Japan: History, Geography, Economy & Culture - Bilingual Subtitles
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A volcanic an edge of the Eurasian continent.
A land of stunning natural beauty, enhanced by centuries of unique art.
Having a history completely unlike any other nation, it has maintained a unique and distinctive culture to the present day.
This is the country that rose from the ashes of defeat in war to become a global economic superpower.
This the land of samurai and judo, sushi and bonsai, manga and godzilla.
This is the land of the rising sun.
This is Japan.
Oh You Japan is an archipelago laying off the eastern temperate coast of Asia and is a country that is the home of the people of the same name,
the Japanese.
They call their own country Nihon or Nippon,
which literally means sun's origin, referring to the fact that it is the first significant place in Asia to receive the sunrise each day.
The word has been in use since around 700 AD.
The English word for this country, Japan, is believed to have come through a corruption of Nippon via Portuguese Malay or Mandarin Chinese.
The Japanese archipelago has been inhabited by humans at least as far back as 16,000 years by hunter-gatherers known as the German.
But around 300 BC,
the Yayoi people began to move into the islands from the mainland,
bringing with them the ancestor of today's Japanese language, as well as Chinese influences in art and architecture.
The first mention of Japan in written records was in the Chinese book of Han in 111 AD,
and the later Chinese records of the three kingdoms as being the most powerful of a of states on the archipelago.
Buddhism arrived around the 6th century the Korean Peninsula and was mixed with the traditional Shinto religion of the islands.
A gradual centralization of power took place between the 6th and 8th centuries in what was known as the Asuka period,
but the first truly recognisable Japanese.
State began in the Nara period of the 8th century, with the first emperor ruling from a Chinese-styled court.
The capital moved to Kyoto in 794, where it would remain until almost the present day.
Introverted into the politicking of the imperial court, the Empress Power declined over the following centuries and regional clans filled up.
vacuum.
Civil war erupted in the twelfth century,
with a Minamoto clan coming out on top,
and their head becoming the first shogun, a military ruler with true power, with the Emperor merely as a figurehead.
Japan would remain more or less under military rule for the next seven seven centuries.
During these next centuries, power shifted back and forth between the regional clans and their armies of samurai and the shogun.
These clans united to beat off two attempted Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281,
but by 1467 the Shoguns power was broken,
and the country descended into violent civil war,
with more than a dozen clans ruled by feudal warlords known as Daimyo fighting it out over the next century,
in what became known as the Sengoku period, the stories of which have gone interlegend to be retold time and again.
This period was further complicated by the first arrival of Europeans, principally the Portuguese, but later the Dutch and English Christianity and guns.
This period was finally concluded in the year 1600 at the Battle of Segeghara when the
warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu was triumphant and all other rival clans defeated.
While the palace emperor remained in Kyoto, the Shobun Tokugawa moved his court to Edo.
later renamed Tokyo, and his successors held absolute power for the next two and a half centuries.
Christianity was viewed as a threat to the Shogun's power and was outlawed under penalty of death.
To go further, all external influences would be prevented as Japan closed itself off from the outside world.
Japanese were forbidden.
to travel abroad.
No foreigners were permitted to enter Japan, with only a sole Dutch outpost being permitted.
No other country in world history has enacted such a wide-reaching policy of isolation for so long.
Despite the isolation, Japan flourished economically and artistically, and its population expanded.
considerably, reaching 30 million by the year 1700, with Edo being the largest city in the world by 1721.
At this time also,
private schools flourished and it is thought that Japan may have been the most literate country in the world at that time.
By the mid-1800s, however, the power of the shogun was waning as a result of growing.
unrest from government in aptitude and economic stagnation, but it took a foreign power to act as the catalyst for change.
In 1852,
a fleet of United States warships led by Commodore Perry was given a mission by the President to force Japan to open up to trade.
The following year, this fleet arrived in Edo Bank.
and used its displays of superior military might and technology to intimidate the authorities,
who eventually had to concede in allowing foreigners to visit and trade with the country.
This change destabilized the shogunate and after a brief civil war was deposed in 1868
with the emperor restored to power in what became known as the Meiji Restoration, named after the emperor's dynastic name.
It was at this time that the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, and that city renamed to Tokyo, meaning Kyoto of the East.
In the following decades, the fastest modernization of any country in history took place, with Japan developing from society into an industrialised nation.
Westerners were brought in in their thousands to advise and supervise in the construction of railways and factories,
and the traditional dress of the rulers and armies of the shogunate was replaced by European-style uniforms.
