# 2000 Years of Japan History in 35 Minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0yp7xjbWRI

[00:00] Japan has been destroyed twice. It
[00:02] survived earthquakes, civil wars, the
[00:04] only atomic bombs ever used in a war,
[00:07] and the occasional giant lizard attack.
[00:09] It even survived two Mongol invasions.
[00:12] Over 4 million Japanese died along the
[00:15] way. How does a country come back from
[00:17] all that? And how does it stay so
[00:19] unmistakably Japanese? To understand how
[00:22] Japan survived all this, we have to go
[00:24] back to a queen nobody was ever allowed
[00:27] to see. Here's
[00:31] a map of Japan way off to the east all
[00:34] by itself in the Pacific. For around
[00:36] 10,000 years, people had been living on
[00:38] these islands. They were called the Jon,
[00:41] and they made some of the oldest pottery
[00:43] ever found in the entire world. But
[00:45] what's strange is that for most of those
[00:47] 10,000 years, basically nobody wrote
[00:50] anything down about them. There's just
[00:53] silence. Even today, nobody knows for
[00:55] certain where the original Japanese
[00:57] people came from. Then around 300 BC, a
[01:00] new group called the Yayoi showed up.
[01:03] They came from over here in Korea,
[01:05] bringing rice farming and bronze tools.
[01:07] They also brought a brand new concept
[01:09] called owning land. Now, here's the
[01:12] thing about rice farming. It can feed
[01:14] way more people than hunting and
[01:16] gathering ever could. So, the Yayoi grew
[01:19] fast, having more babies and building
[01:21] more villages every year. The Yomun, who
[01:24] had been hunters and gatherers, just
[01:26] couldn't keep up. Slowly, they got
[01:28] pushed out and faded away. For the next
[01:31] few hundred years, Japan was a mess.
[01:34] Look at this map. It was full of
[01:35] hundreds of tiny tribes, all constantly
[01:38] fighting each other, and nobody could
[01:40] pull them together. Then, one of the
[01:42] weirdest leaders in history finally rose
[01:44] above them all. Her name was Queen
[01:46] Himiko, and she said she could talk to
[01:49] spirits. Honestly, imagine trying to run
[01:52] an entire country through only one guy.
[01:55] That sounds difficult enough. Running an
[01:57] entire fleet of warships sounds even
[01:59] worse. This video is sponsored by World
[02:02] of Warships. If you're interested in
[02:03] naval history, this game lets you
[02:05] command some of the most iconic warships
[02:07] ever built. From destroyers and cruisers
[02:10] to battleships, aircraft carriers, and
[02:13] submarines, you'll take part in
[02:14] large-scale naval battles inspired by
[02:17] real history. Right now, World of
[02:19] Warships is celebrating the 250th US
[02:22] anniversary event running from June 17th
[02:24] through July 15th. During the event, you
[02:27] can earn historical rewards, unlock
[02:29] special content, and explore American
[02:32] Naval Heritage through new challenges
[02:34] and missions. New and returning players
[02:37] can use the invite code USA250 or the
[02:40] link in the description to receive
[02:42] rewards including 1 million credits, 7
[02:45] days premium, 500 deons, stars and
[02:48] stripes camouflage, the premium cruiser
[02:50] SS Albany, and the premium destroyer USS
[02:53] Smith. If you're interested in naval
[02:56] history, be sure to check out Naval
[02:58] Legends Cruisers, an upcoming book
[03:00] packed with detailed ship illustrations,
[03:02] battle maps, and stories from naval
[03:04] history. You can find the Kickstarter
[03:06] link in the description below. Thanks
[03:08] again to World of Warships for
[03:09] sponsoring this video. And now, let's
[03:11] get back to the history. She had one
[03:13] very specific rule. Nobody was ever
[03:15] allowed to see her face. The only person
[03:18] who could even speak to her was her own
[03:20] brother. He delivered her orders to
[03:22] everybody else in the country. So, when
[03:25] Chinese envoys finally arrived from
[03:27] across the sea wanting to meet her,
[03:29] things got awkward. I have traveled
[03:31] across the sea with gifts from the great
[03:33] way emperor. I'd like to meet your
[03:36] queen.
[03:37] She cannot be seen.
[03:39] But uh how does she rule?
[03:42] She rules through silencu.
[03:45] I have never heard of anything so stupid
[03:47] in my life. And yet somehow it worked.
[03:52] Himiko sent silk and slaves to China as
[03:54] gifts. The Wei Emperor was so impressed
[03:57] that he sent her back an official gold
[03:59] seal, naming her friend and ally of the
[04:02] Wei dynasty. Being mysterious was
[04:04] apparently a real way to run a country.
[04:07] Then Himiko died, and the moment she
[04:09] did, the whole country fell apart again.
