ruins, with flattened cities and millions displaced, Japan became the world's second-largest economy within a generation. The phenomenon is known as the 'Japanese economic miracle'. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the country grew at nearly double-digit annual rates, driven by an export-oriented manufacturing industry, a close alliance between the state, the banks and the big corporations, a disciplined and highly trained workforce, and the US security umbrella that allowed it to spend very little on defence.
The Korean War (1950-1953) gave an initial push by turning Japan into a supply base for the United States. Then came the brands that became synonymous with quality worldwide: Toyota, Sony, Honda, Panasonic. The 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, with the launch of the Shinkansen bullet train, showed the world a rebuilt, ultramodern country. Japan innovated in production management — the 'Toyota system', quality control — and its products, from cars to electronics, conquered Western markets.
By the 1980s, success bordered on euphoria: land and share prices soared in a colossal financial bubble, and it was even said that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were worth more than the entire state of California. The bubble burst in the early 1990s and gave way to what was called the 'lost decade', a long stagnation with deflation that the country took a very long time to emerge from. Even so, Japan remained a technological giant and one of the richest, safest and longest-lived societies on the planet.
Twenty-first-century Japan is a stable parliamentary democracy, dominated for almost the entire post-war period by the Liberal Democratic Party, and one of the world's great technological and cultural powers. Its soft power is enormous: Japanese anime, manga, video games, food, fashion and design have audiences on every continent, and its capital, Tokyo, with a metropolitan area of some 37 million people, is the largest urban agglomeration on the planet.
But the country faces deep challenges. The most serious is demographic: Japan has one of the oldest populations and one of the lowest birth rates in the world, which threatens its workforce, its pensions and the vigour of its economy. On top of that comes an ever-tense relationship with its wartime past, which periodically reopens wounds with China and the two Koreas over the Yasukuni shrine, school textbooks or official apologies. The pacifism of Article 9 is also being debated as regional tension with China and North Korea grows.
The country also continues to live with the force of nature. On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the Tohoku coast and the tsunami that followed killed around 18,000 people and triggered the Fukushima nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl. In 2019, after the abdication of Emperor Akihito —the first in two centuries—, his son Naruhito ascended the throne and the Reiwa era began. Japan thus enters its third millennium of recorded history true to its old paradox: deeply rooted in its traditions and, at the same time, one of the most futuristic places on Earth.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
On the Sea of Japan coast, Kanazawa was during the Edo period the capital of one of the richest domains in the country, the Kaga han, ruled by the Maeda clan. Its rice output —measured in koku— was the second largest in Japan after that of the Tokugawa themselves, which gave the Maeda an immense fortune and Kanazawa a cultural splendour rare in a provincial city.
Shrewd politicians, the Maeda understood that flaunting military power in front of the Tokugawa was dangerous, so they channelled their wealth into the arts: they sponsored crafts, ceramics, silk, noh theatre and gold leaf, of which Kanazawa still produces almost all of Japan's output today. That policy turned the city into a great cultural centre, without the need for threatening fortresses.
The jewel of that era is Kenroku-en, considered one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan, developed by the Maeda over almost two centuries beside their castle. Kanazawa had another historical stroke of luck: lacking any significant military industry, it was spared the bombing of the Second World War, so it preserves intact its samurai house districts (Nagamachi) and its geisha districts (Higashi Chaya), a living portrait of an Edo-period castle town.
Tucked deep in the mountains of the old Hida province, Takayama prospered thanks to a valuable resource: its carpenters. The timber and the skill of Hida's craftsmen were so prized that, even in ancient times, instead of paying taxes in rice, the region sent its carpenters to work on building palaces and temples in the imperial capitals.
Because of its forest wealth and strategic importance, during the Edo period Takayama came under the direct administration of the Tokugawa shogunate rather than a local daimyo. The seat of that government, the Takayama Jinya, is the only provincial administration building from the period that survives in Japan. The town's isolation among the mountains meant that its old quarter of dark wooden houses, with its sake breweries and centuries-old shops, has come down almost intact to the present day, earning it the nickname 'little Kyoto'.
