Hello Everybody! This is the Japan with Enark YouTube Channel, history section.
Have you ever wondered, how the history of Japan is divided into periods or eras?
Then this video is for you!
I'm going to explain now, what types of Japanese era divisions are used.
There're multiple layers of era division, which spend different amounts of years and centuries.
The layer with the longest periods uses a terminology, that is similar to its equivalent in European history.
Pre-Antiquity, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern, and Modern.
The corresponding Japanese terms are genshi, kodai, chūsei, kinsei, and kindai.
The term "kindai" normally refers to the modern history before 1945,
but I'm going to explain this late on in this video.
Like in Western history, it's hard to pinpoint exact starting and endpoints of these long eras.
They're actually quite disputed, but there're some events,
which are frequently mentioned as the endpoint of one era and the starting point of another.
Pre-Antiquity is the longest era by a longshot,
and it's more a field for archeology than history.
It stretches from about 30,000 BCE to the 7th century AD.
The beginning of this era correlates with the oldest human artefacts found to date.
The ending is unclear and disputed, but it roughly correlates with reforms,
that turned the kingdom of Yamato into a centralized state modelled after the Chinese Tang dynasty.
The reformed kingdom of Yamato eventually became the Japanese state at the beginning of Antiquity.
The Japanese Antiquity stretches from the 7th century AD to the 1180s.
There are two years, which are frequently claimed to pinpoint the end of Japanese Antiquity:
1185, the year the Minamoto family won the battle of Dannoura,
which made them the dominant political power of the country,
or the year 1192, in which Minamoto no Yoritomo was appointed shogun by the emperor, or tennō in Japanese.
This started the rule of military leaders, who would become known as the samurai in the modern West.
The Middle Ages of Japan start after this and continue until the beginning of the 17th century.
There are two years frequently mentioned when trying to pinpoint the end of the Middle Ages: 1600 and 1603.
The former was the year, when Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara,
and the latter was the year he was appointed shogun by the emperor.
Ieyasu's leadership of the country ended the Japanese "civil war" going on from the middle of the 15th century,
and started the Early Modern era of Japan.
This Early Modern era came to an end with the Meiji Restauration,
that ended the rule of shoguns and started Japan's transformation into a European style nation state,
and its Modern era, which we are living in now.
These are the five big eras of Japanese history.
These five big eras are divided into several smaller eras, which I call "suberas" in this video.
Let's talk about them, too.
First, the suberas of Pre-Antiquity.
The first one is called the Jōmon era.
The term "jōmon" means "cord-marked",
and is a reference to the common marks on pottery found from this period.
It stretches from around 30,000 BCE to around 300 BCE, which makes it the longest single subera of Japanese history by far.
This period includes the paleolithic era of Japan, and was dominated by societies of hunters and gatherers.
The next period is the Yayoi era from around 300 BCE to around 300 AD.
It is characterized by the introduction of rice farming and a new type of pottery.
Shards of this pottery was first found in Yayoi-chō, a quarter of Tokyo, after which this era was named.
The introduction of rice farming led to the establishment of the first agriculture based kingdoms
in the southern parts of Japan.
The period after the Yayoi era is the Kofun era.
"Kofun" literally means "old tomb".
This name comes from the big burial mounds, which can be found in many places
between the island of Kyushu and the Kansai region, and which were eracted during this era.
It stretches from around 300 to the 7th century.
Its later period is overlapping with the Asuka era, an era, in which the kingdom of Yamato
- one of the ancient rice kingdoms - had its capital in Asuka-kyō, which is in today's Nara prefecture.
The burial mounds are thought to be the tombs of kings and other high officials and powerful locals
of those rice kingdoms, of which Yamato finally became the most powerful.
The Asuka era can be divided into a former part, which is overlapping with the late Kofun era,
and a latter part, which starts Japanese Antiquity with the aforementioned crucial reforms in the kingdom of Yamato,
which then starts to evolve into the highly centralized ancient Japanese empire.
It's also the first era, which is named after the seats of the central government.
The suberas of the Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Early Modern times are primarily named after the locations of central government.
"Central government" means the location of the emperor in Antiquity,
and the location of the shogunate during the later eras.
Only the time of the Japanese "civil war" during the last third of the Middle Ages,
which saw no effective central government, are differring from this pattern.
The Asuka era lasted from 592 to 710.
The period following the Asuka era was the Nara era from 710 to 794,
when the emperor had his capital in Heijō-kyō, which is the contemporary city of Nara.
The next one is the Heian era from 794 to 1185, after the emperor moved his capital to Heian-kyō,
which is the contemporary city of Kyoto.
Heian-kyō stayed the location of the emperor until 1868.
The first and middle thirds of the Heian era mark the heydays of antique Japanese culture.
The then spoken form of Kansai Japanese was standardized into a written language,
which was the written standard of literary Japanese until the 20th century.
