A Brief History of Japan: Islands, Swords, Empire, and Reinvention

Follows: Japan: A Condensed History of Isolation, Innovation, and Identity

Companion piece: If I Was Born in Japan: Harmony, Randoseru, and the Art of Ikigai (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).

On 1 October 2025, Japan counted itself. When the census results came out a year later, they showed 122,972,528 people, 3.2 million fewer than five years before. Forty-six of the country's forty-seven prefectures had shrunk; only Tokyo had grown. The number of Japanese nationals fell by more than four million, while foreign residents reached a record 3.8 million. By September 2026, nearly three in ten people in Japan were 65 or older, the highest share of any large country on Earth.

A few months earlier, the country's parliament had changed the law on who may become emperor, to keep alive a male line of succession that tradition traces back more than 2,600 years. It allowed princesses to keep their royal status after marriage and let the imperial family adopt male relatives from long-separated branches. It did not allow a woman to reign.

Those two facts, a society shrinking faster than any rich country before it and an institution that claims to be the oldest hereditary monarchy in the world, sum up modern Japan's double life. The condensed piece in this library gives the outline. This is the full version, from the first potters to the snap election of February 2026. Some of this history, above all the war of 1931–1945, is argued over fiercely inside Japan and between Japan and its neighbours. Where it is, this piece names who says what, and gives the evidence.

In this history

1. From the first potters to Nara (to 794)
2. Courtiers and warriors (794–1600)
3. The Tokugawa peace and the Meiji revolution (1600–1912)
4. Empire (1895–1937)
5. War, atrocity and defeat (1937–1945)
6. Occupation, miracle and bubble (1945–1991)
7. Lost decades, Fukushima and Japan in 2026 (1991–2026)
8. How to understand Japan today

Part 1 — From the first potters to Nara (to 794)

A chain of islands

Japan is an arc of volcanic islands, four large ones (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu) and thousands of small ones, stretching from the cold seas near Russia to the subtropics near Taiwan. Most of it is mountain and forest; people have always crowded onto narrow coastal plains. It sits where four tectonic plates meet, which is why earthquakes, tsunamis and eruptions run through its whole history. And it lies close enough to the Asian mainland, across the strait from Korea, to receive people and ideas, but far enough that invasion was hard. That combination, near but apart, is the first key to the story.

The Jōmon: hunters who made pottery

The first people to reach the islands crossed during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower. Around 14,500 BCE, by radiocarbon dates from a site called Odai Yamamoto I in northern Honshu, people there were already making clay pots, among the oldest known anywhere. The archaeological culture that followed, lasting until roughly 300 BCE, is named Jōmon ("cord-marked"), after the patterns potters pressed into wet clay with twisted cords. The name was coined by the American zoologist Edward S. Morse in the 1870s.

The Jōmon were not farmers in the usual sense. They fished, gathered shellfish, hunted deer and boar, and harvested nuts and plants so reliably that some lived in large, long-lasting villages. At Sannai-Maruyama, in Aomori, archaeologists have reconstructed pit houses and huge timber structures. They made extraordinary pottery with flame-like rims, and clay figurines called dogū, some with goggle eyes, whose purpose is still debated.

The Jōmon lasted more than ten thousand years: longer than all of Japanese history since. For most of the time people have lived in Japan, they lived like this.

Genetic studies find that the Jōmon were most closely related to two peoples who still live at the edges of Japan: the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Ryukyuans of Okinawa. Their ancestry survives, in smaller proportions, in most modern Japanese people too.

The Yayoi: rice, bronze and iron

Then came rice. From around 300 BCE on the traditional dating (and perhaps several centuries earlier, according to radiocarbon studies whose results are still contested), irrigated wet-rice farming arrived in northern Kyushu, brought by migrants from the Korean peninsula. The period is named Yayoi after a district of Tokyo where its pottery was first identified.

Rice changed everything. Paddy farming demands cooperation, irrigation, stored surplus and therefore organisation: villages, chiefs, and wars over land and water. The newcomers brought bronze, used for mirrors, weapons and large ceremonial bells called dōtaku, and by the 1st century CE iron tools and weapons. Moated, fortified settlements appear, like Yoshinogari in Kyushu, where archaeologists found skeletons without heads.

Japan in Chinese records

Japan enters written history through Chinese eyes. Chinese chronicles called the islands' people the Wa. In 57 CE, the Book of the Later Han records, a ruler of the "Na" state of Wa sent an embassy to the Han emperor and received a gold seal. Astonishingly, a solid-gold seal with that inscription turned up in 1784 on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka; it is now a National Treasure.

In the 3rd century, the Chinese chronicle of the Wei kingdom described a queen named Himiko who ruled a land called Yamatai after a long civil war: a spiritual ruler, while her younger brother handled the affairs of state. Where Yamatai was (northern Kyushu or the Nara basin) is one of the oldest and most passionate arguments in Japanese archaeology, and still unresolved.

The keyhole tombs

From around 250–300 CE the islands' rulers began building enormous burial mounds, giving the Kofun ("old tomb") period its name. The most distinctive are keyhole-shaped, square at the front and round at the back, found only in Japan. The largest, the Daisen Kofun in Sakai near Osaka, built in the mid-5th century and commonly (though not provably) attributed to an emperor called Nintoku, is the biggest tomb in Japan. Around them stood haniwa: unglazed clay figures of warriors, horses, houses and dancers.