Takayama is also famous for its festival, the Takayama Matsuri, one of the three most beautiful in Japan, in which ornate 17th-century floats parade with mechanical puppets (karakuri). The town is, moreover, the gateway to one of the most unusual corners of the country.
Near Takayama, in valleys that snow cut off for months at a time, the villages of Shirakawa-go and neighbouring Gokayama developed a unique type of home: the gassho-zukuri houses. The name means 'built like hands in prayer', because their huge, very steep thatched roofs look like two hands pressed together in prayer. That sharp slope let the snow, which falls in great quantities here, slide off without caving in the roof.
These farmhouses, some more than two centuries old, were much more than homes. Their spacious attics, warmed by the hearth on the ground floor, were used to raise silkworms, an industry vital to the economy of these remote mountain communities. They were built without a single nail, with beams tied together with rope, and their upkeep (rethatching the roof) required the whole village to work together, a tradition of mutual help called yui.
The isolation that kept these valleys poor for centuries ended up saving them from change. That is why they preserve a pre-industrial rural way of life that disappeared from almost everywhere else in Japan. In 1995, Shirakawa-go and Gokayama were inscribed as a World Heritage Site, and their snow-covered villages lit by lanterns became one of the best-loved images of rural Japan.
The Chubu region is dominated by the great mountain ranges of central Honshu. They were named the 'Japanese Alps' in the late 19th century by Western engineers and missionaries, among them the Briton William Gowland, who were struck by peaks over 3,000 metres high. These mountains split the country into two very different sides: the Pacific side, milder and more populated, and the Sea of Japan side, hit by some of the heaviest snowfall in the world.
That rugged terrain shaped the region's history. The mountains made it hard for armies and trade to get through, and they created a patchwork of isolated valleys, each with its own culture, dialect and economy based on timber, mining, silk and mountain farming. For centuries, crossing these peaks was a tough undertaking, and many communities lived almost entirely outside the reach of central power.
With the Meiji modernisation and then 20th-century tourism, those same obstacles became attractions. Mountaineering, introduced by Westerners, turned the Japanese Alps into a hiking destination, and the snow made the region the heart of the country's winter sports. Nagano, in the heart of Chubu, hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics.
Beyond its mountains, the Chubu region was historically a crossroads between eastern Japan, centred on Edo, and western Japan, centred on Kyoto and Osaka. The two great routes of the Edo period ran through it: the Tokaido along the coast, and the Nakasendo through the mountainous interior. The old post towns of the Nakasendo, such as Magome and Tsumago in the Kiso Valley, still keep the stone paving and wooden houses of that era.
That central position put the region at the centre of the great conflicts. Owari Province, in present-day Chubu, was the birthplace of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three unifiers, and the Battle of Sekigahara was fought very close by in 1600, deciding the country's fate in favour of the Tokugawa. Nagoya, today the region's largest city and a major industrial centre, is home to Toyota's automotive empire, which was born in the nearby textile district. The city grew up around a castle the Tokugawa built precisely to keep watch over this crossroads.
Chubu therefore brings together two faces of Japanese history. One is rural, mountain Japan, with isolated villages that preserved age-old traditions. The other is the Japan of the great roads and battles, through which much of what defined the country passed. That double role, as both a remote refuge and an unavoidable route, is the key to its identity.
Before its name became linked forever with nuclear catastrophe, Hiroshima was a prosperous city in western Japan with more than three centuries of history. It was founded in 1589 by the feudal lord Mori Terumoto, who chose the delta of the Ota River to build his castle. The name means 'wide island', after the islets of the delta. During the Edo period it was the seat of the wealthy Asano domain.
With the Meiji modernisation, Hiroshima became an important military and industrial centre. Its port of Ujina was an embarkation point for troops in the wars against China and Russia, and during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 the imperial headquarters and the Diet temporarily moved to the city. Its role as a major military base, with barracks, war industries and a busy port, is precisely what marked it as a target in 1945.
By the summer of 1945, Hiroshima was one of the few large Japanese cities that had not yet suffered heavy bombing. That made it suitable for the United States to measure the full effect of the new weapon. Some 350,000 people lived in the city. That August morning would change not only its fate but the history of humanity.
