Today we’re going to be taking a look at the Seven Great Temples of Nara—the seven temples considered to have held the greatest amount of influence in Nara prefecture throughout history. Having lived in Nara since 2006, this is a topic close to my heart. I’ve visited all the temples I’m going to be describing in this article multiple times each, but I never get…
When it comes to samurai, I love extremes. The first, the last, the strongest, the weakest, the kindest, the cruelest… I plan to do them all eventually. But today… the first! The very beginning of samurai culture: Taira no Masakado. Of course, he isn’t actually the first samurai. No one knows who the real first samurai was, nor can anyone pinpoint the moment in time…
We reach the final part of our story. Bakumatsu is drawing to an end. Don’t be dismayed though; the final act proves to be far more shocking and bloody than anything we’ve seen so far. A power great enough to rival the shōgunate is beginning to form, and there may be little the shōgunate can do to stop it. Part three of our story begins…
Welcome to part two of this coverage of Bakumatsu, arguably one of the most exciting times in Japanese history, detailing the downfall of the shōgunate and the samurai. In part one, we looked at how the arrival of foreign forces stirred up a panic in Japan, causing a number of social and economic problems that set off the whole chain of events. Satsuma han dominated…
Bakumatsu… The end of the Edo shōgunate… No shōgunate goes down without a fight! The Kamakura shōgunate ended with a two-year war orchestrated by Emperor Go-Daigo. The Muromachi shōgunate slowly faded out as the Sengoku daimyō rose to power until it was eventually finished off by Oda Nobunaga. The end of the Edo shōgunate, however, was significantly more complicated. It involved a series of political…
645 was a big year for Japan. Not only did the Imperial Family regain control of the court, but it also conducted the nation’s first set of political reforms: the Taika reforms. Unfortunately, as is more often than not the case with history this old, the texts detailing the events are difficult to trust. The two texts that document the tale were both written around…
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…