Despite westernisation, however, the Japanese held firm to their traditional mix of Buddhist to culture and traditions.
It was during this period that the last and most northerly of the main islands of the archipelago, Hokkaido, began to be colonised.
Throughout all the preceding centuries,
the island was inherited by the ethnically distinct Ainu people,
and there had been little interest in it by the shogunate and the main clans due to its harsh winter clothes.
climate.
But this changed with the growth of Japan into a modern nation,
as its lands were seen as a means of feeding the grown population,
as well as ensuring that a firm presence there would resist the threat of a Russian takeover.
Between 1850 and 1950, the population on the island exploded from just 70,000 to over 4 million.
The native Ainu people were assimilated into the larger population, their distinctive culture all but extinguished.
There had never been a democratic tradition in Japan.
And so although an elected House of Representatives was part of the new constitution,
only 2% of Japanese could vote, and ultimately all nominal power was held by the Emperor.
The military began to gain power and influence throughout the government,
believing that the only way to ensure Japan's survival in this age of Western colonialism
was to use its new industrial power to seize colonies of its own,
gaining Taiwan in 1894 and emboldened by the defeat of the Russian fleet in 1905, occupying Korea in 1910.
This process of military control accelerated rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by fascism from Europe with moderates and dissidents murdered.
In 1931,
the large northern Chinese province of Manchuria was occupied,
In 1987,
Japan began a full-scale invasion of the latter weakened by its own civil war which had been raging since the disposal of the emperor in 1911.
Such actions brought condemnation from the United States and the United Kingdom,
who saw the growth of Japanese regional power as a threat to their own colonies and influence in the region.
Japan responded.
by allowing itself to fascist powers in Europe, Germany and Italy, in 1940, further worsening relations with the US and Britain.
With the Japanese invasion of French Indochina,
what is today Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Western trade embargoes culminated in an oil embargo, and without oil, Japan would not be able to continue.
industrialised warfare and had to act.
Realising it could not win a long war with the United States, Japan aimed to knock them out of the Pacific with a devastating blow.
And on December 7,
1941, they launched the surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as a pretext to attend.
declaration of war.
At same time,
Japanese forces invaded British Southeast Asia and within weeks Singapore had fallen in what is regarded as the worst defeat in British military history.
The Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, what is now Indonesia, were also occupied in rapid succession.
It seemed that Japanese military power was unstoppable.
And it is that we enter what I consider to be the darkest part in Japanese history.
For the peoples of those subject nations and the allied soldiers captured as prisoners of war, life under Japanese rule was nothing short of hell.
Through a twisting of the traditional Bushido samurai code,
defeated armies and people were viewed as subhuman by the ruling military and the armies were ordered to treat them brutally.
Allied POWs were starved,
put into forced labour, tortured and executed, while subject peoples in China, Korea, the and elsewhere were subject to massacres, mass rape and forced prostitution.
By this same twisted code,
the Japanese were taught that to be taken alive by the enemy was worse than death,
and so as the Allies finally began to turn the tide of war in late 1942,
the slow process of expelling the Japanese from their occupied territories was met with ferocious resistance with soldiers fighting to the death rather than be captured,
and in the ultimate symbol, sacrifice, pilots of the Japanese navy turned themselves into guided missiles in suicidal kamikaze attacks on US ships.
The Battle of the Pacific,
one of the most brutal and savage in any of history, reached an ultimate and truly apocalyptic crescendo in mid-1945.
In the face of such suicidal resistance,
it was estimated that a full-scale invasion of the Japanese main islands would result in half a million deaths of U.S.
servicemen.
And a decision was made by U.S.
President to use the ultimate weapon against the enemy.
On August 6th and 9th of 1945, to atomic bombers were dropped on the southwestern cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Between them, almost a quarter of a million people were killed, mostly civilians.
It is the only time in history where atomic or nuclear weapons have been used in war.
After such a devastating shock, Japan had no choice but to and it surrendered unconditionally.
The country was in ruins.
The two atomic bombs just the final blow after months of conventional bombing that had devastated all major cities.
For the first time in its long history, Japan was occupied by foreign power, the United States.
The leadership of the Japanese military under Tojo were tried and executed as war criminals,
but the Allies decided to let the Japanese keep their emperor,
Hirohito, to prevent total humiliation of the nation and any potential unrest in the general population.