Most roots of aspects, that are widely considered as traditional Japanese culture, can be traced back to this period.
It is also the longest of the suberas of those with an abundance of written record.
It is also the last subera of Japanese Antiquity.
The Middle Ages of Japan are generally divided into three suberas:
Kamakura, Muromachi, and Azuchi-Momoyama.
The Kamakura era lasted from 1185 to 1333, after the shogun took the actual political power from the emperor.
During the Kamakura era, the shogunate had its seat in Kamakura,
Which today is a relatively small city south of Yokohama.
The ruling families were first the Minamoto family, and then the Hōjō family,
Which were connected to the Minamoto through marriage.
The next was the Muromachi era from 1336 to 1573, when the shogunate was located in Muromachi,
a quarter of Kyoto.
The ruling family was the Ashikaga family.
The short period from 1333 to 1336 is known as the Kenmu Restauration,
during which Emperor Godaigo tried to take back political power to the hands of the imperial court.
The failure of this restauration led to a split of the imperial court into a northern one based in Kyoto,
and backed up by the new shogunate,
and a southern one located in the mountains of Yoshino in today's Nara prefecture,
which was ruled by ousted Emperor Godaigo and his direct successors.
This split lasted until 1392, when the southern court ceased to exist,
and dominated the politics during the first 50 years of the Ashikaga shogunate.
The Azuchi-Momoyama period is named after the places of Azuchi and Momoyama,
which were two centers of then contemporary art.
It was named like this, because warlord Oda Nobunaga officially dissolved the Ashikaga shogunate
without establishing a new one.
The second half of the Muromachi era and the almost entire Azuchi-Momoyama era are often
submerged under the term "Sengoku", or warring states era,
the time of the medieval Japanese "civil war" from 1467 until the 1590s.
During this time, the Ashikaga shogunate was incapable of strong rule, that would have kept
the ambitions of rival families contained and in check.
It never regained this capacity.
The "civil war" was ended by the "three unifiers" Oda Nobunaga, his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi,
and his successor Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Nobunaga and Hideyoshi refused to take the title of shogun and preferred to rule as kanpaku,
a kind of high rank imperial advisor.
Both also failed to have powerful children in time of their deaths.
So, they couldn't create a dynasty.
Ieyasu, on the other hand, had already powerful offspring at the time he succeeded Hideyoshi.
He also received the title of shogun from the emperor and founded the Tokugawa shogunate.
The Tokugawa shogunate was located in Edo and lasted from 1603 to 1868.
The time of its existence is called the Edo era or, alternatively, Tokugawa era,
and is considered as the Early Modern period of Japan.
Its most recognized trait is high political stability by turning the warlords,
that survived the warring states period, into local bureaucrats under very strict shogunate control,
and isolating the country from the rest of the world except for the Chinese and the Dutch since the 1630s.
The Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown in late 1867 in the Meiji Restauration,
which officially reestablished imperial rule at the beginning of 1868,
which turned Japan eventually into a modern nation state and a contitutional monarchy.
By the way, during this the imperial court moved from Kyoto to Edo,
renamed it Tōkei first, and finally Tokyo shortly after.
The Modern period is divided into currently four suberas,
which are named after the era names of the reigning emperors.
These eras are: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, and Heisei.
Japan had consecutive imperial era names since the Asuka era , but until Meiji,
most of those eras were short-lived and not bound to the reign of an emperor.
Every emperor could change the era name at will, which is why only some very renown premodern imperial
era names - like Taika, Genroku, or Kōmei - are commonly known.
Since 1868 there is the principle of one era name per emperor.
That means, that the modern eras fall align with the incumbency of the respective emperor.
After their death the era name becomes the posthumous honorific name of those emperors.
The Meiji era lasted from 1868 to 1912.
The reigning emperor was Mutsuhito, who's subsequently known as Emperor Meiji since his death.
The Taishō era lasted from 1912 to 1926 under Yoshihito, the now Emperor Taishō.
The next one is Shōwa from 1926 to 1989 under emperor Hirohito.
Since 1989, when the current emperor Akihito took over the throne from his deceased father,
we're living in the Heisei era.
As I stated above, Modern period is called "kindai" in Japanese, but in Japanese historiography,
"kindai" primarily refers to the period between 1868 and 1945.
The historical period after 1945 is known as "gendai", or "present" in English.
To briefly summarize:
We have five large periods: Pre-Antiquity, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern, and Modern,
that is divided into several common suberas.
Three and a half in Pre-Antiquity: Jōmon, Yayoi, Kofun, and early Asuka,
two and a half in Antiquity: late Asuka, Nara, and Heian,
three to five in the Middle Ages: Kamakura, Muromachi, and Azuchi-Momoyama,
that are overlapped by the north-south-split of the imperial court, and the warring state era,
only one in Early Modern: Edo,
and four in the Modern: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, and the current Heisei.
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