The tombs spread outward from the Yamato region (around modern Nara and Osaka) through the 5th century, tracing the growing power of a confederation of clans led by the Yamato kings. Society was organised into uji, clans with hereditary roles and ranks, each worshipping its own kami (spirits or gods). Immigrants from Korea and China, called toraijin, brought writing, silk-making, weaving and metalwork; an early 9th-century register listed more than a quarter of the aristocratic clans around the capital as of foreign descent, though historians doubt how accurate it is.

Buddhism and the Soga

According to the Nihon Shoki, Japan's first official history, Buddhism arrived in 538, when a king of Baekje in Korea sent a statue and scriptures to the Yamato court. Whether to accept the foreign god split the court. The Soga clan championed Buddhism; the Mononobe opposed it; the Soga won.

The towering figure of the next generation is Prince Shōtoku (574–622), regent for Empress Suiko. Later tradition credits him with almost everything: founding temples, promoting Buddhism, sending envoys to China, and writing a "Seventeen-Article Constitution" of moral principles for officials. Modern historians treat him as semi-legendary, a real prince around whom a cult grew.

Copying China

In 645 a palace coup destroyed the Soga, and the new leaders, Prince Naka no Ōe (later Emperor Tenji) and Nakatomi no Kamatari (founder of the Fujiwara clan), launched the Taika ("Great Change") reforms. The model was Tang China. All land would belong to the ruler and be allotted to farmers; taxes would be paid in rice, cloth and labour; a centralised bureaucracy would replace hereditary clan power. Over the following decades, law codes on the Chinese model were written, and the ruler took the title tennō, "heavenly sovereign", the word for "emperor" still used today.

Nara

In 710 the court settled in its first permanent capital, Heijō-kyō (Nara), laid out on a grid copied from the Tang capital Chang'an (this series' A Brief History of China describes the original). The Nara period (710–794) produced Japan's founding texts:

Emperor Shōmu ordered the building of a giant bronze Buddha at the Tōdai-ji temple in 743; it was completed in 752. Its scale was a statement: Buddhism as protector of the state, the emperor as its patron. It was also a response to catastrophe. A smallpox epidemic in 735–737, which spread from Kyushu, killed about a third of the population in the areas it struck.

In two centuries Japan imported a writing system, a religion, a legal code, a city plan and a theory of monarchy from China and Korea, and made them its own. It would do the same with the West twelve hundred years later.

How people lived

For the farming majority, the Chinese-style state meant registration, land allotments, taxes in rice and cloth, and labour service on roads, temples and the capital itself. Many fled their allotments to escape the burden, a recurring problem for the court. Most people lived in pit dwellings and worshipped local kami at simple shrines; Buddhism was at first a religion of the court and aristocracy, and spread among ordinary people only over centuries.

Part 2 — Courtiers and warriors (794–1600)

A capital of peace

In 794 Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō, "capital of peace and tranquillity", modern Kyoto. It would remain the imperial city for more than a thousand years. The Heian period (794–1185) is remembered as the classical age of Japanese culture.

Contact with China thinned. Official embassies to the Tang ended in the 9th century; the last major mission sailed in 838, and the scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane recommended halting them in the 890s as the Tang declined. In the space left by Chinese influence, a distinctly Japanese court culture matured, called kokufū, "national style".

Kana and the women writers

The most consequential invention of the age was a script. Chinese characters, used for prestige writing, fit Japanese grammar badly. From them, Japanese writers developed two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana (together called kana), in which each sign stands for a sound. Educated men were expected to write in Chinese; writing in kana was associated with women. As a result, some of the greatest works of Heian literature were written by women.

The Tale of Genji

The Tale of Genji was written in the early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman serving at court; the earliest reference to it is in her own diary, in an entry dated 1 November 1008. Its 54 chapters follow the loves, griefs and political fortunes of the "Shining Prince" Genji and then his descendants. It is often called the world's first novel. That claim is debated (earlier prose fiction exists in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), but its psychological depth and its sense of time passing are unlike anything before it.

Its world was tiny: a few thousand aristocrats in one city, obsessed with rank, poetry, calligraphy, the colour combinations of layered robes, and the Buddhist sense of mono no aware, the poignancy of things passing. Her contemporary Sei Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book, a collection of lists, sharp observations and opinions that still reads like a modern blog.

The Fujiwara and the retired emperors

Politically, the Heian emperors reigned but rarely ruled. The Fujiwara clan married its daughters to emperors and governed as regents for their grandsons. Around the year 1000, Fujiwara no Michinaga (on whom Murasaki may partly have modelled Genji) could make and unmake emperors. From 1086, emperors who abdicated began to rule from "retirement" as cloistered emperors, competing with the Fujiwara for real power.

The rise of the samurai

While the court refined its poetry, the provinces armed. The land-allotment system broke down into private estates, exempt from tax and defended by their own mounted warriors. Two warrior clans descended from imperial princes, the Taira and the Minamoto, rose by fighting for court factions. In the Hōgen disturbance of 1156, warriors decided a succession dispute in the capital. Taira no Kiyomori then dominated the court, until the Minamoto rose against him.

The Genpei War (1180–1185) ended at the naval battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, where the Taira were destroyed and, in the story told by the Tale of the Heike, their child emperor drowned in his grandmother's arms. The Heike's opening line, about the bells of a temple ringing out the impermanence of all things, is one of the most famous in Japanese literature.

The court never lost its legitimacy. It lost its power. For the next seven centuries, Japan would be ruled by men who claimed to act in the emperor's name.

Kamakura: the first shogunate

The victorious Minamoto leader, Minamoto no Yoritomo, did not move to Kyoto. He built a military government at Kamakura, near modern Tokyo, and in 1192 received the title shōgun, short for "barbarian-subduing generalissimo". Historians date the Kamakura shogunate from 1185 or 1192.

This was the start of a dual system that lasted until 1868: the emperor in Kyoto, sacred and powerless; the shogun, holding real power in his name. After Yoritomo's death, real power passed again, this time to the Hōjō family, who ruled as regents for puppet shoguns from 1203. A retired emperor's attempt to take power back failed in 1221.

The Mongols

In 1274 and again in 1281, the Mongol emperor of China, Kublai Khan, sent invasion fleets against Kyushu. Japanese warriors fought them on the beaches; both times storms wrecked much of the invading fleet. The storms were called kamikaze, "divine winds", proof that the gods protected Japan. The word would be borrowed again in 1944–45 for suicide pilots.

The invasions were won, but they bankrupted the Kamakura regime, which had no conquered land with which to reward its warriors. In 1333 Emperor Go-Daigo rebelled, and Kamakura fell. His attempt to restore direct imperial rule collapsed within three years, when the general Ashikaga Takauji turned against him and in 1336 founded a new shogunate in Kyoto.

Muromachi: culture amid disorder

The Ashikaga (or Muromachi) shogunate was weaker than Kamakura, but its rulers were great patrons of culture. Under them Zen Buddhism, which had arrived from China, shaped art and taste; ink painting, rock gardens and the tea ceremony took form; and the actor-playwright Zeami (c. 1363–1443), patronised by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, created the masked, slow, ghost-haunted drama of Noh. (This library's Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen traces where Zen came from.)

The Warring States

In 1467 a succession dispute in the shogun's house became the Ōnin War, a decade of fighting that burned much of Kyoto. Central authority collapsed. For roughly the next century, the Sengoku ("Warring States") period, Japan was a patchwork of domains ruled by warlords (daimyō), many of them upstarts who had overthrown their own lords. The Japanese had a word for it: gekokujō, "the low overthrowing the high".

In 1543 a Chinese ship carrying Portuguese traders drifted to the island of Tanegashima, and the Portuguese sold the local lord two matchlock guns. Within decades Japanese smiths were making firearms in large numbers. Christian missionaries followed; several daimyō converted, and by the late 16th century there were many thousands of Japanese Christians, especially in Kyushu.

The three unifiers

Three men ended the wars, remembered as the three "Great Unifiers".

Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea are remembered very differently in the two countries. In Korea they are a national catastrophe, the Imjin War, in which Korea's navy and Ming Chinese armies eventually forced the Japanese out after devastating fighting; the war ended with Hideyoshi's death in 1598. Hideyoshi's soldiers took noses from the Korean and Chinese dead as trophies; a mound in Kyoto, the Mimizuka, holds the noses of at least 38,000 Koreans and more than 30,000 Chinese.

The same ruler patronised Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591), the tea master who perfected wabi-cha, the tea ceremony of rustic simplicity. Beauty and violence lived side by side in the age of the samurai.

Part 3 — The Tokugawa peace and the Meiji revolution (1600–1912)

Building a peace

The Tokugawa shogunate, founded in 1603 and ruled from Edo (modern Tokyo), gave Japan more than two and a half centuries without major war, one of the longest periods of peace any society has known. Its methods were control and balance.

The shogun ruled his own vast lands directly and left about 260 daimyō to govern their domains, but watched them closely. From 1635, under the third shogun, Iemitsu, the system of "alternate attendance" (sankin-kōtai) required every lord to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his wife and heir there as hostages when he went home. The lords' great processions along the highways, and their spending in the capital, drained their wealth and built a national road network and economy.

Society was described in a Confucian scheme of four ranked orders: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. Historians writing since the 1990s, followed by Japanese textbooks, see it less as a strict ladder than as a set of legal categories. The samurai, about 6 percent of the population, became salaried administrators who still wore two swords but no longer fought. Peasants, about 80 percent, paid most of the taxes in rice.

Sakoku: closed, but not shut

Between 1633 and 1639 the shogunate issued a series of edicts that sharply restricted contact with the outside world. In 1637–38 a rising of some 40,000 mostly Christian peasants at Shimabara in Kyushu was crushed, and Christianity, already suspect as a foothold for European power, was banned under penalty of death. The Portuguese were expelled.

The policy is usually called sakoku, "closed country", but that word was coined only in 1801, by a translator of a European book about Japan. Historians such as Ronald Toby have shown that Japan was never sealed. It traded through four "gateways":

Through Dejima came books on medicine, astronomy and anatomy, studied by a growing circle of scholars of "Dutch learning" (rangaku). What the shogunate controlled was not knowledge but who could come and go.

The floating world

Peace made Japan urban and commercial. By the mid-18th century Edo had over a million people, probably the largest city in the world; Osaka and Kyoto each had over 400,000. Around 1700 Japan may have been the most urbanised country on Earth. Osaka's merchants traded rice futures, and its brokers became richer than many samurai.

Townspeople made their own culture: the ukiyo, the "floating world" of theatres, teahouses and pleasure quarters. Kabuki theatre, puppet drama and the woodblock prints called ukiyo-e catered to them. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) turned the light verse form that became haiku into high art. Late in the period, Katsushika Hokusai published The Great Wave off Kanagawa (late 1831), whose imported Prussian-blue ink and dramatic composition made it perhaps the most famous image in Asian art.

