About the Author

Welcome to Japan History! My name is Richard Jesner. I’m originally from Glasgow, Scotland, but since 2006, I’ve been living in a rural prefecture in Japan known as Nara. Although not as famous as Tōkyō, Ōsaka, or Kyōto, Nara’s popularity has been rising since a number of guide books around the world have started printing pictures of its scenic temples and infamous deer park.

I’d begun studying Japanese shortly before moving to Japan, but a lack of resources, classes, and teachers severely hindered my progress. Since beginning my life in Nara, however, it got a whole lot easier; my new environment became my textbook. Shop names… signboards… the instruction sticker on the wall of my shower… everything became a study tool. Three years of obsessively reading every kanji character around me and I managed to pass the top grade of the Japanese Language Proficiency test(N1 as it is now known).

As the years passed, I picked up bits and pieces about Japanese history from comics, TV shows, movies, and conversations with friends. But I never really had an interest in it. That all changed in 2019, however, when I decided that since I’d pretty much committed myself to living in Japan long term, I should have at least a basic grasp on its history. So, I went on Amazon and rented a book that gave an overview of Japanese history written from a Western perspective. Interesting and well-written as it was, it left me with many questions. So I read another book. And another. But the more I read, the more insatiable my thirst for knowledge became.

Before long, I switched to Japanese sources. That’s when I really started finding the answers I’d been looking for. Initially, I’d been hesitant about studying in Japanese since I knew it would take me longer to get through the books and articles than if I were reading them in English. And while that turned out to be the case, it was worth the effort; not only were there infinitely more sources available in Japanese, but they were, more often than not, written in a more light-hearted, easily digestible manner. Studying Japanese history through the perspective of the descendants of the people who created it proved to be so much more enlightening than any of the books or sources I’d studied up until that point. Not to mention, the level of detail was beyond anything I could have prepared myself for!

As an example let’s take a look at the Wikipedia page for Tokugawa Ieyasu, first shogun of the Edo shogunate and one of the most famous figures in all Japanese history.

20+ pages of information presumably covers a lot, right? Now let’s compare it to the Japanese page…

More than three times the content!! And when you take into account the fact that Japanese words don’t have spaces between them and are usually only 2-4 characters long, there’s a further 10 pages in there at least!!

So, time consuming as this process is(a great deal of it consumed by dictionary usage), this is how I’ve gained the level of knowledge I have of Japanese history up until this point. Through this website, I hope to instil that knowledge in as light-hearted and easily-digestible a manner as the sources that guided me did.

Right now, I’m aiming to pass level three of the national Japanese history test(Level five being the lowest and one being the highest). Wish me luck!

Richard Jesner