[04:12] Her power had only ever come from how
[04:14] mysterious and magical she seemed. Once
[04:16] she was gone, all that magic was gone
[04:19] with her. The tribes had no reason to
[04:21] listen to anybody else, and they went
[04:23] straight back to fighting. Whoever rose
[04:25] next was going to need a completely
[04:27] different way to keep everyone in line.
[04:29] Something bigger than gold seals.
[04:31] Something that made it dangerous to even
[04:34] think about disobeying.
[04:38] Out of all those waring tribes, one clan
[04:41] punched its way to the top. They were
[04:43] called the Yamato. To make absolutely
[04:46] sure nobody got any ideas about
[04:48] overthrowing them, they came up with a
[04:50] brilliant story. Their leader, they
[04:52] said, was descended directly from the
[04:54] sun goddess herself. That made the
[04:57] emperor a literal god walking on earth.
[05:00] Disobey him and you were disobeying
[05:02] heaven. To prove their power, the Yamato
[05:05] started building tombs. Not normal
[05:07] tombs, enormous keyhole-shaped tombs for
[05:11] their dead emperors. Look at this map.
[05:14] The biggest one called Daisen Kofu is
[05:16] bigger by area than the Great Pyramid of
[05:18] Giza. Most people have never heard of
[05:20] it. It's just sitting there in Japan
[05:22] today, pyramid- sized, mostly hidden
[05:25] under a forest. Then trouble arrived
[05:28] from across the sea. A foreign religion
[05:30] called Buddhism showed up from Korea.
[05:33] The locals, who already had their own
[05:35] religion called Shinto, were not happy
[05:37] about it. You can't just bring in a new
[05:40] god. We already have plenty. But this
[05:43] one teaches you how to escape suffering.
[05:46] I'm not suffering. You're making me
[05:49] suffer right now. The fight nearly
[05:51] turned into a full civil war. Then
[05:54] Prince Shotoku, who was running the
[05:56] country because the emperor was very
[05:57] young at the time, made a weirdly
[05:59] chilled out decision. He just kept both
[06:02] religions. And it worked because the two
[06:05] religions ended up doing completely
[06:07] different jobs. Shinto handled all the
[06:09] happy parts of life like births,
[06:11] weddings, and shrines for good luck.
[06:13] Buddhism handled death and what came
[06:15] after. Nobody had to give up anything.
[06:18] Even today, most Japanese people are
[06:20] born Shinto and buried Buddhist. They
[06:23] use one religion for life and the other
[06:25] one for death. Shotoku also did
[06:27] something else. He wrote one of the
[06:29] cheekiest letters in the history of
[06:31] diplomacy. He sent it to the emperor of
[06:33] China in the year 607.
[06:37] From the son of heaven in the rand where
[06:40] the sun rises to the son of heaven in
[06:43] the land where the sun sets.
[06:46] Never show me this letter again. It
[06:49] nearly started a war. Calling yourself a
[06:52] son of heaven was something only the
[06:54] Chinese emperor was supposed to do. But
[06:56] the Chinese decided a war wasn't worth
[06:59] the trouble. Japan was far away across
[07:02] the sea, and getting an army over there
[07:04] would be super expensive. The cheeky
[07:06] letter also showed Japan now had real
[07:09] organized power, not just random tribes.
[07:12] So after a bit of huffing, the Chinese
[07:14] started treating Japan as an equal, not
[07:17] as some backwater across the sea. And
[07:19] Shotoku gave the islands their first
[07:21] official name based on his cheeky
[07:23] letter, Nihon, which means the place
[07:26] where the sun comes from. For the first
[07:28] time, Japan officially existed as a
[07:30] country. There was just one problem.
[07:33] China, which at the time was called Tang
[07:34] Dynasty China, was the richest and most
[07:37] advanced empire on the entire planet.
[07:39] And next to that, the new little country
[07:41] of Nihon was looking a little basic.
[07:47] So, Japan made a wild decision. It was
[07:50] going to copy China from top to bottom.
[07:52] Every single thing it could possibly get
[07:54] its hands on. Tang Dynasty China was the
[07:57] New York of the ancient world, and Japan
[08:00] wanted it. There was just one problem.
[08:02] China was hundreds of miles away across
[08:05] some of the most dangerous open sea in
[08:07] the world. Over the next 200 years,
[08:10] Japan sent 21 official missions across
[08:12] to China. Look at this map. Every single
[08:15] ship had to cross right here, where the
[08:18] East China Sea is famous for swallowing
[08:20] ships whole. One in every four ships
[08:23] that made the trip didn't make it home.
[08:26] People drowned in storms, and whole
[08:28] expeditions could just vanish into the
[08:30] sea, never to be heard from again. The
[08:33] Japanese kept going anyway. Each mission
[08:36] sent scholars, monks, students, and
[08:39] artists, some of whom stayed in China
[08:41] for decades just to learn everything
[08:43] they could. And when those scholars
[08:45] finally came home, they copied
[08:48] everything. The writing system, the
[08:50] calendar, the legal code, the way
[08:52] streets were laid out in big cities.