How people lived

The national population, about 30 million around 1721, barely grew for a century, and was about 32 million by the 1860s. Historians debate why: late marriage, deliberate family limitation (including infanticide, which some historians emphasise), and repeated famines such as the Tenmei famine of 1782–1788. Village life was hard but organised: villages paid their taxes collectively, managed irrigation and forests together, and settled disputes internally. Temple schools taught many children, especially boys, to read and count, though how widespread literacy was is uncertain (the condensed piece gives the main estimates).

Tokugawa Japan was not frozen. It was a complex, commercial, literate society that had chosen, for political reasons, to control its contact with the outside world. That is why it could change so fast when it had to.

Perry

On 8 July 1853, four American warships, the "black ships", anchored at Uraga at the mouth of Edo Bay. Their commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore demanding that Japan open its ports. He left, promising to return for an answer, and came back on 13 February 1854 with eight ships. On 31 March 1854 the shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa, opening two ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, to American ships.

More treaties followed with the US and the European powers. Like China's, they were "unequal": foreigners in Japan were tried by their own consuls, not Japanese courts, and Japan could not set its own tariffs. Everyone in Japan had heard what had happened to China in the Opium Wars.

The fall of the shogunate

The treaties discredited the shogunate, which had failed in its basic duty of keeping the "barbarians" out. Young samurai, especially from the southwestern domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, rallied to the slogan "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians". After clashes with Western warships taught them that expulsion was impossible, they turned their anger on the shogun instead. In 1866 Satsuma and Chōshū, long rivals, formed an alliance. On 3 January 1868 they and their allies seized the palace in Kyoto and proclaimed that power had been restored to the emperor, a boy of fifteen, who took the reign name Meiji ("enlightened rule"). The shogun's supporters fought on in the Boshin War until 1869, and lost.

Revolution from above

What followed was one of the most radical transformations any country has undergone, carried out not by a popular revolution but by a small group of young former samurai acting in the emperor's name. On 6 April 1868 the young emperor swore a Charter Oath of five articles, the last of which set the course of the age:

"Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule." — Charter Oath, article 5 (1868)

In a few decades the new government:

The slogan was fukoku kyōhei, "rich country, strong army". The state built model factories, railways and telegraphs, then sold many to private entrepreneurs, some of whose firms grew into the zaibatsu conglomerates (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo). Silk, much of it reeled by young farm women working long hours in mills, paid for imported machinery.

The tragic figure of the age is Saigō Takamori, a giant of a man who had helped make the Restoration, broke with his colleagues, and died leading the samurai revolt of 1877 against the modern conscript army he had helped create.

The cost

Modernisation had losers. Peasants paid the new taxes in cash and often protested. The Ainu of Hokkaido, colonised from 1869 by a government development agency, lost their land to Japanese settlers; an 1899 law labelling them "former aborigines" aimed to assimilate them. The Ryukyu Kingdom, which had paid tribute to both China and Japan, was annexed outright in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture. The new Japan was being built as a nation-state, and its edges were being made Japanese.

Part 4 — Empire (1895–1937)

Learning the imperial game

Meiji's leaders drew a lesson from the world of the 1870s and 1880s: in the age of empires, a country either took colonies or became one. Japan's first target was Korea.

In 1894–95 Japan fought Qing China over influence in Korea and won decisively. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895), China recognised Korea's "independence" (from China), ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan, and paid an indemnity of 200 million taels of silver. Russia, Germany and France then forced Japan to give back the Liaodong Peninsula it had also won, a humiliation Japan did not forget, especially when Russia took the same peninsula for itself.

In 1904–05 Japan fought Russia for Manchuria and Korea. It won on land, at enormous cost, and at sea, destroying the Russian fleet. It was the first time in modern history that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a major war, and it electrified nationalists across Asia. The peace treaty, signed on 5 September 1905, gave Japan control over Korea and a foothold in southern Manchuria.

Taiwan, the first colony

Taiwan was Japan's first colony, and it did not come quietly. When Japanese troops landed near Keelung on 29 May 1895, local leaders proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of Formosa"; it took a five-month campaign, slowed by guerrilla resistance, to reach Tainan in the south. Japan then ruled Taiwan for fifty years from Taihoku (Taipei), aiming to make it a "model colony": railways, harbours, public health, rice and sugar for the Japanese market, and schools that taught in Japanese.

Resistance continued, especially among the island's Indigenous peoples. In October 1930, at Musha in the central mountains, Seediq fighters attacked a gathering at a school and killed 134 Japanese; the colonial army's retaliation killed several hundred Seediq. Taiwan's memory of Japanese rule today is mixed, shaped partly by comparison with the Nationalist rule that followed in 1945.

Korea

Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905 and annexed it outright by a treaty signed on 22 August 1910, which took effect on 29 August. Korea's last emperor had refused to sign it; it was signed by a Korean minister and the Japanese resident-general. Japan and South Korea have disagreed ever since about whether the treaty was legal: their 1965 normalisation treaty fudged the question by declaring the old treaties "already null and void", which Seoul reads as void from the start and Tokyo as void from 1945 or 1965.

Colonial rule built railways, ports, factories and schools, and Korea's economy grew. It also suppressed Korean political life, imposed Japanese language in schools and, later, pressure to adopt Japanese names, and in the war years mobilised Koreans as labourers, soldiers and "comfort women". Those who argue colonialism "modernised" Korea and those who stress its brutality are arguing about the same decades, and the argument is still politically live in both countries.