At 8:15 in the morning of 6 August 1945, the US bomber Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb known as 'Little Boy' on central Hiroshima. It detonated about 600 metres above the ground with a force equivalent to about 15,000 tonnes of TNT. In an instant, a fireball levelled the heart of the city. The temperature at the hypocentre reached several thousand degrees, and the blast wave and the fires destroyed everything for kilometres around.
The death toll is estimated, not known exactly, because records were destroyed and many people died later. The explosion is thought to have killed tens of thousands of people instantly, and by the end of 1945 the total number of people in Hiroshima killed by the bomb had reached between 90,000 and 166,000, the vast majority of them civilians. In the years and decades that followed, many more died from cancers and illnesses caused by radiation. The survivors are known as hibakusha.
This text treats the event with the restraint it demands: there is no heroism to celebrate and no figure to round down. There is a legitimate and still open historical debate over whether the bombing, and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later, was necessary to force surrender and avoid a land invasion, or whether Japan was already on the verge of giving up, especially after the Soviet Union entered the war. What is beyond dispute is the scale of the suffering inflicted on the civilian population.
People said at the time that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for decades. They were wrong. The city was rebuilt, and in 1949 the Japanese parliament declared it a 'Peace Memorial City', dedicated to the memory of the victims and to the abolition of nuclear weapons. That purpose shaped its rebirth.
In the centre, the building of the former Industrial Promotion Hall, one of the few left standing near the hypocentre, was deliberately kept in ruins. This is the Atomic Bomb Dome (Genbaku Dome), a World Heritage Site since 1996 as a testament to the weapon's destructive power. Around it, the Peace Memorial Park was created, with the museum, the cenotaph and the flame that will burn until the last nuclear weapon in the world is gone. The story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who developed leukaemia from the radiation and folded paper cranes in the hope of getting well, turned the origami crane into a worldwide symbol of peace.
Today Hiroshima is a modern, lively city of more than a million people, but its identity is tied forever to a message. In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit the memorial, and in 2023 the city hosted a G7 summit. Every 6 August, the ceremony beside the dome reminds the world of what happened there.
A few kilometres from Hiroshima, in the Seto Inland Sea, lies the island of Itsukushima, better known as Miyajima, 'the shrine island'. Its signature image, a large vermilion torii that seems to float on the water at high tide, is one of the most reproduced icons of Japan and appears on the traditional list of the country's 'three most beautiful views'.
The island has been considered sacred since ancient times. Itsukushima Shrine, dedicated to three sea goddesses, was built over the water on a platform of piles precisely because the island itself was so revered that people did not want to 'defile' it with buildings on dry land. For the same reason, for centuries no one was allowed to be born or to die there. The shrine reached its height in the 12th century under the patronage of Taira no Kiyomori, the powerful head of the Taira clan, who made it his clan's guardian shrine.
The Itsukushima Shrine complex, with its torii in the sea and the sacred forest of Mount Misen behind it, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1996. Like Hiroshima, Miyajima shows another side of western Japan: the deep, almost physical bond between the Shinto religion and the natural landscape of the archipelago.
The Chugoku region, at the western end of Honshu, looks out over the Seto Inland Sea. For thousands of years this waterway was the great highway of ancient Japan, carrying embassies to China, trade and armies. Its islands, ports and straits saw decisive events, such as the naval Battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, in which the Minamoto clan wiped out the Taira and brought the Genpei War to an end.
For centuries, these coasts were also the domain of pirates and lords of the sea, the so-called 'kaizoku' or Murakami, who controlled traffic on the Inland Sea by charging tolls and offering protection to ships. The region also had considerable mineral wealth. The Iwami Ginzan silver mine, active from the 16th century, came to produce a huge share of the world's silver and is now a World Heritage Site, a testament to Japan's role in global trade in the early modern era.
Further west, Choshu Province (present-day Yamaguchi) was one of the two great driving forces of the Meiji Restoration. Its rebel samurai produced many of the leaders who brought down the shogunate in 1868 and built modern Japan. This quiet west of gentle landscapes holds some of the keys to the nation's history, from ancient maritime trade to the revolution that launched the country into the modern age.
