10 historical facts about Japan that allow you to look at this country from a different perspective

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Japan is a unique country with a very colorful and distinctive history. In addition to the well-known facts about the failed attempts of the Mongol invasion due to the strongest typhoons, and about the 250-year Edo period, when Japan was in self-isolation, without communicating with other countries, there is a lot of interesting things in the history of this country.

1. The Japanese have not eaten meat for a long time

In the middle of the seventh century, Emperor Tenmu, following the Buddhist precepts prohibiting the taking of life, issued a decree prohibiting the consumption of meat. Violation of it was punishable by death, and he acted for over 1,200 years. Communication with Christian missionaries led to the fact that in the 16th century the ban was lifted, and the Japanese began to eat meat again. It cannot be said that all residents welcomed its abolition, especially for the monks.

2. Women's Kabuki Theater

Everyone knows the Japanese Kabuki dance theater, whose troupe consists exclusively of men. But there was a time when Kabuki was his complete opposite - purely feminine. Kabuki was founded by the famous dancer Izumo no Okuni, who often performs in men's clothing. Her theater became immensely popular, but the Japanese government considered the girls' performances indecent. And one of the scandals that happened during the performance was the reason to ban them from performing. And since 1629, the Kabuki theater has become what everyone knows it now.

3. Japan's surrender might not have happened

In August 1945, Japan surrendered, as Emperor Hirohito announced on a nationwide radio broadcast. This statement was recorded at night, a few hours before the broadcast. A group of military men led by Major Kenji Hatanaki, who did not want to surrender, broke into the palace and, knowing about the record, decided to destroy it. But the tape was secretly removed from the palace, and they could not find it. Hatanaka tried to use the nearest radio station to broadcast his statement, but he failed and he shot himself.

4. Checking swords for bystanders

In the Middle Ages, it was considered a great shame if a samurai could not defeat an opponent with one blow. Therefore, samurai necessarily tested their weapons, especially new ones, before using them in battle. Usually the bodies of criminals or corpses were used for this. But sometimes they resorted to another method, called "tsujigiri" (murder at the crossroads), when the victims were bystanders encountered at night at the crossroads. At first, such cases were extremely rare, but gradually developed into a serious problem, and in 1602 the tsujigiri were banned by the Japanese authorities.

5. Spooky trophies of Japanese soldiers

Under the legendary commander Toyotomi Hideyoshi, in the last decade of the 16th century, Japan twice attacked Korea. These incursions were very bloody in nature, with the death toll of up to a million Koreans. At first, the Japanese brought home the severed heads of their opponents as trophies, but this was very inconvenient. And then, instead of heads, they began to bring severed ears and noses. And there are a lot of such terrible trophies in Japan, they even began to create terrifying monuments-tombs that could contain tens of thousands of such trophies.

6. Harakiri for atonement

At the end of the war, Vice Admiral Tekijiro Onishi, hoping to turn the tide, organized squads of kamikaze pilots to destroy Allied aircraft and ships. Having become the ideological father of the kamikaze, Onishi believed that such a tactic would sow panic and force the Americans to end the war. About 4,000 lives of young pilots were sacrificed to his ghostly hope, but Onishi, according to him, was ready for much more sacrifices. But after the surrender of Japan, Onishi suddenly realized all the senselessness and cruelty of his idea with the kamikaze, and as an atonement, he committed hara-kiri the day after the surrender, apologizing in his suicide note to the souls of the pilots who died through his fault, as well as to their families.

7. The first Japanese to accept Christianity is a criminal

The 35-year-old samurai criminal Anjiro, who killed his opponent during a fight, first hid in the port of Kagoshima in Japan, and then fled abroad to Malacca. There he was baptized, taking the name Paulo de Santa Fe and traveled to Japan with the Christian missionary Francis Xavier. However, the mission was unsuccessful and they soon parted ways. And if Francisco was later even canonized, then Anjiro, apparently, died as a pirate, and they gradually forgot about him.

8. In Japan, the slave trade was abolished thanks to the Portuguese

One of the consequences of the first contacts of Western countries with Japan was the slave trade. In the 1540s, the Portuguese bought up the Japanese as slaves with great profit for themselves. As a result, this trade acquired such proportions that the Japanese could even be owned by Portuguese slaves. Under the influence of Christian missionaries, the king of Portugal imposed a ban on the enslavement of the Japanese, promulgating a corresponding law, but the Portuguese colonists ignored this ban. The military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi was outraged by such activities, and in 1587 he managed to impose a ban on the slave trade in Japan.

9. Japanese schoolgirls worked as nurses

At the end of the war, in bloody battles in Okinawa, which lasted for 3 months, almost 100,000 civilians died, including 200 local schoolgirls, who were called upon to work as nurses during the fighting. Initially, they worked in a military hospital, but with the intensification of bombing they were transferred to the very hell. And despite the increasing advantage of the allies' forces, they were forbidden to surrender. Some of the girls died by blowing themselves up with a grenade, others during the battle.

10. The Japanese tried to create an atomic bomb during World War II

A group of Japanese physicists in the spring of 1941 began to develop their own nuclear weapons. However, they failed to achieve success within the framework of this program. Although they possessed all the necessary knowledge, they were greatly lacking in resources. And it is not known where the wheel of war would have turned if they had succeeded.