Taishō democracy

At home, the 1910s and 1920s brought a flowering of party politics, a lively press, labour unions and mass culture, often called "Taishō democracy" after the reign of the Taishō emperor (1912–1926). Japan fought on the Allied side in the First World War and in 1915 presented China with the "Twenty-One Demands" for special rights, fuelling Chinese nationalism. In 1925 the vote was extended to all men aged 25 and over, quadrupling the electorate to 12.5 million; the same year a Peace Preservation Law criminalised organising to change the "national polity" (kokutai), and more than 70,000 people were eventually arrested under it.

The earthquake

At 11:58 a.m. on 1 September 1923, just before lunchtime, an earthquake of magnitude around 8 struck the Kantō plain. Fires swept through Tokyo and Yokohama; modern research counts 105,385 dead or missing. In the chaos, rumours spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. Vigilantes, sometimes with police and soldiers, massacred Koreans, and also Chinese workers and Japanese mistaken for Koreans. Estimates of the Koreans killed range from 248 (the police count at the time) and 832 (an investigation by the colonial government) to 2,613 (an investigation by Korean students) and, in some modern estimates, as many as 6,000. Military police also murdered the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, his partner Itō Noe and his six-year-old nephew.

The army takes over

The Great Depression hit Japan's silk-exporting countryside hard, and discredited the parties and big business in many eyes. On 18 September 1931 Japanese officers in Manchuria set off a small explosion beside a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden, blamed Chinese saboteurs, and used it as a pretext to conquer all of Manchuria. In 1932 they created the puppet state of Manchukuo, headed by the last Qing emperor, Puyi. When the League of Nations adopted a report refusing to recognise Manchukuo, Japan quit the League.

At home, young officers and nationalists assassinated politicians and businessmen; in the "2-26 incident" of 26 February 1936, rebel officers killed leading officials, including two former prime ministers, and occupied central Tokyo before the coup collapsed. Party government gave way to cabinets dominated by the military. In 1940 the parties dissolved themselves into a single "Imperial Rule Assistance Association".

Part 5 — War, atrocity and defeat (1937–1945)

The war with China

On 7 July 1937 a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing escalated into full-scale war. Japanese armies took Shanghai after months of fighting and advanced on the Chinese capital, Nanjing.

Nanjing

Japanese troops entered Nanjing on 13 December 1937. Over the following six weeks or so, and in the surrounding countryside, they killed prisoners of war and civilians on a vast scale, and raped tens of thousands of women. Westerners who stayed in the city, among them the German businessman John Rabe, set up a "safety zone" that sheltered many thousands and recorded what they saw.

That the massacre happened is established by contemporary diaries, Japanese soldiers' own accounts, foreign eyewitnesses and the post-war tribunals. How many died is disputed, and the number has become a symbol in itself.

Inside Japan, the debate is often described in terms of schools. Historians of the "affirmation" school, including Kasahara and Hata despite their very different numbers, agree that a large-scale massacre took place. A minority "illusion" school (maboroshi-ha) has argued that the massacre was invented or vastly exaggerated by "victor's justice"; its claims are rejected by mainstream historians, and one of its prominent authors was discredited for academic misconduct. The Japanese government's position is that the killing of a large number of non-combatants and looting by the Japanese army "cannot be denied", while the true number of victims is "difficult to determine". Japanese textbooks mention the massacre, some only briefly; how they treat it has been argued over at home and protested abroad for decades. Since 2014, China has marked 13 December as a national memorial day.

The comfort women

From 1932, and on a large scale after Nanjing, the Japanese military set up "comfort stations", brothels for soldiers, across its empire and occupied territories. The women in them, euphemistically called "comfort women", came above all from Korea, China and the Philippines, and also from Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, Timor and elsewhere, including Japanese women and some Dutch women in the Dutch East Indies.

How many there were, and how they were recruited, is the heart of a long dispute.

Key moments in Japan's own handling of the issue:

• 4 August 1993: Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei's statement acknowledged that the military was involved in establishing and managing the comfort stations, that women were in many cases recruited "against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.", lived "under a coercive atmosphere", and offered apologies. A government review ordered under Prime Minister Abe in 2014 led to no revision.
• 1995: the Asian Women's Fund, financed by citizens' donations, was set up to support survivors; critics wanted official state compensation instead.
• August 2014: the Asahi Shimbun retracted articles based on the testimony of Yoshida Seiji, a Japanese man who had claimed to have rounded up Korean women by force and whose account proved false. Japanese conservatives presented this as discrediting the whole issue; historians replied that the documentary evidence of military involvement never depended on him.
• 28 December 2015: Japan and South Korea agreed that Japan would pay ¥1 billion into a Korean foundation for survivors and that the issue was resolved "finally and irreversibly". South Korea's next government shut the foundation in November 2018. South Korean courts in 2021 and 2023 ordered Japan to compensate survivors; Japan does not accept the rulings, citing state immunity.

The Pacific War

The war in China bogged down. Japan moved into French Indochina, the United States cut off oil exports, and Japan's leaders decided to seize the oil and resources of Southeast Asia. On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Asia) Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and, within hours, British and American territories across Asia. For six months it conquered almost everything it attacked, under the banner of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" that promised to free Asia from Western colonialism. In practice, occupation meant forced labour, requisitioned food and brutal military rule, along with real encouragement of some independence movements.

The tide turned at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. From 1944 American bombers burned Japan's cities; the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed about 100,000 people. The battle for Okinawa, from 1 April to 22 June 1945, killed somewhere between 40,000 and 150,000 civilians; Okinawan authorities count at least 149,425 Okinawans killed, missing or driven to "coerced suicide", some at the urging of Japanese soldiers.

Japan's Unit 731 in Manchuria conducted lethal human experiments and biological warfare in China; its attacks are estimated to have killed around 200,000 people. Prisoners of war, Asian labourers and occupied populations died in huge numbers. In the Dutch East Indies alone, wartime famine and occupation killed an estimated 3 to 4 million people.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On 6 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on 9 August a second on Nagasaki. By the end of 1945 the bombs had killed an estimated 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, most of them civilians, about half on the first day, the rest from burns, injuries and radiation sickness. On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria.

On 15 August the emperor's recorded voice told his people, on the radio, that the war had to end. The surrender was signed on 2 September 1945.

Whether the bombings were necessary is still argued. Their defenders, starting with President Truman, say they ended the war quickly and saved the far larger number of lives, Japanese and Allied, that an invasion would have cost. Critics argue Japan was already close to surrender, that the Soviet entry was decisive, and that deliberately killing civilians on that scale was a crime. In Japan, the bombings are remembered above all through the testimony of survivors (hibakusha) and a deep public commitment to nuclear disarmament.

Part 6 — Occupation, miracle and bubble (1945–1991)

MacArthur's Japan

From the surrender on 2 September 1945 until 28 April 1952, Japan was occupied by the Allied powers, in practice by the United States, under General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). It is one of the few military occupations in history remembered, by many of the occupied, with something like gratitude, and also one of the most thorough attempts to remake a society from outside.

The reforms came quickly:

• Women voted for the first time in the general election of 10 April 1946.
• Unions were legalised by a trade union law of December 1945.
• Land reform between 1947 and 1949 bought about 38 percent of cultivated land from landlords and sold it cheaply to the tenants who farmed it, creating a nation of small owner-farmers who became the bedrock of conservative politics.
• The zaibatsu were to be broken up; in the end only the largest few were dissolved.
• The emperor, Hirohito, was kept on the throne and not put on trial, a decision MacArthur judged necessary for a peaceful occupation and his critics have never forgiven. In a New Year message in 1946 he renounced the idea that he was a living god.
• War crimes trials in Tokyo convicted Japan's wartime leaders and sentenced several to death.

The constitution

In February 1946, frustrated by Japanese drafts that changed little, MacArthur ordered his own staff to write a constitution. They did it in under a week, handing it to Japanese officials on 13 February. After revision by the Diet, it was adopted on 3 November 1946 and took effect on 3 May 1947. It made the emperor "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people", with no political power; guaranteed civil rights and equality of the sexes; and included Article 9:

"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. … land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." — Constitution of Japan, Article 9

The constitution has never been amended, making it the world's oldest unamended national constitution. Article 9 has been reinterpreted instead. During the Cold War, Japan built "Self-Defence Forces", justified as the minimum needed for defence. On 1 July 2014 the cabinet reinterpreted the article again to allow "collective self-defence", fighting alongside an ally under attack. Amending it needs a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Diet and a majority in a referendum.

The reverse course

As the Cold War began, American priorities shifted, from about 1947, from punishing Japan to rebuilding it as an ally: the "reverse course". Purged conservatives returned, left-wing unions were curbed, and the Korean War (from 1950) brought a flood of American military orders that jump-started industry. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on 8 September 1951, restored Japan's sovereignty from 28 April 1952, along with a security treaty that kept American bases. Okinawa remained under US control until 1972, and still hosts a heavy concentration of American bases.

Japan's postwar order was a bargain: American protection, a pacifist constitution, and a nation free to concentrate everything on rebuilding its economy.

The miracle

From about 1955, when incomes per person recovered to their prewar peak, until the oil shock of 1973, Japan's economy grew at around 10 percent a year. Nothing like it had been seen in a large economy.

The causes are debated. The developmental-state view, associated with the political scientist Chalmers Johnson, credits the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), founded in 1949, for steering credit and protection toward chosen industries. Others stress high savings, a well-educated workforce, cheap energy, an undervalued yen, open American markets, technology licensed from abroad, and fierce competition between firms. Companies organised into keiretsu, groups linked by cross-shareholdings and a main bank. Large firms offered core male workers employment for life and pay rising with seniority; their wives were expected to stay home.

In 1960, after huge street protests against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato turned national attention to economics with an Income Doubling Plan, promising to double the economy in ten years. It doubled in under seven. In 1964 Tokyo hosted the Olympics; the new shinkansen bullet train opened between Tokyo and Osaka for the occasion; and Japan joined the OECD, the club of rich countries.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (October 2026). Dollar figures swing with the exchange rate; the yen's strength in 1995 and weakness in 2025 explain much of the difference between those years.

How people lived

Within a generation, most Japanese moved from farms to cities and from poverty to comfort. Families crowded into new apartment blocks, bought televisions, washing machines and refrigerators, then cars. The salaryman commuting on packed trains and drinking with colleagues after work, and the "education mother" managing her children's exam preparation, became national figures. Life expectancy rose from about 68 in 1960 to 79 in 1990, among the highest in the world.

The miracle had costs: severe industrial pollution, cramped housing, long hours, and a politics dominated by a single party. The Liberal Democratic Party, formed in 1955 by a merger of two conservative parties, governed without interruption until 1993.