In 710, the imperial court established a stable capital for the first time at Heijo-kyo, present-day Nara, laid out on a grid in imitation of the Chinese city of Chang'an. Until then the capital moved with each emperor; from Nara onwards, Japan had a permanent urban centre, and with it was born a mature state that copied the institutions of Tang China.
The Nara period (710-794) was the great era of state Buddhism. Emperor Shomu, convinced that religion would protect the realm from plagues and misfortune, ordered the building of Todai-ji and its Daibutsu, a seated bronze Buddha some 15 metres tall completed in 752, housed in what was for centuries the largest wooden building in the world. Other great temples rose around it, such as Kofuku-ji and nearby Horyu-ji, whose wooden pagodas are among the oldest wooden structures on the planet.
The power these monasteries accumulated ended up unsettling the court, and in 794 Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Kyoto, partly to escape the influence of Nara's monks. The city remained a major religious centre. Its deer, which roam freely through the park and which Shinto tradition regards as messengers of the gods, and its ancient temples —a World Heritage Site since 1998— make it a living time capsule of 8th-century Japan.
Founded in 794 under the name Heian-kyo, Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for more than a thousand years, until the court moved to Tokyo in 1868. Over that millennium much of what is now considered classical Japanese culture took shape: the poetry and novels of the Heian court, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, dry gardens, noh theatre, refined cuisine and the world of the geishas of the Gion district.
The city was the stage for history's great upheavals. Under the Ashikaga shogunate (1336-1573) it was once again the centre of power, and gems such as Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) and Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) date from that era. But it also suffered destruction: the Onin War (1467-1477), which opened the Sengoku period, reduced much of Kyoto to ashes and left the city devastated for decades.
Kyoto had a stroke of luck that was both tragic and fortunate: in the Second World War it was considered as a target for the atomic bomb, but was ultimately ruled out —according to the most widespread version, because of its cultural value—, and so it was spared the mass bombing that razed other cities. Thanks to that it preserves some 2,000 temples and shrines, 17 of them jointly inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1994, from Kiyomizu-dera perched on its hillside to the thousands of vermilion torii of Fushimi Inari.
If Kyoto was the city of the court and Nara the city of temples, Osaka was always the city of trade. Its position by the sea and at the mouth of several rivers made it, from ancient times, the great port and market of the Kansai region. In the 7th century it briefly became the capital (Naniwa-kyo), but its true calling was commerce.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second unifier of Japan, chose Osaka as the base of his power and in 1583 built the imposing Osaka Castle, one of the largest in the country. After his death, the castle was the scene of the final act of unification: in the sieges of 1614 and 1615, Tokugawa Ieyasu crushed the supporters of Hideyoshi's heir and definitively consolidated Tokugawa rule. During the Edo period, Osaka became 'the nation's kitchen' (tenka no daidokoro), the centre where rice from all over the country was traded and where, in fact, one of the world's first futures markets was invented.
That commercial, street-level soul defines Osaka to this day: it is Japan's food capital, home of takoyaki and okonomiyaki, with a reputation for direct, warm, joking people very different from Tokyo's formality. Heavily bombed in 1945 and rebuilt as an industrial powerhouse, today it is the economic heart of western Japan and one of its most vibrant cities.
In western Kansai stands the best-preserved and most beautiful castle in Japan: Himeji, nicknamed Shirasagi-jo, 'the white heron castle', for its white walls and a silhouette that seems about to take flight. It is the culmination of Japanese castle architecture, an art that reached its peak between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when gunpowder demanded more sophisticated fortifications.
The current castle was built in its definitive form by Ikeda Terumasa from 1601, on top of earlier 14th-century fortifications. It is a masterpiece of defence: a maze of courtyards, walls and gates designed to disorient and expose the attacker, with a six-storey main keep on a stone base. Unlike so many Japanese castles destroyed by wars, fires or the bombing of 1945, Himeji survived almost intact, which makes it exceptional.
For its value as the supreme example of feudal-era wooden castle architecture, Himeji was one of the first Japanese sites inscribed as a World Heritage Site, in 1993. Thoroughly restored in the 2010s, it looks whiter than ever today and lets you understand, at a glance, what the military power of the daimyo looked like in the twilight of warring-states Japan.