[08:54] They even built a brand new capital
[08:56] called N. Designed as a mini version of
[08:59] the Chinese capital Chiang with neat
[09:02] grid patterned streets meeting at
[09:03] perfect right angles. Look at this map.
[09:06] It's basically a tiny copy paste of the
[09:08] original. Japanese officials even
[09:11] started dressing like Chinese government
[09:12] workers and reading Chinese poetry at
[09:15] parties to look posh. For a while,
[09:18] everything fashionable in Japan came
[09:20] from China. Their proudest project was a
[09:23] giant temple called Toaii, the biggest
[09:26] wooden building in the entire world.
[09:28] Inside sat a bronze Buddha 15 m tall
[09:32] made from around 500 tons of bronze. To
[09:35] cast it, they used up almost all the
[09:37] bronze in the entire country. The whole
[09:40] project nearly bankrupted Japan. For the
[09:43] official opening ceremony in the year
[09:45] 752,
[09:47] they needed someone really special to
[09:49] paint in the Buddha's pupils. So they
[09:51] invited an Indian monk named Bodhisina.
[09:54] He had walked and sailed all the way
[09:56] from Tamil Nadu in southern India
[09:59] through China and over to Japan. The
[10:01] journey took him years. Around 17,000
[10:05] people came to watch him climb a ladder
[10:07] and paint two very tiny dots. They could
[10:10] barely see him do it. They didn't care.
[10:13] He had come further to paint those dots
[10:16] than most people in the crowd had ever
[10:18] traveled in their entire lives. By this
[10:20] point, the Buddhist temples had grown
[10:22] enormous. They owned vast amounts of
[10:25] land and gold from years of donations
[10:27] and they basically started telling the
[10:29] emperor what to do. So the emperor did
[10:31] the only thing he could think of. He
[10:33] packed up the entire capital and moved
[10:35] everyone to a new city called Kyoto just
[10:38] to get away from these annoying monks.
[10:40] And once everyone was settled in in
[10:42] Kyoto, Japan suddenly stopped copying
[10:45] China. They felt like they had taken
[10:47] plenty already and the Tang dynasty over
[10:49] there was starting to fall apart anyway.
[10:51] There wasn't much new learning worth it,
[10:53] and the deadly trips across the sea just
[10:55] weren't worth the risk anymore. The
[10:57] ships stopped sailing, and Japan turned
[11:00] completely inward. Then came something
[11:03] Japan invented entirely on its own. It
[11:05] was strange and beautiful, but
[11:07] completely useless for actually running
[11:09] a country. And hey, if you're enjoying
[11:11] the video so far, make sure to like and
[11:13] subscribe. These videos take a crazy
[11:15] amount of work to animate, and trust me,
[11:17] the story of Japan only gets crazier
[11:19] from here.
[11:22] For the next 300 years, while the rest
[11:24] of the world was busy conquering and
[11:26] burning each other's cities to the
[11:27] ground, the people running Japan did
[11:30] almost nothing. Quite literally nothing.
[11:33] The emperor was still officially in
[11:35] charge, but real power belonged to one
[11:37] specific family, the Fujiwara.
[11:41] Their strategy was simple. They got
[11:43] their daughters to marry every single
[11:45] emperor for 10 generations in a row.
[11:47] Every new emperor grew up surrounded by
[11:49] Fujiwara relatives who all told him
[11:52] exactly what to do. They ran the country
[11:54] from the in-laws position. And what did
[11:57] the nobles in Kyoto do with all this
[11:58] peace and power? They got obsessed with
[12:01] looking pretty, like deeply obsessed.
[12:05] The fashionable noble outfit was 12 full
[12:08] layers of silk, all in different colors,
[12:10] layered carefully so the colors blended
[12:12] together perfectly at the sleeves.
[12:14] People would judge you on how nice the
[12:17] gradient looked when you stuck your arm
[12:18] out of a carriage window. They wrote
[12:21] poems about cherry blossoms and drank
[12:23] tea by candle light. They even picked
[12:25] their romantic partners based entirely
[12:28] on the quality of their handwriting.
[12:30] Some of the most powerful men in Japan
[12:32] reportedly refused to date a woman if
[12:34] her brush strokes looked too thick.
[12:37] Imagine being dumped because your
[12:38] handwriting wasn't fancy enough. Does
[12:41] this brush stroke look like longing to
[12:44] you? Um, it looks like you've been awake
[12:47] for 9 hours, sir.
[12:50] But does it convey yearning?
[12:53] It conveys a man who needs to go to bed.
