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One of Japan's Red seal ships (1634), which were used for trade throughout
Asia.
Samurai of the Satsuma clan during the Boshin war, circa 1867.
The 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.After Hideyoshi's death, Tokugawa Ieyasu
utilized his position as regent for Hideyoshi's son Toyotomi Hideyori to gain
political and military support. When open war broke out, he defeated rival clans
in the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Ieyasu was appointed shōgun in 1603 and
established the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo (modern Tokyo). The Tokugawa shogunate
enacted a variety of measures to control the daimyo, among them the sankin-kotai
policy. In 1639, the shogunate began the isolationist sakoku ("closed country")
policy that spanned the two and a half centuries of tenuous political unity
known as the Edo period. The study of Western sciences, known as rangaku,
continued during this period through contacts with the Dutch enclave at Dejima
in Nagasaki. The Edo period also gave rise to kokugaku, or literally "national
studies", the study of Japan by the Japanese themselves.
On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry and the "Black Ships" of the United
States Navy forced the opening of Japan to the outside world with the Convention
of Kanagawa. The Boshin War of 1867–1868 led to the resignation of the shogunate,
and the Meiji Restoration established a government centered around the emperor.
Adopting Western political, judicial and military institutions, a parliamentary
system modeled after the British parliament was introduced, with Ito Hirobumi as
the first Prime Minister in 1882. Meiji era reforms transformed the Empire of
Japan into an industrialized world power that embarked on a number of military
conflicts to increase access to natural resources. After victories in the First
Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan
gained control of Korea, Taiwan and the southern half of Sakhalin.
The early twentieth century saw a brief period of "Taisho democracy"
overshadowed by the rise of Japanese expansionism and militarization. World War
I enabled Japan, which joined the side of the victorious Allies, to expand its
influence and territorial holdings. Japan continued its expansionist policy by
occupying Manchuria in 1931. As a result of international condemnation for this
occupation, Japan resigned from the League of Nations two years later. In 1936,
Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany, joining the Axis Powers
in 1941.
In 1937, Japan invaded other parts of China, precipitating the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), after which the United States placed an oil
embargo on Japan. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States naval
base in Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States, the United Kingdom
and the Netherlands. This act brought the United States into World War II. After
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, along with the Soviet
Union joining the war against it, Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender on
August 15 (V-J Day). The war cost Japan millions of lives and left much of the
country's industry and infrastructure destroyed. The International Military
Tribunal for the Far East, was convened by the Allies (on May 3, 1946) to
prosecute Japanese leaders for war crimes such as the Nanjing Massacre.
In 1947, Japan adopted a new pacifist constitution emphasizing liberal
democratic practices. Official American occupation lasted until 1952 and Japan
was granted membership in the United Nations in 1956. Under a subsequent program
of aggressive industrial development aided by the US, Japan achieved spectacular
growth to become the second largest economy in the world, with a growth rate
averaging 10% for four decades. This ended in the mid-1990s when Japan suffered
a major recession. Positive growth in the early twenty-first century has
signalled a gradual recovery.
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