In southern Kansai, high in the mountains of the Kii Peninsula, lies Koyasan, the sacred centre of Shingon Buddhism, one of the most important schools in Japan. It was founded in 816 by the monk Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi, one of the most revered figures in Japanese religious history, who is also credited with spreading calligraphy and even, according to legend, inventing the kana syllabary.
Kukai brought the teachings of esoteric Buddhism from China and chose this wooded plateau, surrounded by eight peaks like the petals of a lotus flower, to build a monastic complex set apart from the world. Over the centuries, Koyasan filled with temples —at one point more than a hundred— and became a major pilgrimage centre. According to Shingon tradition, Kukai did not die in 835 but entered eternal meditation, and awaits in his mausoleum the arrival of the Buddha of the future.
That mausoleum is in Okunoin, Japan's largest cemetery, a forest of ancient cedars crowded with more than 200,000 graves and monuments, including those of great feudal lords who wished to rest near the saint. Today Koyasan, a World Heritage Site since 2004 as part of the Sacred Sites of the Kii Mountain Range, offers travellers the shukubo experience: staying in a temple, eating Buddhist vegetarian cuisine and attending the dawn prayers.
Until the 16th century, Edo was a fishing village around a modest castle on the vast Kanto plain, the largest flatland in mountainous Japan. Everything changed in 1590, when Tokugawa Ieyasu received it as his base and, after winning at Sekigahara in 1600 and being named shogun in 1603, turned it into the centre of his dynasty's power. Kyoto remained the imperial capital, seat of the emperor, but the real government —the bakufu— was in Edo.
The sankin-kotai system, which required daimyo from all over the country to live in Edo in alternate years, filled the city with mansions, retinues and trade, and made it grow explosively. By the 18th century, Edo had more than a million inhabitants and was probably the most populous city in the world. The warrior districts were laid out around the castle; further down, by the canals, the districts of artisans and merchants bustled with life, the cradle of the period's urban culture.
When the Meiji Restoration toppled the shogunate in 1868, the new regime moved the imperial court from Kyoto to Edo and renamed it Tokyo, 'the eastern capital'. The Tokugawa castle became the Imperial Palace. And so the city the shoguns had built to rule from the shadows suddenly became the official capital of all Japan.
The modern history of Tokyo is also the story of two catastrophes from which it was reborn. On 1 September 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake, of magnitude close to 7.9, and above all the fires it unleashed, killed more than 100,000 people and razed much of Tokyo and Yokohama. Amid the chaos, false rumours spread that set off a massacre of several thousand Korean residents, a dark episode that historians document clearly.
Barely two decades later came the second destruction. On the night of 9 to 10 March 1945, hundreds of US bombers launched a napalm firebombing raid on Tokyo that, in a few hours, killed around 100,000 people and left more than a million homeless: it is considered one of the deadliest bombing raids in all of history, comparable in deaths to the atomic bombs.
From those ashes contemporary Tokyo emerged. Post-war reconstruction, crowned by the 1964 Olympic Games —with its bullet train and elevated expressways—, transformed the city into the symbol of the Japanese economic miracle. Today its metropolitan area, with some 37 million people, is the largest urban concentration on the planet, a marvel of punctual trains, neon districts like Shibuya and Shinjuku, and temples that survive among skyscrapers.
An hour south of Tokyo, the small coastal town of Kamakura played an enormous role: it was the capital of the first shogunate in Japanese history. When Minamoto no Yoritomo emerged victorious from the Genpei War, he chose Kamakura —protected by hills and the sea, far from the court in Kyoto— as the seat of his military government. Between 1185 and 1333, this town was the country's true centre of power.
Under the Kamakura shogunate an austere warrior culture flourished, along with Zen Buddhism, brought from China, which suited the samurai mindset. From this era comes the bronze Great Buddha (Daibutsu) of Kotoku-in temple, cast around 1252: a seated figure more than 11 metres tall weighing some 120 tonnes. It originally stood indoors, but a tsunami in the 15th century swept the building away, and since then the Buddha has meditated in the open air, becoming one of the icons of Japan.
It was also here that the shogunate withstood the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281. The effort, however, eventually exhausted it, and in 1333 the troops of Emperor Go-Daigo took and destroyed Kamakura, ending its century and a half of glory. The town kept its standing as a religious centre, with dozens of temples and shrines such as Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu, and today it is one of Tokyo residents' favourite historic outings.
