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History is full of people who died in ridiculous manners. The Greek playwright Aeschylus, for example, was supposedly killed by a falling tortoise. Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, ingested mercury pills in the belief that they would grant him immortality. Ironically(but not surprisingly) they led to his death. More than likely, every country has its own tale of untimely, but humorous, demise….
Welcome to part three of this overview of the life of Oda Nobunaga. I never intended for this to be a trilogy, but I guess I was naïve to think I could condense the life of Japan’s greatest warrior into just two articles. If his life were to be made into a movie trilogy, I have no doubt it’d be one of the most epic…
Welcome to part two of this study of arguably the greatest samurai of all time. In this part, we’ll be looking at some of the reasons why he’s considered the greatest by so many. I hinted at one reason at the end of part one, where Oda Nobunaga dealt a devastating blow to the Imagawa at the battle of Okehazama―one of the three major upsets…
Some men need no introduction. In Japan’s case, no one man needs less of an introduction than Oda Nobunaga. I’m willing to bet more Japanese people know his name than the full name of the current prime minister. Undoubtedly the most famous samurai of all time, he ranks in the top three of virtually every samurai ranking that has been conducted in the modern age….
Welcome to the Jōmon era―the most peaceful era in Japanese history. How do we know it was so peaceful? Well, of all the skeletal remains found from its 14,000-plus-year history, only 1.8% were found to contain evidence of assault―one-fifth of the percentage of similar civilizations from the same time period! For this and many other reasons, it’s relaxing to go back and look at the…
Every now and again history throws out a character so accomplished and yet so shrouded in mystery that they beg the question ‘Were they real?’. Of all such people, there are perhaps none so famous as Shōtoku Taishi. His face has adorned seven varieties of Japanese banknotes over the past hundred years―a feat unrivalled by any other historical figure. In the Heian era, he was…
Kofun are one of the best things about living in Japan―especially when you live in Kansai and you’re surrounded by them. Southern Nara and Eastern Ōsaka in particular are riddled with kofun to the point you feel like Indiana Jones just walking down the street. Some have been turned into parks, some museums and others have been reconstructed to appear the way archaeologists believed them…
Sushi is ubiquitous. With almost 200,000 Japanese restaurants worldwide, most of them serving some form of sushi, and the fact that sushi is ranking in more ‘Most popular foods’ lists than ever before, it’s arguably the most famous Japanese food in the world. But sushi didn’t always exist in the form we know it today. In fact, it has only existed in this form since…
Japan has experienced many battles in many forms over its long and varied history, from small personal skirmishes fought between political rivals and samurai clans to full-scale conflicts between groups of 100,000+, and even wars that lasted as long as a decade. Most had little to no impact on the country’s history and remain in the history books purely to give us a deeper insight…
We’ve reached the final part of this overview. For those of you who have stuck with it from the very beginning, thank you! For those of you who jumped in here for information on the Taishō/Shōwa eras, you have no idea how long this thing has been!! I was really hoping to keep it to ten parts, but Japanese history wouldn’t allow it; it’s just…