In the following years of occupation,
up to 1952, major reforms were made to ensure that democracy and an orientation to peaceful methods would survive into the future.
And this has borne out in the seven decades since,
with the country not having fought a war but instead focusing on economic growth and power.
Mirroring, in a way, the incredible transformation from feudal to industrial power in the late 1800s, Japan pulled off another economic miracle.
of World War II to become the world's second largest economy by the late 1960s.
The economy grew year on year,
on average by 10% from 1956 until 1973, and by 1968 only the United States had a higher economic output.
Due largely to trends in overall demographics,
however, The economic came to an end in 1989, with the stock market and property price crash,
and throughout the 1990s there was virtually no growth in what became known as the last decade.
Since 2000, growth has recovered albeit slowly.
Japan is a unitary state, meaning that the central government has supreme authority.
as opposed to federal systems like the United States.
The country is divided into 47 counties called prefectures, and some of the larger prefectures such as Hokkaido are divided into sub-prefectures.
At the base of the State Administration are the municipalities, numbering over 1,700 in total.
Some of the larger cities like Tokyo and Osaka.
Saka have their own exceptional government structures.
Since the new constitution was created in 1947,
the emperor has no formal powers,
and so Japan is now a constitutional monarchy governed by an executive of a Prime Minister
and cabinet elected from the parliament known as the National Diet.
The diet is bicameral,
meaning that it's going to composed of two houses,
a 465-seat lower house of representatives elected by universal suffrage every four years,
and a 245-seat upper house of counselors elected again by all Japanese citizens over the age of 18 serving six-year terms.
The conservative liberal democratic party has been in power for all the but nine of the years since 1955 and dominate Japanese politics,
making some international commentators describe Japan as a flawed democracy.
The current emperor is Narahito,
son of Akahito who abdicated in 2019 and grandson of Hirohito who had lived through all the turbulence of the nationalistic takeover of Japan,
the most violent of all wars, its defeat and subsequent occupation by the United States and its rise economically afterwards.
Ultimately, these empress trace their lineage back to the 7th century according to legend,
although the first historically verifiable emperor dates to the 6th century AD.
Either way, Japan is regarded as the world's oldest surviving monarchy.
Japan is an archipelago of over 6,800 islands occupying the northwestern Pacific.
All but four of these islands are comparatively small and outlying and it is on the four main islands where the vast majority of the
population live.
5th Okinawa the far south half way to Taiwan is a notable exception to this rule.
The main four are from north to south,
Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, It is possible to travel across all four main islands by train, and from tip to tip would
take you just 29 hours thanks to the remarkable bullet trains that run all the way from
Sapporo in the north to Kagoshima in the south.
A car journey would take you 37 hours by comparison, and involves a ferry crossing from Hokkaido to Honshu in the north.
Japan's total land area is about 400,000 square kilometers, making it the fourth largest island in the world, and 61st country overall.
It has the sixth longest coastline of any nation.
Its highest point is Mount Fuji at 3,776 metres,
a dormant volcano that lasts erupted in 1708,
and owing to its near-perfect profile, a national symbol, and the most photographed natural feature on Earth.
Japan is bordered by the Pacific Ocean.
and flank.
To the northwest it faces the Korean Peninsula, the of Japan and the extreme southeast of Russia around their port of Vladivostok.
To the north is Sakalen and the Curial Islands also a of Russia, but with the closest four being claimed by Japan.
To the south runs a long chain of the Ryukyu Islands.
that face China across the East China Sea.
Japan about 20 degrees of latitude from 24 degrees north at the bottom of the UQ
chain to 45 degrees north at the tip of Hokkaido.
Consequently it sees great variation in climate.
the far islands are subtropical bordering on tropical.
As we head north along the Ryukyu chain and onto the main islands,
the humid subtropical climate of hot summers and cool winters,
with year-round precipitation, dominates all but mountain areas and is regarded as the principal climate of Japan.
It's only when we move into the north of Honshu Island where the winters start to become cold and consistent.
where we find a hot summer continental climate.
Finally, in the far north, these hot summers give way to only warm ones, and in combination with the cold winters, the island of Hokkaido
is therefore dominated by the warm summer continental climate.
The humid subtropical and continental climates are characterized by four distinct seasons.
islands, and being present in Japan have become a part of their culture and art history.
This nose and chills of winter contrast with the full green leaf and sweltering heat of summer,
while autumn bursts into vivid colour, thanks to so many maples being present on the islands.