In the mountains north of Kanto, Nikko holds the most sumptuous shrine in Japan, and it is no coincidence: buried there is Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who unified the country and founded the dynasty that ruled it for 250 years. After his death in 1616, Ieyasu was deified under the name Tosho Daigongen, and his grandson, the shogun Iemitsu, had the Tosho-gu shrine built in his honour, completed in 1636.
Unlike the usual restraint of Japanese architecture, Tosho-gu is a baroque extravaganza of gilded carvings, colours and detail: here you'll find the famous carving of the 'three wise monkeys' (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) and the Yomeimon gate, so laden with ornament that it is called 'the twilight gate' because you could spend the whole day looking at it. The complex, surrounded by ancient cedars and waterfalls, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999.
Nikko had been a sacred mountain centre since the 8th century, when the monk Shodo founded its first temples, but it was the Tokugawa who turned it into a first-rank place of political and religious pilgrimage, where the shogunate's power was made visible in gold. An old Japanese saying sums it up: 'don't say kekko —splendid— until you've seen Nikko'.
Southwest of Tokyo, among volcanic mountains and with Mount Fuji as a backdrop, Hakone was a strategic point on the Tokaido during the Edo period, the great road linking Edo with Kyoto. There the shogunate set up one of its most important checkpoints, the Hakone Sekisho, where the movement of people and weapons was monitored. The watchword was to stop 'guns coming in and women going out': to control the entry of weapons into Edo and to prevent the daimyo's families, held as hostages, from fleeing the capital.
Hakone is also hot-spring country. Its intense volcanic activity —visible in the steaming Owakudani valley, with its sulphur fumaroles— has fed for centuries the onsen, the thermal baths where travellers on the road rested and which today are one of the area's great attractions. The nearness of Mount Fuji, the 3,776-metre sacred volcano and Japan's supreme symbol, completes a landscape that ukiyo-e printmakers depicted again and again.
Fuji is not just an aesthetic icon: it is a volcano venerated since ancient times, an object of pilgrimage and mountain worship, and its last major eruption was in 1707. Declared a World Heritage Site in 2013 as a 'place of worship and source of artistic inspiration', it sums up the Japanese bond between nature, religion and art that you can feel throughout this region.
Hokkaido, the great northern island, was not part of Japan for almost all of its history. It was the home of the Ainu, an indigenous people whose language, religion and culture were completely different from those of the Japanese. They were hunters, fishers and gatherers who revered the spirits (kamuy) of animals, mountains and rivers. They had a very rich oral tradition and held ceremonies such as the bear ceremony, in which the bear was honoured as a visiting god. The Ainu are not Japanese either ethnically or linguistically, and their origins are still studied and debated.
For centuries the Japanese knew Hokkaido as Ezo, 'the land of the barbarians', a foreign territory. In the Edo period the Matsumae clan, based at the southern tip of the island, traded with the Ainu, often on abusive terms. There was resistance: Shakushain's Revolt in 1669 was the largest Ainu uprising against Japanese commercial control, and it was crushed.
Everything changed with the Meiji Restoration. In 1869 the new government formally annexed the island, renamed it Hokkaido and launched a settler colonisation policy, run by an agency called the Kaitakushi. It brought in hundreds of thousands of Japanese, divided up Ainu lands and developed farming and mining with foreign advice, mainly from the United States. For the Ainu it was a catastrophe. The 1899 Protection Act, despite its name, stripped them of their land and forced them to assimilate, in effect banning their language and customs. Only in 2008 did the Japanese parliament officially recognise them as an indigenous people, and in 2019 a law recognised their rights for the first time.
Sapporo, today Japan's fifth most populous city, was born out of that 19th-century colonisation. When the Meiji government decided to develop Hokkaido, it chose Sapporo as the capital and designed it from scratch in 1869. It has a regular grid layout, unusual in Japan, inspired by cities in the United States, which served as the model for the 'development' of this northern 'frontier'.
