Media Download: Japan

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Japan

clip_image002[1] The islands of Japan are born of the unimaginable violence of plate tectonics, arising as the Pacific Plate is ground beneath the Eurasian Plate. The result is a mountainous land of great beauty and peril, where the people live and thrive in a narrow corridor between volcano and sea. For much of its history, Japan was divided into many small kingdoms which expended huge quantities of time, energy and effort warring with each other. Betrayal was common, as was deceit, backstabbing, and cold-blooded assassination. The violence would lead to the rise of the Samurai professional warrior class, would end only when the great Oda Nobunaga and his heirs unified the country in the 16th – 17th centuries. In the modern era, Japan has survived the unimaginable catastrophe of World War II, nuclear attack and Western occupation, emerging to be one of the great economic and cultural powerhouses of the late 20th – early 21st centuries.

Leader: Oda Nobunaga (1534 – 1582 AD)

clip_image004[1] Oda Nobunaga was a 16th century Japanese warlord. Both a brilliant general and a cunning politician — as well as an early adopter of new technology — Nobunaga fought and backstabbed his way to domination over nearly half of feudal Japan. His two lieutenants, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, would complete the job after his death. Nobunaga was a brutal man in a brutal time. But by helping to unify Japan he brought an end to the brutal wars that had been ravishing his country for more than a century.