But it's the spring that is celebrated the most, specifically the flowering of the cherry tree, the blossom that the Japanese call Sakura.
The blossom lasts no more than a week or so in one location,
but the wave of blossom travels up the country from south to north over March and April.
During this festival,
known as Hanami, family and friends and celebrate with food and drink together beneath the trees in a tradition that could goes back centuries.
The northwest coast of Japan has a peculiarity of being one of the snowiest places in the world.
This is owing to a rare combination of cold winds blowing over water onto the land.
In this case the dry cold winds that consistently blow out from central Siberia each winter.
As they roll over the sea of Japan.
Japan, they gather moisture, then deposit it heavily onto cities like Sapporo and Nagata.
This unusual effect is the winter part of the eastern Asian monsoon, the world's largest weather system, which affects all islands in Japan.
In summer, winds move in the opposite direction from the Pacific Ocean toward the Eurasian mainland, laden with moisture.
As most of the populated cities are on the southeast side of the islands,
these cities experience higher rainfall in summer than in winter as a result.
Owing to its heavily mountainous geography,
two of the land is not suitable for either agriculture or urban development,
and so much of the country has retained the natural biome of temperate broadleaf forest.
In the far north, this forest gives way to coniferous boreal forest, while in the far southern islands a form of tropical forest is present.
That mountainous geography has a single cause, one that is perhaps Japan's biggest curse, plate tectonics.
Japan lies adjacent to fault lines that separate the giant Pacific Plate with others on the eastern edge of Asia.
This has produced volcanoes such as Mount Fuji just mentioned,
but more importantly earthquakes and especially the tsunami that can sometimes be produced when these occur In fact,
the word Tsunami is one that we have borrowed from Japanese,
so much that these destructive forces have dominated their history, with the most recent being the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.
This magnitude 9 quake killed 16 to 20,000 people,
the vast majority of whom were drowned by the Tsunami, and led to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, whose effects are still ongoing today.
Japan has a population of 126 million ranked 11th in the world, with 80% of them living on the largest island of Honshu.
Almost a third of them, 38 million, live in the greater Tokyo area, which is the most populous metropolitan area in the world.
The second largest conurbation is that of Osaka, Kobe.
having 20 million people.
Between them, these two conurbations account for half of Japan's population.
Already one of the most densely populated nations in the world,
and with most of the land area mountainous, this population is crammed into crowded cities that occupy the relatively rare coastal plains.
The vast majority are Japan's population over 98% are ethnic Japanese, making the country one of the most ethnically homogenous in the world.
At 83.5 years,
Japan is ranked number two in the world for life expectancy,
with the island of Okinawa having the highest proportion of centenarians found anywhere in the world with an increased
aging population due to a reduction in the birth rate in recent decades,
the population is expected to fall considerably to 95 million by 2050, which will have significant effects on the economy, housing and so on.
The Japanese language is spoken by virtually all the inhabitants of the archipelago.
Its origins are uncertain.
but it is believed to have come across from the mainland by the Yayoi people about two millennia ago.
It is the dominant member of the small Japonic language group,
with Ryukyuan being the other, spoken only by older people in the Ryukyu Islands and now facing extinction.
Japan was greatly influenced by the Chinese in the 8th and 9th centuries,
with as many as half the words today, believed to have come from this period of importation.
The written language is one of the most complicated in the world, being a combination of three different scripts – Kenji, Hiragana and Katakana.
Kenji, derived from Chinese, uses thousands of different pictograms to describe meaning and is used for most content words.
Hiragana and katakana represent spoken syllables and are used to perform grammatical linkages and borrowed foreign words respectively.
Shinto and Buddhism are the country's primary religions.
Shinto is exclusive to the archipelago and is based on the belief that kami or spirits present throughout nature as well as in people.
Buddhism arrived in Japan around a millennium after its birth in India in the 6th century Japan's flag is unmistakable,
being a simple red disc in the center of a field of white, representing the rising sun.
It has been in use formally since 1870,
although the use of a sun flag to represent the Japanese Imperial Court goes back as early as the 8th century.
Japan has no coat of arms as such, but the Chrysanthemum is considered a national emblem and represents the emperor.
Japan's economy is the third largest in the world,
after the United States and China, and ranks as number one in the world by the Economic Complexity Index.
It is dominated by an advanced manufacturing sector that exports electronics,
cars, motorcycles, robots, and dozens of other types of finished products or components built to a
quality and precision that is the envy of the world.
