The History of Japan

ISBN-13: 9783565078509 / Angielski / Miękka / 2025 / 224 str.

Auke de Haan

Opis

Kick off in the archipelago's foggy dawn, where Jomon hunters etched cord marks on clay pots, fending off Ainu whispers from the north till Yamato clans forged the first throne from rice tribute and rice-paper edicts. The Heian court's ladies layered kimonos like secrets, their waka verses veiling palace poisonings while Fujiwara puppeteers tugged imperial strings. Then the Genpei wars splashed the seas red-Minamoto no Yoritomo claiming the shogunate in 1192, kicking off seven centuries of warrior bosses bunkered in Edo castles, where samurai swore bushido oaths sharper than their blades, lopping heads for a sideways glance.Fast to the locked-door centuries: Tokugawa's iron-fisted peace clamped ports shut, but Dutch traders smuggled syphilis and syphilis cures through Dejima slits, seeding the rot that blew open in Perry's black ships of '53. Meiji's mustache brigade scrapped the shogun, shipped princes to Berlin for blueprints, and cranked out railroads from Kyoto silk mills, hurtling into Russo-Japanese scraps and Taisho dreams before the '30s militarists marched on Manchuria with bayonets and bad maps. Pearl Harbor's dawn raid yanked the world into the fray, island-hopping hell from Guadalcanal to Okinawa's caves, till Fat Man and Little Boy etched the end in uranium glow.Reborn from the rubble, MacArthur's occupation scribbled democracy on rice-paper constitutions, sparking the '50s miracle where salarymen rebuilt Toyotas from scrap and salarymen dreams. Bubble '89 popped like a sake gourd, but Akihabara's glow and bullet trains hummed on, weaving tradition with tech in a knot that ties sumo to semiconductors. This history's no haiku-it's the full storm surge of a nation that bends but never breaks, from kamikaze gales to karaoke nights.

Kick off in the archipelago's foggy dawn, where Jomon hunters etched cord marks on clay pots, fending off Ainu whispers from the north till Yamato clans forged the first throne from rice tribute...