Japan's History: A Short Guide for Karate Students

Japan's history: a short guide for karate students

You don't need to be a historian to train karate. But names like samurai, shogun, Edo and Meiji come up all the time, and it helps to know where they fit. This is a quick tour, based on the history of Japan in the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. The facts are Grolier's; the summary is ours.

Early peoples

One of the earliest known cultures in Japan is the Jomon, from about 8000 BC: hunters and gatherers with stone and bone tools and very distinctive pottery. In the 3rd century BC a new people, the Yayoi, probably arrived from mainland Asia and brought rice farming, weaving and wheel-made pottery.

The oldest written histories, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon shoki (720), mix legend with history. They trace the state back to a mythical emperor Jimmu in 660 BC. Grolier notes they become more reliable from the 5th century on.

Emperors and courts

From around the 3rd or 4th century AD, rulers from the Yamato plain on Honshu unified much of the country. They claimed descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Chinese ideas shaped the early state. Prince Shotoku issued a 17-article constitution in 604, and the Taika reforms of 646 claimed all land for the emperor. The first permanent capital was built at Nara in 710, and in 794 Emperor Kammu moved it to Heian, modern Kyoto.

In Heian the Fujiwara family dominated the court for centuries through marriage ties with the imperial house. Meanwhile, land drifted into private estates, private armies appeared and a class of rural warriors, the samurai, emerged.

The age of the shoguns

Two warrior clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, fought their way into court politics in the 12th century. The Minamoto won, and Minamoto Yoritomo became shogun in 1192. From then on the emperor was a revered figure, but real power usually belonged to the military government.

Some highlights from the centuries that followed:

• 1274 and 1281: two Mongol invasions are driven off, helped by storms later called kamikaze, "divine winds."
• 1338: the Ashikaga shogunate begins.
• 1467 onward: the Onin War opens a century of fighting among regional lords, the daimyo.
• 1543: the first Europeans arrive. The Portuguese start trading, and in 1549 Francis Xavier brings Catholicism. Christianity is later banned, and by 1639 almost all Europeans are expelled.

Unification and the Tokugawa peace

Between 1560 and 1600, three great daimyo reunified the country: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Their tools, as Grolier lists them, included firearms, fortified castles, disarming the peasants and a national land survey. By Hideyoshi's death in 1598, samurai had been separated from the rest of society.

Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603. His family ruled from Edo (modern Tokyo) until 1867. It was a long peace. Cities boomed (Edo passed a million people), and the samurai, at the top of a four-class system, gradually turned from warriors into bureaucrats. That shift matters for martial arts history, because the arts changed when they were no longer needed on the battlefield.

Opening up: Meiji and after

By the 19th century the system was creaking: peasant uprisings, indebted samurai, an inefficient government. When Commodore Perry arrived in 1853, the shogun asked the daimyo for advice and lost control of the debate. The slogan "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians" spread, and in 1868 power returned to the emperor in the Meiji Restoration.

In less than half a century Japan went from a closed feudal society to an industrial power. A conscript army replaced the samurai and defeated Saigo Takamori's samurai revolt in 1877. A constitution followed in 1889. Wars with China (1894 to 1895) and Russia (1904 to 1905) made Japan a major power in East Asia, and it annexed Korea in 1910.

This is the Japan Okinawan karate stepped into in the early 20th century: modern, nationalistic and hungry for anything that could be turned into a "way."

Sources

• "Japan, history of," The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (CD-ROM), Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc..