Japan日本

People have lived on the archipelago for at least 30,000 years. The Jōmon culture, from about 14,000 BCE, made some of the oldest pottery known anywhere, marked with twisted-cord patterns that gave the period its name. Wet-rice farming and metal arrived from the continent with the Yayoi people after about 300 BCE, and by the 3rd to 6th centuries powerful clans were burying their leaders under huge keyhole-shaped mounds called kofun. The largest, attributed by tradition to Emperor Nintoku, still sits in suburban Sakai, south of Osaka, surrounded by moats.

Buddhism, Chinese writing and a Chinese model of government reached the Yamato court from Korea and China in the 6th century. The court built grid-plan capitals, first Nara in 710 and then Heian-kyō, today’s Kyoto, in 794. For the next four centuries aristocrats refined poetry, calligraphy and court ritual; The Tale of Genji, written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu around 1000, comes from this world. Real power slowly shifted to provincial warriors, and in 1185 the Minamoto clan set up a military government at Kamakura. From then until 1868 an emperor reigned in Kyoto while a shōgun ruled.

The 15th and 16th centuries brought the Sengoku, or warring states, period, when regional lords fought for territory and built the stone-walled castles that still anchor many towns. Three men reunified the country in turn: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who won at Sekigahara in 1600 and became shōgun in 1603. The Tokugawa ruled from Edo for 265 years, restricted foreign trade to the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, expelled missionaries and banned Christianity. Internal peace let cities, roads and a merchant culture grow; Edo passed a million people in the 18th century.

In 1853 US warships under Commodore Matthew Perry forced the opening of ports. Within fifteen years the shogunate collapsed and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 put the emperor at the centre of a modernising state based in Edo, renamed Tokyo. Japan built railways, a conscript army, a parliament and heavy industry at speed, then expanded overseas: Taiwan in 1895, a war with Russia in 1904–05, the annexation of Korea in 1910, and the occupation of Manchuria in 1931.

Full-scale war with China began in 1937 and widened into the Pacific War after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Japanese forces occupied much of Southeast Asia; the conduct of that war and occupation is still debated in Japan and remains a live issue with its neighbours. US bombing destroyed most large Japanese cities, and atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Japan surrendered that month. A US-led occupation until 1952 produced the 1947 constitution, whose Article 9 renounces war.

Rapid growth followed. The Tokyo Olympics and the first Shinkansen line in 1964 announced recovery, and by the late 1980s Japan was the world’s second-largest economy. An asset bubble burst around 1990–91, opening a long period of low growth. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck the Tōhoku coast, killing about 18,000 people and causing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The Reiwa era began in 2019 when Emperor Naruhito succeeded his father.

Japan has about 124 million people, a figure that peaked in 2008 and has fallen every year since. Close to three in ten residents are 65 or older, one of the highest shares in the world, and in many rural towns the proportion is far higher. Visitors see it in older staff at hotels and taxis, in schools converted to community centres, and in the roughly nine million empty houses, called akiya, counted by the 2023 housing survey.

The country is often described as ethnically uniform, but that picture leaves people out. The Ainu of Hokkaidō were legally recognised as an indigenous people only in 2019, and the national Ainu museum, Upopoy, opened at Shiraoi in 2020. Okinawa was the independent Ryūkyū Kingdom until 1879 and keeps its own languages, music and food. Several hundred thousand ethnic Koreans, many descended from people who came during colonial rule, have lived in Japan for generations. Registered foreign residents now number well over three million, a record.

Social life is shaped by the line between uchi, the inside group, and soto, everyone outside it. Family, company, school club and neighbourhood are all uchi groups, and behaviour changes when crossing between them. Seniority matters: the senpai–kōhai relation between senior and junior runs through schools, sports and offices. Much local work is done by chōnaikai, neighbourhood associations that organise festivals, rubbish rotas and disaster drills.

Work has long defined adult status, especially for men. The postwar model of lifetime employment at a large firm, with long hours and evening drinking with colleagues, still exists but now covers a shrinking share of workers; close to four in ten are on part-time or contract terms. More women work than ever, yet leadership remains heavily male. Marriage rates and the birth rate, about 1.2 children per woman, are both low, which is why childcare and immigration are constant political topics.

Most Japanese do not call themselves religious, yet most visit shrines at New Year and hold Buddhist funerals. The saying that people are born Shinto and die Buddhist is only half a joke. Shinto, the older layer, worships kami: spirits present in mountains, waterfalls, old trees, ancestors and certain people. There is no founder and no single scripture. A shrine marks where a kami is felt to be present, which is why many stand on hills, beside springs or in groves of tall cedar.

The markers of a shrine are easy to learn. A torii gate divides ordinary space from sacred space. A twisted straw rope, shimenawa, with zig-zag paper streamers marks a pure object or boundary. At the water basin visitors rinse the left hand, the right, then the mouth. At the hall the common form is two bows, two claps and a final bow. Pairs of guardian lion-dogs, or foxes at Inari shrines, flank the approach.

Buddhism arrived in the 6th century and was adopted by the court as a protector of the state. Schools multiplied: esoteric Tendai and Shingon in the Heian period, then in the Kamakura period the popular Pure Land teachings, which promised rebirth through calling on Amida Buddha, Nichiren’s devotion to the Lotus Sutra, and Zen with its meditation and austere gardens. At a temple visitors bow and pray quietly without clapping; incense smoke from the burner is wafted over the body for health.

For about a thousand years the two traditions were blended, with kami treated as local forms of buddhas and temples running shrines on their grounds. In 1868 the Meiji government ordered them separated, and many Buddhist buildings were destroyed in the following years. The state then promoted Shinto as a national ideology until 1945, when the occupation ended state support. Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which enshrines the war dead including convicted war criminals, remains politically contested for that reason.

Everyday practice is practical and local. People buy omamori charms for exams, traffic safety or childbirth, hang wooden ema plaques with wishes, draw omikuji fortunes, and collect goshuin, hand-brushed seals in a stamp book. Households may keep a small Buddhist altar for ancestors. Christians are about one percent of the population, though Christian-style chapel weddings became popular from the 1980s.

Traditional buildings are wooden, raised off the ground on posts and designed around a heavy roof rather than load-bearing walls. That means frequent loss to fire, and a habit of careful rebuilding. Hōryū-ji near Nara holds some of the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, from about the 7th century, while Ise Grand Shrine is deliberately rebuilt on an adjacent plot every twenty years. Age in Japan often lives in the form and the craft skills rather than the original timber.

Inside, the tatami mat sets the scale. Rooms are still sized by the number of mats, so a six-mat room is a standard small bedroom in any estate agent’s listing. The shoin style of the 15th and 16th centuries added the alcove, tokonoma, where a scroll and a flower arrangement change with the season. Sliding paper and wooden screens let rooms open to a garden, and the garden is designed to be seen from a fixed viewpoint, often seated on the floor.

Castles were built mostly between the 1570s and 1610s. Only twelve original keeps survive; Himeji and Matsumoto are the best known, and many others are concrete reconstructions from the 1950s and 60s. From the Meiji period, foreign architects and their Japanese students brought brick and stone, seen in Tokyo Station of 1914. After 1945 architects such as Tange Kenzō made concrete expressive, and the 1960s Metabolist group imagined cities of plug-in capsules.

The performing arts come in historical layers. Noh, a masked, slow dance-drama, took shape in the 14th century. Bunraku puppet theatre and kabuki, with its bold make-up and male actors in all roles, grew up in the merchant cities of the Edo period. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints recorded the same urban world of actors, courtesans and travel; Hokusai’s Great Wave from about 1831 is the most reproduced. Manga and anime inherit its flat colour and strong line.

The tea ceremony, codified by Sen no Rikyū in the 16th century, ties many arts together: architecture of the tea hut, garden paths, ceramics, calligraphy and flowers. Its taste for the rough and imperfect, often summed up as wabi-sabi, explains why a lopsided tea bowl can be valued above a perfect one, and why mended pottery with gold lacquer seams, kintsugi, is displayed rather than hidden.

The basic meal pattern is ichijū sansai, one soup and three side dishes around a bowl of rice, with pickles. The word for a meal, gohan, literally means cooked rice. A set lunch, teishoku, follows this pattern at almost any price level, which makes it a reliable way to eat well cheaply. Washoku, traditional Japanese food, was added to UNESCO’s intangible heritage list in 2013, largely for the way it follows the seasons.

The flavour foundation is dashi, a quick stock usually made from kombu kelp and shaved dried bonito, katsuobushi. In 1908 the chemist Ikeda Kikunae isolated glutamate from kombu and named its taste umami. Soy sauce, miso, mirin and sake add the rest. The idea of shun, eating each ingredient at its peak, is why menus change monthly and why the same restaurant may feel different in May and November.

For more than a thousand years, Buddhist-influenced rules discouraged eating meat from domestic animals, starting with an edict of 675. Temple cooking, shōjin ryōri, developed rich vegetarian dishes from tofu, yuba and vegetables. Kaiseki, the formal multi-course meal, grew from food served before the tea ceremony. The Meiji government encouraged beef and dairy from the 1870s, giving rise to sukiyaki and to yōshoku, Western-style dishes such as curry rice, hamburg steak and tonkatsu.

Many dishes now seen as deeply Japanese are fairly recent or imported. Tempura came with Portuguese traders in the 16th century. Hand-pressed nigiri sushi was Edo street food in the early 19th century. Ramen grew from Chinese noodle shops in the early 20th century, and instant noodles were invented by Andō Momofuku in 1958. Regional pride is strong: Osaka for okonomiyaki and takoyaki, Hokkaidō for seafood and miso ramen, Okinawa for pork and bitter melon.

Table manners are few but firm. Say itadakimasu before eating and gochisōsama deshita after. Slurping noodles is normal. Do not stand chopsticks upright in rice or pass food from chopstick to chopstick, since both echo funeral rites. Tipping is not expected. Department store food halls, depachika, and convenience stores, konbini, are part of daily food life, and both are good places to see what people actually buy.

A matsuri is at root a visit from the kami. The deity is moved from the shrine into a portable shrine, mikoshi, or onto a wheeled float, and carried through the parish so it can see and bless the people. That is why mikoshi are shaken and bounced, why carriers chant, and why the route follows old neighbourhood boundaries. Food stalls, yatai, line the approach, selling grilled squid, candy apples and goldfish scooping.

The year opens with Shōgatsu, the most important holiday. Businesses close from about 29 December to 3 January, families gather, and tens of millions make hatsumōde, the first shrine visit. Setsubun on 3 February marks the end of winter, when people throw roasted soybeans to drive out demons. Girls’ Day is 3 March, and cherry blossom viewing, hanami, runs from late March in Tokyo and Kyoto, earlier in the south and later in the north.

Golden Week, from 29 April to 5 May, strings four public holidays together and is one of the busiest travel periods. Summer is festival season. Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri fills July, with its great float procession on 17 July; its origins go back to a rite against plague in 869. Tanabata, the star festival, is 7 July in most places and August in others. Obon in mid-August welcomes ancestral spirits home, with bon-odori circle dances and fires to light the way.

Autumn brings harvest festivals, the Jidai Matsuri costume parade in Kyoto on 22 October, and Shichi-Go-San around 15 November, when children aged three, five and seven are taken to shrines in formal dress. Maple viewing, momijigari, peaks in late November in central Japan. Japan switched to the Western calendar in 1873, so most festivals kept their old numerical date and shifted by about a month against the seasons, while some moved to match.

Japan also counts years by imperial era. 2026 is Reiwa 8, and forms, receipts and train tickets may use this system. Dates are written year, month, day. A few public holidays move to Mondays under the Happy Monday system, creating three-day weekends when domestic travel spikes. When a holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday becomes a substitute day off, so check the calendar before booking popular trains or ryokan.

Japanese mixes three scripts in one sentence. Kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese, carry most meaning; about 2,100 are on the official list for daily use. Hiragana, a rounded syllabary, writes grammar endings and native words, and katakana, a sharper syllabary, writes foreign loanwords such as terebi for television. Station names are usually given in kanji, hiragana and romaji, the Latin alphabet, so learning a few kanji for exit, entrance and toilet is useful quickly.

The language builds social relationships into grammar. Keigo, polite language, has respectful forms that raise the listener and humble forms that lower the speaker. Shop staff use it to customers; customers reply in plain polite speech. Visitors are not expected to master it. A handful of phrases go far: sumimasen for excuse me and thank you, onegaishimasu for please, and arigatō gozaimasu for thank you. Kansai speech, heard in Osaka and Kyoto, differs noticeably from Tokyo’s standard.

Many manners follow from a concern not to impose on others, often called meiwaku, causing trouble. Trains are quiet and phone calls are avoided on them. People queue at marked spots on platforms. Public bins are scarce, so people carry rubbish home. Eating while walking is frowned on in many places. On escalators, Tokyo stands on the left and Osaka on the right, though rail companies now ask people to stand still on both sides.

Shoes come off at homes, ryokan, many temples and some restaurants; a raised floor or a step at the entrance is the signal. Separate toilet slippers are worn only in the toilet. In onsen and public baths, wash thoroughly before entering the bath and keep towels out of the water. Some baths still refuse tattoos, though many now allow small ones covered with a patch. Bowing replaces handshakes in most everyday settings; a small nod is fine for visitors.

Japan is the fourth-largest economy in the world by dollar output, having been passed by Germany in 2023 as the yen weakened. Manufacturing giants in cars, electronics and machinery sit alongside millions of small family firms. The weak yen has made the country cheaper for visitors than at any point in decades, while locals feel rising import prices after thirty years of almost flat wages.

Rail shapes daily life more than in most countries. The first Shinkansen ran between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, and the national railway was split into regional JR companies in 1987. Private railways built department stores and suburbs at their terminals, a model started by Kobayashi Ichizō of Hankyū in Osaka. That is why so much shopping is in or above stations. Rechargeable IC cards such as Suica and ICOCA pay for trains, buses, vending machines and konbini.

Cash has been slow to fade. Card and mobile payments passed 40 percent of consumer spending in 2024, but small restaurants, shrines, temples and rural buses may still take only coins and notes. Post office and convenience store cash machines accept foreign cards. Consumption tax is 10 percent, or 8 percent on takeaway food, and prices are usually shown with tax included. Registered shops offer tax-free sales to visitors with a passport.

Tourism has become a major industry. Arrivals reached a record of about 37 million in 2024, concentrated in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and a few famous sights. Some places now respond with measures against overtourism: timed entry, higher prices for visitors, or rules in parts of Kyoto’s Gion. Meanwhile, labour shortages mean self-order tablets, ticket machines and unstaffed shops, which can make ordering easier for visitors who do not speak Japanese.