Europe met “Japan” through Chinese tongues, not Yamato speech
Japan’s archipelago faces the Pacific off northeast Asia, edged by the Sea of Japan, Okhotsk, and East China Sea. Locals say Nihon or Nippon for 日本, yet English “Japan” arrived via Min or Wu Chinese readings that Marco Polo heard as Cipangu.
Modern humans arrived about 38,000 years ago. The Jōmon culture, beginning around 14,500 BC, lived in pit dwellings and made some of the oldest surviving pottery. China’s Book of Han, finished in 111 AD, describes a hundred small kingdoms, and a century later the Book of Wei tells of Yamatai uniting many of them. Buddhism came from the Korean kingdom of Baekje in 552, and before the name 日本 took hold in the early eighth century, Chinese writers called the islands Wa.
The Taika Reforms of 645 nationalised land on Confucian lines and began household registers, and after the Jinshin War of 672 the Taihō Code set up a centralised legal state. During the Nara period (710–784) the court at Heijō-kyō produced the Kojiki in 712 and the Nihon Shoki in 720. In 1185 Minamoto no Yoritomo founded a warrior government at Kamakura, which repelled Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281.
Civil war from 1467 opened the Sengoku era. Portuguese merchants and Jesuits arrived in the sixteenth century, and Oda Nobunaga used firearms to subdue rivals before Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed unification. Tokugawa Ieyasu won at Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603, ruling from Edo, today’s Tokyo.
Commodore Perry’s four black ships reached Uraga in July 1853, forcing the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854. Under Meiji (1868–1912) Japan became Asia’s most industrialised power, winning wars against China and Russia and annexing Korea in 1910. Taishō democracy gave way to militarism after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Since the war it has been a constitutional monarchy with a National Diet, the only Asian member of the G7.
Source: Japan