The government hired foreign advisers to modernise the island at a rapid pace. One of them, the American William S. Clark, left a lasting mark. He briefly ran the agricultural college that would grow into Hokkaido University and, as he left, said the words 'Boys, be ambitious', which became almost a motto for the city. Beer, another legacy of that period of Western influence, made Sapporo famous throughout the country.
Hokkaido's harsh climate and enormous snowfalls shaped the city's identity. In 1972 Sapporo became the first Asian city to host the Winter Olympics, and its Snow Festival, with huge ice sculptures, draws millions of visitors every February. Sapporo stands for Japan at its youngest: a territory that was a frontier a century and a half ago and is now a modern metropolis, with a much shorter history than the rest of the country.
At the other end of the archipelago, more than 1,500 kilometres southwest of Tokyo, the islands of Okinawa formed an independent kingdom for centuries: the Ryukyu Kingdom. It was unified in 1429 under the Sho dynasty, with its capital at Shuri Castle, and prospered as a maritime trading power. It acted as a go-between linking China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, and it had its own culture, language and music, distinct from those of Japan.
Its independence was gradually hemmed in. Ryukyu was formally a tributary state of imperial China, but in 1609 the Japanese domain of Satsuma invaded the islands and brought them under its control. Satsuma kept up the fiction of an independent kingdom so it could go on profiting from the lucrative trade with China. For more than two centuries Ryukyu lived under this double subordination, paying tribute to two empires at once.
The end came with Japan's modernisation. Between 1872 and 1879, in the process known as the 'Ryukyu Shobun' (the Ryukyu Disposition), the Meiji government abolished the kingdom and deposed its last king, Sho Tai, who was taken to Tokyo. It then turned the islands into Okinawa Prefecture. Annexation brought a policy of forced assimilation: the Ryukyuan language was suppressed and Japanese identity was imposed, in a process very similar to the one the Ainu suffered in the north. Okinawa also became the poorest and most marginalised prefecture in the country.
In the spring of 1945, Okinawa was the scene of the last great battle of the Pacific War and one of the bloodiest of the entire Second World War. Between 1 April and 22 June, US forces landed on the island to use it as a final base before invading the Japanese mainland. Japanese resistance was fierce and desperate, with kamikaze suicide attacks on the fleet and a defence that turned every cave and every hill into a death trap.
The cost to the civilian population was horrific, and this text treats it with the restraint it deserves. An estimated 100,000 or so Okinawan civilians died, perhaps more. That was between a tenth and a quarter of the island's population, and by some estimates close to a third. Many died in the crossfire or the bombardments. Others starved when the Japanese army seized the food. Still others were driven to mass suicide by Japanese soldiers who had told them the Americans would torture them, or were simply executed by those same troops on suspicion of disloyalty. The exact figures are disputed because of the chaos of the battle and the deaths in caves that were never counted.
The battle left a deep mark on Okinawan identity and on its relationship with the rest of Japan, shaped by a sense of having been sacrificed. After the war, Okinawa remained under US military administration until 1972, and it still hosts most of the US bases in Japan, a presence that continues to cause strong local tensions.
Hokkaido and Okinawa, the northern and southern ends of Japan, share a parallel history that sets them apart from the rest of the country. Both were foreign territories with their own peoples and cultures, the Ainu and the Ryukyuans, and Japan annexed and assimilated both by force in the same expansionist push of the Meiji era, in the late 19th century. In both places, incorporation brought colonisation, the suppression of the native language and a peripheral, disadvantaged place within the new nation-state.
Today those distinct identities are re-emerging with pride. In Hokkaido, Ainu culture is going through a revival: Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum, opened in 2020, and efforts are growing to revitalise a language in serious danger of disappearing. In Okinawa, music, dance, food and martial arts keep a distinct identity alive; karate was born right there, in the Ryukyu Kingdom. The ruins of Shuri Castle, a World Heritage Site, are its symbol, although a fire badly damaged them in 2019.
The two regions also offer the country's most distinctive landscapes. Hokkaido has wild nature, volcanoes and extreme winters, while Okinawa has turquoise subtropical beaches, coral reefs and a warm climate. In more than one sense, they are the two faces Japan keeps at its frontiers: proof that a country that seems so uniform today was also built by absorbing other peoples.
Hardly anything that happened to Japan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