[12:57] Perfect. Send it. While the nobles were
[13:01] busy comparing handwriting, one of them
[13:03] was secretly doing something nobody on
[13:05] earth had ever done before. Her name was
[13:07] Murasaki Shikibu and she was writing a
[13:10] novel, a massive thousandpage novel
[13:13] called The Tale of Genji about love,
[13:17] jealousy, and politics inside the
[13:20] imperial court. It's considered the
[13:23] first real novel in the history of the
[13:25] world. She wrote it nearly 600 years
[13:27] before Shakespeare was even born. While
[13:30] most men in Europe were still mainly
[13:31] worried about not dying of plague, a
[13:34] woman in 12 layers of silk was quietly
[13:36] inventing the entire idea of long
[13:39] fiction. Outside the palace walls,
[13:42] though, the country was quietly falling
[13:44] apart. The Fujiwara nobles couldn't be
[13:46] bothered to do any of the boring stuff
[13:48] like collecting taxes or fighting off
[13:51] bandits. So, they hired some tough local
[13:53] warriors to handle all that messy real
[13:56] life work for them. These hired warriors
[13:59] had a name. They were called the
[14:01] samurai. The samurai got really good at
[14:04] their jobs. They earned land and got a
[14:06] rich. Before long, they had their own
[14:09] private armies. Meanwhile, back at the
[14:11] palace, the nobles were still inside
[14:14] comparing handwriting samples. The
[14:16] samurai had all the swords. Nobles had
[14:19] all the silk. Anyone want to guess how
[14:21] this ends?
[14:25] The nobles never stood a chance. The
[14:27] samurai swept them aside without much of
[14:29] a fight. But with nobody left to
[14:31] actually rule the country, the biggest
[14:33] samurai clans, turned on each other to
[14:35] see who would run Japan. Two enormous
[14:38] warrior clans, the Tyra and the Minamoto
[14:41] went to war for control. Look at this
[14:42] map. Their territories spread across the
[14:45] country like spilled paint. And wherever
[14:46] the two colors met, there was battle.
[14:49] After years of fighting, the Minamoto
[14:51] won. But the Minamoto leader did
[14:53] something nobody had ever tried before.
[14:56] Instead of taking the throne for
[14:57] himself, he invented a brand new job
[15:00] called the Shogun. Basically, a military
[15:03] boss who actually ran the country while
[15:05] the emperor stayed locked safely in his
[15:07] palace, still being treated like a god.
[15:10] This weird setup with a useless god
[15:12] emperor at the top and a real boss
[15:14] carrying all the swords just below him
[15:16] stuck around for almost 700 years.
[15:20] Things were going pretty well for the
[15:21] shogun. Then a letter arrived from the
[15:24] scariest person alive on the planet. His
[15:26] name was Kubla Khan, ruler of the Mongol
[15:30] Empire. His grandfather, Genghaskhan,
[15:32] had conquered most of Asia. He himself
[15:35] had just finished conquering China, and
[15:37] now he wanted Japan to bow down, too.
[15:41] Submit to me or face my armies.
[15:45] Hello.
[15:47] Uh,
[15:48] is anybody over there?
[15:52] Huh? Send another messenger.
[15:55] Did you receive my letters?
[15:58] We did. Your messengers will not be
[16:01] returned.
[16:02] Japan executed his ambassadors. When
[16:05] Khan sent more ambassadors to find out
[16:07] what happened to the first ones, Japan
[16:09] executed those, too. Then they just sent
[16:13] their heads back just to make sure the
[16:15] message was understood clearly. Kubla
[16:17] Khan was understandably furious. He
[16:21] gathered the biggest invasion fleet in
[16:23] the entire history of the world. 4,400
[16:26] ships around 140,000 men. Nothing on
[16:31] this scale would even be attempted again
[16:32] until D-Day in 1944,
[16:35] almost 700 years later. The samurai
[16:38] built stone walls along Hakata Bay and
[16:41] held the beaches for weeks against
[16:43] impossible odds. It was a complete
[16:45] culture clash. The samurai were used to
[16:47] fighting polite one-on-one jewels with
[16:50] formal introductions beforehand. The
[16:52] Mongols brought poison arrows and bombs,
[16:55] which the samurai had never seen in
[16:57] their lives. The Japanese should have
[16:59] lost easily.
[17:02] But then a typhoon hit overnight. It
[17:06] smashed most of the Mongol fleet into
[17:08] splinters. The few ships that survived
[17:10] limped home in total disgrace. Six years
[17:13] later, Kublai tried again with an even
[17:16] bigger fleet. And you won't believe
[17:18] this. But another typhoon hit, another
[17:22] fleet destroyed. Kubla never tried
[17:25] again. And out of every country in the
[17:28] entire world, Japan was the only one the
[17:30] Mongols ever failed to conquer. The
[17:33] Japanese gave those storms a name. They
[17:36] called them kamakazi, the divine wind.
[17:39] And they started believing deeply and
[17:42] very seriously that their islands were
[17:44] personally protected by the gods
[17:46] themselves. Hold on to that idea because
[17:49] the kamicazi story is going to come
[17:50] roaring back in about 700 years in a
[17:53] very different form. But for now, peace
[17:56] in Japan was about to do what peace in
[17:57] Japan always does. End.