Japan's rise as an economic superpower,
Tiger economy is a truly remarkable story when one considers that it was barely out of the feudal era a century and a half ago.
The manufacturing techniques that originated in Japan such as Justin Time Logistics have been emulated today by most Western economies,
as well as the later Tiger economies of the Faris such as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and finally China.
Japan the first country to develop high-speed rail systems with their world-famous Shinkansen or bullet trains first appearing in 1964 and continuing today to link
all the major cities across all four main islands.
Japanese manufacturing brands are household names globally.
In the automotive If these include Toyota, the world's largest by volume of production, Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Subaru, Isuzu, and Daihatsu.
Until the recent ramp up of Chinese production,
Japan was making more cars, trucks, and than any other country in the world, and is still the world's largest automotive exporter.
In electronics, Japan dominated for decades, although recent competition from South Korea, Taiwan, and China had reduced their market share.
Nonetheless, its electronics industry is still the world's largest, and Japanese brands of television's cameras, video recorders, camcorders, video game systems, and laptops are legend.
Past and present,
they include Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Nintendo, Yamaha, Epson, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sega, Nikon, Sharp, Konika Minolta, Fujitsu, Casio, JVC, Pioneer, Samuel, Riko, and NEC.
These corporations were leaders in the development and mass market production of the transistor radio, the personal cassette player, digital watches, video recorders and laptops.
Tokyo has the third largest stock exchange in the world,
after the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ,
while the Japanese currency, the CNN is a third-most widely traded currency after the US dollar and Euro.
The last decade of the 1990s and early 2000s saw economic activity contract,
and this is part of the reason why Japan has by far the highest national debt of any developed
nation at an eye-watering 236% of GDP in 2017.
With your forementioned demographic issues of a declining population, the economic future of the country remains unclear.
Japanese culture is one of the most distinct and globally recognised in the world.
It is a complex fusion of both East Asian and Western influences,
but at its centre is a rich body of customs and art that originated.
with in the archipelago.
The Japanese unique take on calligraphy,
illustration, painting, flower arranging, garden design, poetry, theatre and clothing are admired globally and have
led to many Japanese words finding their way into English, including Bonsai, Haiku, Ichabana, Kabuki, Origami, Geisha, Kimono and karaoke.
Japanese traditional warfare has been a magnet for aficionados around the world for many years,
with costuminous traditions and weapons of the samurai, particularly from the warring states period of the 16th century instantly recognisable.
It's martial arts,
our world's famous and include karate,
sumo, aikido, and kendo, with judo in particular being internationally popular and taught in dojos or schools around the world, and on a related subject, ninjas
anyone?
More recent global influences have come from Japan fusing its power in the electronics industry.
with its long tradition of art and storytelling in the video games industry, being a major player in this market since the 1970s.
Japanese and comics,
manga and anime are the latest incarnations in a tradition of illustration that goes back centuries, and now enjoy a huge audience globally in addition.
the domestic market.
Japanese cinema is as old as any in Europe or North America and had a golden age in the 1960s,
with Kurosawa's 7th Samurai regarded in many polls as one of the finest films and most influential in cinema history.
And we mention it Godzilla,
a prehistoric sea monster and empowered by nuclear radiation to become a global pop icon and I haven't even mentioned food.
The Japanese have developed a distinctive and refined cuisine across the centuries with ramen noodles,
fried tempura, teriyaki meats and sushi being the most popular around the world.
Any country that can make raw fish not only edible but desirable deserves a particular credit.
For a relatively small country, isolated on the eastern fringe of the continental landmass of Eurasia, Japan's global reach is astonishing.
As a Gaijin who has studied this country,
its history and its art for the longest time,
I still have to scratch my head when trying to understand the fundamental essence of the country and its people.
What is Japan?
Who are the Japanese?
There are few, if any, non-western countries that have so successfully taken the expansion of western culture and fused it into their own country.
traditions and art,
and yet how does one reconcile the softness and perfection of their manners with the savagery that has marked the darker episodes in their history?
I for one cannot.
Japan is as much of a mystery as it is a fascination, and will likely continue to be so in the centuries to come.
And that's Japan.
I hope you enjoyed this whirlwind tour of that unique archipelago and its people.
If you did, then please like and share this video.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially if you're from this country, and if I missed out anything that you feel is important.
If you haven't done so already,
then please click the subscribe button so you don't miss future episodes,
and if you'd like to support future development of this channel, then please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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