The bubble

In September 1985 the Plaza Accord between the major economies drove the dollar down and the yen sharply up. To cushion exporters, the Bank of Japan cut its discount rate from 5 percent to 2.5 percent by early 1987. Cheap money poured into land and shares. Commercial land prices in the six biggest cities rose about 300 percent between 1985 and 1991; at the peak, the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were reportedly valued at more than all the real estate in California. On 29 December 1989 the Nikkei stock index closed at 38,915.87.

Between May 1989 and August 1990 the central bank raised its rate in steps from 2.5 to 6 percent. The Nikkei lost more than 40 percent in 1990; land prices began to fall in 1991 and kept falling for years. The bubble left banks holding vast bad loans secured on land now worth a fraction of its price.

At the end of the 1980s many Americans feared Japan would overtake them. A generation later, Japan's own economists were asking how a country so rich and so capable could stand still for thirty years.

Part 7 — Lost decades, Fukushima and Japan in 2026 (1991–2026)

The lost decades

What followed is known as the "lost decade", later the lost twenty and thirty years. Growth averaged around 1 percent a year from 1991 into the 2010s. Banks and regulators, rather than writing off bad loans, kept insolvent "zombie" firms alive; in November 1997 the major bank Hokkaido Takushoku and the brokerage Yamaichi Securities collapsed. Prices drifted down, so people and firms held cash, which deepened the stagnation. The Nikkei hit a post-bubble low of 7,862 in March 2003.

Economists argue about the causes: a "liquidity trap" in which interest rates could go no lower (Paul Krugman), a "balance-sheet recession" in which firms used their income to pay off debt rather than invest (Richard Koo), monetary policy that was too tight, or simply slowing productivity growth (Fumio Hayashi and Edward Prescott). Some point out that, measured per working-age person, Japan's performance looked much less dismal than the headlines, because its workforce was shrinking.

1995 was a year of shocks. On 17 January the Kobe earthquake killed more than 5,000 people and exposed slow government response. On 20 March the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 14 and injuring many more. The certainties of the postwar order seemed to be breaking.

In politics, the LDP lost power briefly in 1993–94 and again from 2009 to 2012. On 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi issued a formal statement on Japan's colonial rule and aggression that became the reference point for later governments' expressions of remorse and apology.

Shinzo Abe, returning as prime minister in December 2012, launched "Abenomics": massive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan from 2013 (and negative interest rates from 2016), fiscal stimulus and promises of structural reform. Abe was also a nationalist who visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's war dead (including 14 men judged or charged as Class A war criminals, enshrined secretly in 1978) are honoured, in December 2013, drawing protests from China and South Korea and disappointment from Washington. In 2024 the Nikkei finally rose above its 1989 peak, and Japan emerged from decades of falling prices.

11 March 2011

At 2:46 p.m. on 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0–9.1 earthquake struck under the sea off northeastern Honshu. The tsunami that followed reached as high as 40.5 metres at Miyako and swept away whole towns. Official figures count 19,759 deaths, including later disaster-related deaths, and 2,553 people still missing.

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the tsunami knocked out the backup power that cooled the reactors. Three reactors melted down and hydrogen explosions blew apart reactor buildings; residents within 20 kilometres were evacuated, and in 2015 more than 228,000 people affected by the disaster were still living away from home. Total damage was estimated at about US$360 billion. The disaster shook public faith in the authorities and in nuclear power, and whether to restart the country's reactors is still argued over.

The population turns

Japan's population peaked at about 128 million around 2008 and has fallen every year since. Births tell the story: about 2.7 million in 1949, at the peak of the postwar baby boom; 2.09 million in 1973; 686,061 in 2024, with preliminary counts showing another fall in 2025. The fertility rate in 2024 was 1.15 children per woman. In 2024 Japan recorded about 1.6 million deaths, more than twice as many as births.

The causes are argued about: long working hours, expensive housing and education, job insecurity for young men, a workplace culture hard on mothers, and changing ideas of marriage. Governments have tried childcare subsidies and cash for families with little effect so far. Immigration, long resisted, has quietly grown, with foreign residents reaching a record 3.8 million in 2025; it has also become politically contested, with anti-foreigner rhetoric gaining ground.

The imperial family

Emperor Akihito, who had reigned since January 1989, abdicated on 30 April 2019, and his son Naruhito succeeded him. Japan has had eight reigning empresses in its history, the last in the 18th century, but modern law allows only men in the male line to reign, and the only such man of the younger generation is the emperor's nephew, Prince Hisahito (born 2006). The line's survival has become a political question. On 17 July 2026 the Diet passed a revision of the Imperial House Law: princesses who marry commoners may now keep their status and duties (though not pass it to their husbands or children), and men in the male line of long-separated branches may be adopted into the family. It kept the ban on a reigning empress, despite polls showing broad public support for allowing one, so Princess Aiko, the emperor's only child, cannot succeed.

Takaichi's Japan

On 4 October 2025 the LDP elected Sanae Takaichi, a hardline conservative and protégé of Shinzo Abe, as its leader. Days later its coalition partner of 26 years, Komeito, walked out; the LDP formed a new coalition with the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin), and on 21 October 2025 Takaichi became Japan's first woman prime minister.

In early November 2025 she told the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute an "existential crisis situation" in which Japan might use force in self-defence. Beijing reacted furiously: it warned Chinese citizens against travelling to Japan, cancelled flights and concerts, halted imports of Japanese seafood, and in January 2026 banned exports of dual-use goods to Japan. The pandas lent to Japan went home.

