Japan

The Japanese archipelago has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, but its earliest well documented culture is the Jomon, a hunter gatherer society known for cord marked pottery that flourished from roughly 14,000 BCE. The subsequent Yayoi period, beginning around the third century BCE, introduced wet rice agriculture, bronze, and iron from the Asian mainland. By the Kofun period of the third to seventh centuries CE, a centralising polity had emerged in the Yamato basin, and Chinese chronicles record tributary missions from a queen named Himiko. The Yamato court progressively consolidated authority, adopted Buddhism in the sixth century, and through the Taika Reforms of 645 and the later Taiho Code modelled its administration on Tang China. The Nara (710 to 794) and Heian (794 to 1185) periods saw the flowering of an aristocratic court culture in the new capitals at Nara and Heian kyo, modern Kyoto.

From the late twelfth century, effective power shifted from the imperial court to a succession of warrior governments, or shogunates. The Kamakura shogunate (1185 to 1333) repulsed two Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281; it gave way to the Ashikaga or Muromachi shogunate, whose decline produced the Sengoku era of warring domains. Reunification was achieved by Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo in 1603. For more than two centuries the Tokugawa regime imposed a closed country policy, sakoku, that strictly limited foreign contact. The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's American squadron in 1853 forced Japan to open its ports, precipitating the collapse of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which restored nominal authority to the young Emperor Meiji and inaugurated rapid industrial and military modernisation.

The Meiji and subsequent Taisho eras transformed Japan into a constitutional monarchy with an elected Diet, established under the 1889 Meiji Constitution, and into a colonial power. Victories over Qing China in 1895 and Imperial Russia in 1905 secured Taiwan and a sphere of influence in Korea, which was annexed outright in 1910. Through the 1930s, militarist factions drove expansion into Manchuria and broader China, and in December 1941 Japan entered the Second World War against the United States and the European Allies. Defeat in August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Soviet entry into the war, ended the empire and inaugurated an Allied occupation under General Douglas MacArthur.

A new constitution promulgated in 1947 vested sovereignty in the people, reduced the emperor to a symbol of the state, and renounced war in its Article 9. The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty restored Japanese sovereignty in 1952, and a security treaty with the United States, revised in 1960, anchored Japan's Cold War alignment. Under successive governments, most of them led by the Liberal Democratic Party founded in 1955, the country achieved an extraordinary postwar economic recovery, joined the United Nations in 1956, and emerged as the world's second largest economy by the late 1960s. The bursting of an asset price bubble in the early 1990s opened a prolonged period of slow growth and demographic ageing.

In the post Cold War decades, Japan has expanded its international security role, hosted the 1998 Nagano and 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, and weathered the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The accession of Emperor Naruhito in 2019 inaugurated the Reiwa era. Today Japan is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy under the 1947 constitution, with executive authority exercised by a prime minister responsible to the bicameral National Diet.