[18:03] By the 1400s, the whole Shogun
[18:05] arrangement just stopped working. The
[18:07] regional warlords called Daimo simply
[18:09] stopped taking orders. Then they started
[18:11] fighting each other. Look at this map.
[18:14] Japan shattered into dozens of many
[18:16] countries, each one with its own warlord
[18:19] and its own private army. The chaos had
[18:21] a name. It was called the Sangoku Jedai,
[18:25] the Waring States period, and it went on
[18:27] for a full century. Out of all that
[18:30] mess, one of the most famous Japanese
[18:32] inventions in history finally appeared
[18:34] in real life. The ninja. And yes, ninja
[18:38] were absolutely real. They were
[18:39] professional spies and assassins hired
[18:42] by the warlords to handle the jobs that
[18:45] weren't considered honorable enough for
[18:47] samurai. Climbing castle walls in the
[18:49] dark, slipping poison into tea,
[18:51] listening through paper walls,
[18:53] disappearing in puffs of smoke. Some of
[18:55] the techniques in the old ninja training
[18:57] manuals are so detailed that modern
[19:00] soldiers still study them today. Hiya.
[19:03] Then one day, Portuguese traders washed
[19:06] up on a tiny Japanese island called
[19:08] Tameashima. They were carrying something
[19:11] Japan had never seen in its entire
[19:14] history. Guns. The warlords took one
[19:17] look and immediately wanted them. Within
[19:21] 30 years, Japanese gunsmiths were
[19:23] producing better guns than the Europeans
[19:24] had brought in the first place. Out of
[19:26] all the chaos came the most famous
[19:29] warrior in Japanese history, a man named
[19:31] Miiamoto Mousashi. He killed more than
[19:34] 60 men in one-on-one sword jewels and
[19:37] never lost a single one of them.
[19:39] Mousashi was also a brilliant poet and
[19:41] painter. In Japan, being a great warrior
[19:44] was only half the job. You were expected
[19:46] to be a complete person, master of both
[19:49] the sword and the brush. They called
[19:51] this code Bushido, the way of the
[19:54] warrior. But the chaos still needed
[19:56] someone to end it. Three warlords took
[19:59] turns trying. The first one was Oda
[20:01] Nobunaga, a ruthless commander who got
[20:03] most of the way there before being
[20:04] betrayed and killed by one of his own
[20:06] generals. The second was Toyotomy
[20:09] Hideayoshi, who finished the
[20:11] unification, then got bored and decided
[20:13] to invade Korea for fun and lost. The
[20:16] third was the most patient man in
[20:18] Japanese history, Tokugawa Ayasu. His
[20:21] entire strategy was do nothing. Wait, my
[20:26] lord, Hidoshi is fighting a war in
[20:28] Korea. Should we join him?
[20:31] No.
[20:32] He'll be furious with us.
[20:35] He'll be dead. We wait. And Hideoshi did
[20:39] die. Then Tokugawa won one massive final
[20:43] battle at a palace called Seek Gajara
[20:45] with around 200,000 men fighting on a
[20:48] single battlefield. By the end of the
[20:50] day, he had taken all of Japan for
[20:52] himself. After a full century of
[20:55] non-stop war, the new Shogun was
[20:57] completely exhausted, and he was about
[20:59] to make one of the most radical
[21:01] decisions in the entire history of
[21:03] Japan.
[21:06] Tokugawa Yayyasu locked Japan up
[21:09] completely. No foreigners allowed in and
[21:12] no Japanese allowed out. Anyone caught
[21:14] trying either way got the death penalty.
[21:17] No exceptions for everyone for
[21:20] everything. He had his reasons. Spanish
[21:22] and Portuguese missionaries had been
[21:24] quietly converting Japanese peasants to
[21:26] Christianity. And Tokugawa was convinced
[21:29] that one day the Europeans would use
[21:31] those converts to invade Japan. the same
[21:34] way they had taken half of South
[21:36] America. So, he just sealed the whole
[21:38] country shut. There was exactly one tiny
[21:42] little exception. The Dutch, for being
[21:45] polite and not pushing Christianity,
[21:48] were allowed to trade through one single
[21:50] artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor.
[21:53] See the map? The island called Dejima
[21:55] was about the size of a few football
[21:57] fields. That postage stamp- sized rock
[21:59] was Japan's only window to the rest of
[22:02] the entire world. And it stayed that way
[22:05] for 250 straight years. Every few years,
[22:08] the Dutch traders had to travel all the
[22:10] way to the shogun's court and perform
[22:12] humiliating tricks to amuse him. They
[22:14] had to dance for him and sing songs in
[22:17] Dutch. Sometimes he even made them
[22:19] pretend to be drunk. It was the price of
[22:21] staying in business. Inside the bubble,
[22:25] time basically froze. The samurai now
[22:28] had no wars to fight, so they slowly
[22:30] turned to government bureaucrats and
[22:32] amateur poets. People were stuck in
[22:34] whichever social class they had been
[22:36] born into for life. Born a fisherman,
[22:39] die a fisherman. Born a farmer, die a
[22:42] farmer. No moving up, no moving down.
[22:45] From the outside, it looked peaceful,
[22:48] even quite stable. But under the
[22:50] surface, the whole country was slowly
[22:52] rotting. Prices kept rising, famines
[22:55] kept hitting, sometimes killing hundreds
[22:57] of thousands of peasants. The merchants
[22:59] class was getting richer than the
[23:00] samurai, but had no real power in the
[23:03] old system. Resentment was building in
[23:06] every corner of the country. Meanwhile,
[23:08] the Dutch had been secretly smuggling in
[23:10] something very dangerous through Dejima
[23:14] books. Had you there for a second,
[23:16] didn't I?
[23:18] This drawing, it shows what's actually
[23:21] inside the human body. If anyone catches
[23:24] us with this, we're dead.
[23:27] Then we'd better read faster. A tiny
[23:30] secret network of Japanese scholars have
[23:32] been quietly studying Western science
[23:34] and medicine for decades, and even how
[23:37] their weapons worked. They translated
[23:40] Dutch medicine books word by word, often
[23:42] guessing what each term meant. They even
[23:45] dissected criminal corpses to see if the
[23:48] Dutch anatomy books were accurate. They
[23:50] were. The traditional Japanese maps of
[23:52] the human body had been wrong for over a
[23:55] thousand years. Nobody important paid
[23:57] these scholars any attention. They were
[24:00] just nerds with banned books. Meanwhile,
[24:02] outside the bubble, the rest of the
[24:04] world had totally transformed. The
[24:06] industrial revolution had ripped through
[24:08] England. America had become a whole new
[24:10] country. And Napoleon had risen and
[24:12] fallen across Europe. Steam engines,
[24:15] factories, telegraphs, and repeating
[24:17] rifles had all been invented. Whole
[24:20] nations had been built and destroyed.
[24:22] And Japan, sealed inside its bubble, had
[24:25] no idea any of it was happening. Then
[24:28] one morning in July 1853, four enormous
[24:32] black ships appeared in Tokyo Bay here
[24:34] on this map. They had no sails, yet they
[24:37] were moving against the wind, breathing
[24:40] thick black smoke. Nobody in Japan had
[24:43] ever in 250 years seen anything like
[24:46] them.
[24:49] The ships were American. Their commander
[24:52] was a man called Matthew Perry. No, not
[24:54] the guy from Friends. Another Matthew
[24:56] Perry. His message was super simple.
[24:59] Open your ports to American trade or we
[25:02] will open them for you. Japan had
[25:04] absolutely nothing in its arsenal that
[25:06] could fight steam powered warships. So
[25:09] they signed the treaty. The humiliation
[25:11] was total. The shogun, the most powerful
[25:13] man in Japan, looked weak and useless in
[25:16] front of the entire country. The samurai
[25:18] class, who were supposed to defend Japan
[25:20] from any outside threat, were super
[25:22] angry. A full rebellion broke out. For
[25:25] the first time in nearly 700 years, the
[25:27] shogun was overthrown. The rebels put a
[25:30] teenage emperor named Magi back on the
[25:32] throne and gave him real power. The new
[25:34] government knew exactly what would
[25:36] happen if they didn't modernize fast.
[25:39] The Europeans have been gobbling up the
[25:40] rest of Asia for years, and Japan was
[25:43] clearly next on the menu unless
[25:44] something changed. They had to catch up
[25:46] to the modern world or vanish
[25:48] completely. So, Japan did something no
[25:51] country in history had ever done before.
[25:54] It deliberately ripped its own
[25:56] civilization apart and rebuilt itself
[25:58] from scratch in just 40 years. Railways,
[26:02] factories, telegraph lines, a whole
[26:05] westernstyle army, a modern
[26:07] constitution, a parliament, new schools
[26:09] teaching mathematics and physics. Look
[26:11] at this man. With one single generation,
[26:13] feudal Japan had become an industrial
[26:16] superpower. And remember those nerds,
[26:18] the secret scholars with the banned
[26:20] Dutch books? They were suddenly the most
[26:22] important people in the country. They
[26:24] were the ones who already knew how the
[26:26] modern world worked. They went straight
[26:28] from hiding in atticss to running entire
[26:31] government departments. But there was a
[26:33] big price to pay. The samurai class
[26:35] itself was abolished by the law. They
[26:38] lost their swords and their wages
[26:40] overnight. Worst of all, they lost their
[26:42] whole reason for existing. Some of them
[26:45] rose up in one last doomed rebellion
[26:48] called the Satsuma Rebellion. They lost,
[26:50] of course. The new government had
[26:52] cannons and modern rifles. The samurai
[26:55] had swords. Many of the ones who
[26:57] survived couldn't handle the new world
[26:59] and quietly chose to end things on their
[27:02] own terms.
[27:05] An entire warrior class that had ruled
[27:07] Japan for almost a thousand years simply
[27:10] disappeared. But here's the strange
[27:12] thing. Out of every Asian country, Japan
[27:15] was the only one that was never fully
[27:17] colonized by Europeans. China had been
[27:20] carved up by European powers and India
[27:22] had become a full British possession.
[27:24] Most of Southeast Asia was under French
[27:26] or Dutch control, too. Japan absorbed
[27:29] the European threat, copied everything
[27:32] useful from it, and turned that
[27:33] knowledge straight back into national
[27:36] fuel. And then in 1905, Japan did
[27:39] something even more crazy. It went to
[27:42] war with Russia, tiny, recently feudal
[27:45] little Japan, against the giant Russian
[27:48] Empire that stretched all the way from
[27:50] Poland to the Pacific Ocean. As you can
[27:52] see on this map, Russia was huge. Nobody
[27:56] outside Japan thought they had a chance.
[27:58] But amazingly, they won. They sank most
[28:02] of the Russian fleet. Then they took
[28:04] huge stretches of land in Manuria, which
[28:06] as you can see on this map, was in
[28:08] northeast China, and forced Russia to
[28:10] sign a peace treaty. It was the first
[28:13] time in modern history that an Asian
[28:15] country had defeated a European one. The
[28:17] entire world was completely, utterly
[28:20] stunned. Japan was starting to feel
[28:22] unstoppable. And that feeling was about
[28:24] to turn into something really, really
[28:27] dangerous.
[28:30] Japan kept winning. Then it kept taking.
[28:34] First it took Taiwan, then it took
[28:36] Korea. After so many easy victories, the
[28:38] Japanese military had become really
[28:40] powerful and hugely popular at home.
[28:43] Plus, the way the government was set up,
[28:45] the army could speak directly to the
[28:47] emperor without going through any
[28:48] politicians. So the military just
[28:50] started ignoring the elected government
[28:52] and making its own decisions. There was
[28:55] no single dictator running the country.
[28:57] No Hitler or Stalin figure at the top.
[29:00] Anyone who tried to slow things down was
[29:02] assassinated. The whole nation just got
[29:04] steadily more aggressive every single
[29:07] year. And nobody, not even the emperor
[29:09] himself, could find the brakes. In 1931,
[29:13] Japanese soldiers secretly blew up their
[29:15] own railway in a Chinese region called
[29:17] Manuria. and then blamed China for it.
[29:20] They used this fake attack as an excuse
[29:23] to invade. Look at this map. They set up
[29:25] a puppet state and called it Manuku. The
[29:28] rest of the world got upset. The League
[29:30] of Nations told Japan to stop. So, Japan
[29:33] simply walked out of the League of
[29:35] Nations and kept going anyway. By 1937,
[29:38] Japan was invading the rest of China. In
[29:41] the city of Nanjen, Japanese troops
[29:43] killed an estimated 200,000 civilians
[29:45] and prisoners of war in just a few
[29:48] weeks. It was one of the worst
[29:49] atrocities in the entire 20th century.
[29:52] Then in December 1941, during World War
[29:55] II, Japan did something that even today
[29:58] historians still struggle to explain. In
[30:01] one single day, it attacked the United
[30:03] States, the British Empire, and most of
[30:05] Southeast Asia all at once. Starting
[30:08] with a surprise attack on the American
[30:10] naval base at Pearl Harbor, they sank or
[30:13] damaged 18 American warships in a single
[30:16] morning. Within a few months, the
[30:18] Japanese Empire had ballooned all the
[30:20] way from the borders of India out to the
[30:22] middle of the Pacific Ocean. For half a
[30:24] year, they really did look unstoppable.
[30:28] Then in June 1942, the Americans
[30:31] surprised them right back. In a sea
[30:33] battle near a tiny island called Midway,
[30:36] the US Navy sank four Japanese aircraft
[30:38] carriers in a single day. Japan never
[30:41] recovered. The Americans started pushing
[30:44] back island by island. Japanese cities
[30:46] were firebombed flat. Whole
[30:48] neighborhoods turned to ash overnight.
[30:50] And the military, growing more
[30:52] desperate, invented a terrible new kind
[30:54] of warrior, kamicazi pirates. Young men,
[30:58] often only 18 or 19 years old, flew
[31:00] planes loaded with explosives straight
[31:03] into American warships. Around 4,000 of
[31:06] them died this way in the final year of
[31:08] the war. The divine wind, the kamicazi
[31:11] that had saved Japan from the Mongols
[31:13] 700 years earlier, was being asked to
[31:16] save them one more time. But this time,
[31:19] the divine wind didn't come. In August
[31:23] 1945, the Americans dropped two atomic
[31:26] bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and
[31:28] Nagasaki. The war ended a few days
[31:31] later. The emperor himself went on the
[31:33] national radio to announce the
[31:35] surrender. And what's crazy is that no
[31:38] Japanese person anywhere in the entire
[31:40] country had ever heard the emperor's
[31:42] voice before ever. He had been treated
[31:44] as a literal god for centuries. Gods
[31:47] don't do radio broadcasts. And when he
[31:50] finally did speak, he used such old
[31:53] formal court language that most regular
[31:55] people couldn't actually understand the
[31:57] exact words he was saying. They just
[31:59] knew from the tone and the silence
[32:01] afterwards that it was over. In 1945,
[32:06] basically nobody on Earth thought Japan
[32:08] would ever matter again. Every single
[32:11] one of them was about to be very, very
[32:14] wrong.
