The History Of Japan: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘What do we know about very early Japanese civilization and how old? How old is it?’
‘So we think there have been people living in Japan on the Japanese islands probably for about 30,000 years, maybe 35,000 years, you can dig up edge ground axes and all this kind of thing. So we're fairly sure they've been there for a while. But the first written records for Japan to actually find out in detail what was going on. We don't really have those until the early centuries AD. So Chinese visitors came across and had a look of what was going on there. They discovered these, sort of a series of small chiefdoms dotted around the archipelago. So there's no place yet that would understand itself as being Japan, just these different chiefdoms.
And the first known and named person in Japanese history is a shaman Queen called Himiko who was in power, she came to power almost as a teenager in her early 20s, in about 190 AD. And she was a combination of a shaman and a military ruler. And so the picture we get from the Chinese observers talking about her kingdom, they call her, they sort of saw her as ruling by magic and sorcery as well as force of arms. So you get a sense of a community, which is ruled by her from behind palisades guarded, no one ever really sees her, communing with the gods for the good of the realm. Her brother, we think, does much of the sort of day to day work of ruling the realm. And it's a fairly hierarchical place, as well. I know people think about Japan now as a fairly hierarchical society. The earliest suggestion we have is of a fairly hierarchical place based around people's wealth and status, based in turn around the amount of rice wealth they control, precious metals, like brass from which you make bells and mirrors and swords and these sorts of things. So yes, status society, controlled by a mixture of her shamanic power, and also the force of her warriors’ arms, but even then, that's really only one out of perhaps 100 or so chiefdoms, although hers, we think is the most powerful, and it's certainly the one that we know the most about from this early period.’...
‘What contribution did ancient Japan make to global culture?’
‘It's a good question. Partly because people would have trouble agreeing on what would be a Japanese contribution versus a Chinese contribution. So from around the five hundreds AD, you have this heavy sustained contact with China. So a lot of what we think about as being Japanese has origins in China. So Japanese Buddhism comes from China via Korea, a lot of its temple architecture, rice, we talked about other elements of its cuisine. The kimono also has its origins in Chinese style court dress. So the point at which you can say there's a real definitive Japanese contribution, I might, I might highlight two things, I suppose.
One would be going right the way back that Japan produces some of the world's oldest pottery. So the very early period, we call it Jomon, which we date from roughly 14,500 BCE, all the way through to 500 AD. So it's a huge long period. But that period is defined in part by the discovery of what they call rope patterned pottery, so quite simple clay pots with a rope pattern around them. That's what Jomon means. For a while we thought that was the world's oldest pottery, so a lot of Japanese would point to that as being a big early contribution. Unfortunately for Japan, they found some in China, which is about 20,000 years, BC, so a little bit older. But still some of that old pottery in Japan, I think, is really important. And even now, there are styles of pottery in Japan, Bizenyaki [sp?] is one example, which really emphasize not a polished result, but a kind of beautifully rustic aesthetic to it. So that sort of pottery, that kind of ceramic, I think, is a really early Japanese contribution.
If I had to name another early one, it would probably be what a lot of your readers and listeners would know as Shinto. The Shinto religion, the way of the gods. It's not really called Shinto until you know, towards the modern era. But this sense of human life taking place amidst these flows of energy that go right through nature, through the natural world, the earth, vegetation, other animals, being part of a flow of energy. So Queen Himiko who we spoke about, one of her big roles, we think, was to call down some of the gods into particular features of the landscape, a tree, a waterfall stream, and worship them, there in natural form. So what used to be called kind of animism, the sense of nature being pervaded by the divine... So if you wanted two examples from ancient Japan, I'd say probably those two: that natural rustic aesthetic for its ceramics, and then that sense of the world being inhabited by the divine...
Buddhism comes into Japan, we think, around 550AD. So it's been around for 1000 years by that point in Asia, and it passes through China, through the Korean Peninsula and makes its way into Japan... people are quite skeptical early on. it's thought, it's treated as a migrant religion. And there's a worry that the gods we've been speaking about, the ones that have, you know, what we now call Shinto that they might be offended by this interloper. And early on Japan goes through a couple of natural disasters, at which point people blame Buddhism, they say the native Gods clearly are offended. And so they throw Buddha statues into a canal, they burn down a temple. So it takes a while to get going after 550. But you could say probably by around 900, or 1000, it's becoming the dominant institutional form of religion in Japan.’...
‘Why did the West not colonized Japan for so long, whereas others such as China couldn't resist?’
‘Much of the reason I would argue is that Japan wasn't of all that much interest to people in the West. India was thought to be far richer. There were lots of legends about the wealth of India. The same is true of China’...
‘It's funny. In Japan, if you go all the way back to, what, 700s through to the middle of the 1100s, you've got a period of imperial rule. After that the Emperors are more or less the puppets of powerful aristocratic families and later of the shoguns. And then after 1868, the Emperor sort of reappears. The Meiji Emperor, just a teenager when he comes to power, as I say, taken as a figurehead by these new rulers in Japan. But the Emperor doesn't have a great degree of power. The new leaders are very smart about setting the Emperor up as divine or reminding people of his divinity, as someone to be respected, as someone whose authority is absolute, the Japanese Constitution, the modern constitution from 1889 until Second World War basically says people's rights are a gift from the Emperor, and he will take them back if they turn out to have abused them. So very clever use gets made of the Emperor as a figurehead and a symbol. But the degree to which he has any actual power is is pretty debatable.’...
‘And the theme of conflict continued into the 1930s for Japan, didn't it?’
‘Yes, absolutely. Some people would say perhaps the change point comes in the 1920s. You have a generation of political leaders and military leaders from this tumultuous period I've talked about from the late 1860s onwards, who are remembered now as being founding fathers, great people, visionary, but also quite, perhaps quite realistic and mature in their vision of where Japan or to place limitations on itself as a world power. A lot of those guys start to die off in the 1910s and early 1920s. And you get a generation coming through who've never really known vulnerability, for Japan. And the view they increasingly start to take, and you really see it among young officers in the military in particular is, Japan isn't being given the respect it deserves.
So a couple of really quick examples. Japanese diplomats try to get a racial equality clause built into the Treaty of Versailles. European countries, Westerners generally, block them. The United States immigration policy is clearly a racist policy against so called yellow peril, the Chinese and also the Japanese. They do deals on naval ratios with the British and the Americans, the Japanese see themselves as losing out in that. This all contributes to a sense that Japan's diplomats are spineless, politicians are a little bit useless. And in order for Japan to protect itself in the world, really, it needs to have a strong military, and it needs to secure itself on the Asian mainland… this younger generation think that we need to secure ourselves more on the Asian mainland, otherwise, we're going to be overrun, because they think they're kind of being hemmed in… there is a sort of encirclement theory that some in the Japanese military would say, we are done for as a country, if we don't assert ourselves’"