How did a closed island nation of samurai become the world’s second-largest economy? This animated documentary tells the entire history of Japan in 16 minutes, from the first people 30,000 years ago to the shrinking, ageing Japan of today.
In 1853, four American black ships steamed into Edo Bay. Japan had shut out the world for over 200 years, and its samurai still carried swords. Within 50 years it would destroy the Russian navy. Within 90, it would be at war with the United States. And a century later, after losing almost everything, it would have the second-largest economy on Earth.
The secret? Again and again, Japan tore itself down and rebuilt itself from scratch: it borrowed an empire from China, handed power to the samurai, shut out the world for two centuries, remade itself on a Western model in one generation, and rose from the ruins of World War II to the top of the world economy.
In this video:
• The Jomon, the Yayoi and the first emperors of Yamato
• How Japan copied Tang China, and how Kyoto and kana were born
• The samurai, the shoguns and the Mongol invasions (the “kamikaze”)
• The Sengoku period and the three unifiers: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu
• Sakoku, the closed country, and 265 years of Edo peace
• Commodore Perry, the Meiji Restoration and the Russo-Japanese War
• The road to World War II, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The postwar economic miracle, the bubble and the lost decades
• Japan’s quietest crisis: an ageing, shrinking population
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro: Four Strange Ships
0:44 Islands at the Edge (Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun)
1:53 Borrowing an Empire (Asuka, Nara, Heian)
3:14 The Age of the Samurai (Kamakura, Muromachi)
4:41 A Century of War (Sengoku)
5:32 The Three Unifiers (Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu)
7:23 The Great Peace (Edo)
8:41 The Black Ships (Perry, Satsuma and Choshu)
9:51 Catching Up With the West (Meiji)
11:16 The Road to Ruin (1920s – 1945)
13:14 The Miracle (1945 – 1989)
14:21 The Lost Decades (1990 – today)
15:19 Reinvention
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Figures are rounded; where historians’ estimates vary, the video says so.
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