[32:15] American
[32:17] forces occupied Japan and got straight
[32:20] to work. They wrote Japan a brand new
[32:22] constitution that literally banned the
[32:24] country from ever declaring war on
[32:26] anyone ever again. The emperor, who had
[32:28] been a literal god for over a thousand
[32:30] years, was officially downgraded to a
[32:32] symbol. The country was both broke and
[32:35] broken. But for the first time in its
[32:37] entire history, it was also brand new.
[32:41] But the emperor's surrender speech had
[32:43] said something strange. The war, he
[32:45] said, had only moved to a different
[32:47] battlefield. The Japanese people took
[32:49] that idea completely literally. The old
[32:52] samurai code of total loyalty to your
[32:55] lord, the Bushidau, survived the fall of
[32:57] the empire. It just changed jobs. A new
[33:00] kind of person appeared in Japan called
[33:03] the salaryman. Instead of armor and a
[33:06] sword, he wore a suit and carried a
[33:08] briefcase. But he gave his entire life
[33:11] to his company, working 16-hour days and
[33:14] never taking a vacation exactly the same
[33:16] way as samurai had once given his entire
[33:18] life to his lord. It was the same
[33:20] loyalty in a different costume. And it
[33:24] worked. In less than 30 years, after
[33:26] losing absolutely everything, Japan
[33:28] became the second biggest economy on the
[33:30] entire planet. Toyota, Honda, Sony,
[33:33] Nintendo, Mitsubishi. Japan invented the
[33:36] bullet train, the Walkman, and the home
[33:39] video game console. And basically all of
[33:41] modern anime came from Japan, too. The
[33:44] country that had bombed Pearl Harbor was
[33:46] now politely selling America,
[33:47] televisions, cars, and even Mario games.
[33:51] Japanese culture was suddenly
[33:53] everywhere. Sushi shops were popping up
[33:55] in every American city. Over in
[33:57] Hollywood, directors were remaking
[33:59] samurai films as westerns, and kids in
[34:01] Brazil and Germany were learning
[34:03] Japanese words from cartoons. A country
[34:05] that had been firebombed flat 30 years
[34:08] earlier was quietly conquering the world
[34:10] all over again. This time with cartoons
[34:13] and electronics. Then in 1990, the whole
[34:17] thing popped. Land prices, which had
[34:19] been climbing crazily for years,
[34:21] crashed. Stock prices crashed. Some
[34:23] pieces of land in central Tokyo had been
[34:25] worth on paper more than the entire
[34:27] state of California. That kind of money
[34:30] simply vanished overnight. Japan entered
[34:33] what historians later called the lost
[34:36] decades. But what's really strange is
[34:38] that the trains kept running on time and
[34:40] the shops stayed open. People still went
[34:43] to work every day and life in Japan kept
[34:46] on going. It just stopped growing. And
[34:49] now Japan is facing a brand new kind of
[34:52] problem. one that no country in human
[34:54] history has ever really faced before.
[34:57] The country is shrinking. Look at this
[34:59] map. Fewer babies are born in Japan
[35:02] every single year. There are now more
[35:04] Japanese people over 65 than under 15.
[35:07] Entire villages out in the countryside
[35:09] are being abandoned because there are
[35:11] simply not enough young people left to
[35:13] live in them. Engineers are now building
[35:15] robots to look after the elderly because
[35:17] there aren't enough humans to do that
[35:19] job. Soon there will be more graveyards
[35:22] than schools. What's scary is almost
[35:25] every other major country on Earth is
[35:27] sliding into the exact same shrinking,
[35:30] aging problem that Japan is dealing with
[35:32] right now. Italy, South Korea, Germany,
[35:35] even China. They just don't know it yet.
[35:38] Japan got there first. The rest of the
[35:40] world is about to follow. Japan is
[35:42] quietly getting on with it while
[35:44] everybody else pretends nothing is
[35:45] wrong. And now that you've seen the
[35:48] insane history of Japan, you kind of
[35:50] have to learn about the Mongols, too.
[35:52] Because without the Mongol Empire, a
[35:53] huge part of Asian history stops making
[35:56] sense. Trust me, this story gets
[35:58] absolutely insane. So, click here and
[36:00] watch that video next. I'll catch you
[36:02] next time.