Riding high approval ratings, Takaichi dissolved the lower house on 23 January 2026. In the election on 8 February the LDP won about 316 of 465 seats, the first time any party had passed the two-thirds mark of 310 seats on its own. Stocks hit records. Her government has since loosened Japan's long-standing restrictions on exporting lethal weapons and pushed to revise the constitution, alarming pacifists. By September 2026, after months of decline, her cabinet's approval ranged between 44 and 62 percent across the main polls.

Her supporters see a leader finally restoring national confidence, strengthening defence against a more assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea, and reviving the economy. Her critics see a revisionist who has criticised the Kono and Murayama statements, who risks dragging Japan into a war over Taiwan, and whose majority could weaken the postwar constitution's guarantees.

The 2026 facts in this part come from France 24, Nippon.com and the World Bank, dated as given. Japan's story is moving fast; check the latest before quoting any of it.

Part 8 — How to understand Japan today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. Borrow, then make it your own. Japan took writing, Buddhism and statecraft from China and Korea, guns and Christianity from Portugal, science from the Dutch, a constitution from Prussia and another from the Americans, and baseball from the United States. Each time the borrowed thing became distinctively Japanese. That is less "imitation" than a deliberate national habit of learning.

2. Authority and power are often separate. For most of its history Japan's emperor reigned while others ruled: regents, retired emperors, shoguns, oligarchs, generals, bureaucrats and the LDP's factions. This helped the monarchy survive. It also made it hard to say who was responsible, a question that haunted the debate over the emperor's role in the war.

3. The war is not settled. Inside Japan there is no single memory of 1931–45. One strand, voiced by many historians, teachers, survivors and by the Kono and Murayama statements, emphasises aggression, atrocity and remorse. Another, voiced by nationalists and part of the LDP, emphasises Japanese suffering, the Allied firebombing and atomic bombs, and the injustice of "victor's justice", and resents what it sees as endless demands for apology. China and South Korea read every Yasukuni visit and textbook revision through that lens. Relations with both neighbours rise and fall with how Japanese leaders speak about the past.

4. Pacifism and its limits. Article 9 and the memory of Hiroshima made pacifism part of national identity. But Japan also hosts major US bases, maintains large, modern armed forces under another name, and now sits beside a much stronger China and a nuclear-armed North Korea. Whether to rewrite Article 9 is the defining constitutional argument of the age.

5. The first country to grow old. Japan is living through what most rich countries, and China, will face: a shrinking workforce, more deaths than births, empty houses in emptying villages, and the question of whether to rely on robots, on women and older people working longer, or on immigrants. The rest of the world is watching how it copes.

Japan has reinvented itself twice in modern times: in 1868 and in 1945, both times after a shock from outside. The question its history poses now is whether it can reinvent itself a third time without one.

The takeaway

Japan's history is a story of selective borrowing and fierce independence. Its people adopted rice, writing, Buddhism and a state from the mainland, then were ruled for seven centuries by warrior governments in the emperor's name, then spent two and a half centuries at peace under the Tokugawa while controlling their contact with the world. Forced open in 1853, Japan modernised in a generation and became an empire that conquered much of Asia, committed mass atrocities and was destroyed in 1945. Rebuilt under occupation as a pacifist democracy, it became the world's great economic miracle, then stalled for three decades. Today it is rich, safe and ageing fast, governed by a newly dominant conservative party, and still arguing, with itself and its neighbours, about how to remember the war.

Try this: pick one Japanese thing in your life, a bowl of ramen, a Nintendo game, a Toyota, a haiku, a manga. Trace it back through this history: when did that thing, or the skills behind it, enter Japan, and from where? Then find one place in the story where Japan chose not to borrow, and ask why.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, life expectancy, fertility, age structure.
- Nippon.com: "Japan Census Highlights Accelerating Population Decline" (13 October 2026); "Japan's Senior Cohort Approaches 30% of Total Population" (7 October 2026, from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications data); Takaichi cabinet approval polls (9 October 2026).
- France 24 reporting: Takaichi's election as LDP leader and prime minister (4 and 21 October 2025); China's response to her Taiwan remarks (21 November 2025); the dissolution (23 January 2026) and election result (8 February 2026); the Imperial House Law revision (17 July 2026).
- Kono Statement (4 August 1993) and Murayama Statement (15 August 1995), as summarised and quoted in the scholarly literature; Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs site could not be reached for this piece.
- Nanjing and comfort-women estimates: Kasahara Tokushi, Hata Ikuhiko, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Su Zhiliang, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as cited in the scholarly literature on the war.
- Vital statistics (births 1949, 1973, 2024; deaths 2024; population peak) from the Statistics Bureau of Japan and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, as tabulated in standard references.
- Dates of the premodern and modern periods cross-checked against the scholarly works cited in the relevant encyclopaedia articles; each claim is logged with its source.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen (the authoritative history from the Tokugawa to the postwar era)
- 📘 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower (the Pulitzer-winning account of the occupation, seen from the Japanese side)
- 📘 A Modern History of Japan — Andrew Gordon (a clear, balanced textbook from 1800 to the present, strong on ordinary people's lives)
- 📘 The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler (read the original long read of Japanese literature)
- 📘 Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival — David Pilling (modern Japan, the lost decades and 2011, by a journalist who lived there)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Japan: A Condensed History of Isolation, Innovation, and Identity; If I Was Born in Japan; A Brief History of China (this series); Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen