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World history
Course: World history > Unit 3
Lesson 11: Medieval JapanWATCH: Shoguns, samurai and the Japanese Middle Ages
An overview of the Japanese Medieval period in which Shoguns ruled under the bakufu (shogunate) feudal system. Discussion of daimyo during the Kamakura and Muromachi/Ashikaga periods. Samurai and bushido.
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- Is that the time when Marco Polo in the 1285 around met kublai knan? Is that the time when people thought the earth was flat?(5 votes)
- Yes, the Kublai Khan mentioned in the video is the one from Marco Polo's book. Flat earth - well, at the time, the Japanese took their cosmological ideas from the Chinese, who believed that the earth was square and the heavens were round. These ideas lasted until around the 17th century when they were exposed to Portugese sailors. Greeks as early as 500 BC had believed that the earth was round. Eratosthenes in around 300 BC made a rough estimate of the circumference of the earth that was pretty accurate, but it took a long time for these ideas to influence world society.(13 votes)
- , what are some examples of technology and ideas that Japan "borrowed" from other cultures? 5:55(4 votes)
- Much of Japanese development in Pottery is due to Japan capturing and relocating Korean artisans after their invasion of Korea in 16th Century.
The captives brought to Japan, including scholars, craftsmen, medicine makers, and gold smelters, provided Japan with many cultural and technological gains.[273] In the years that followed, Japanese pottery and art advanced and developed a significant similarity to their Korean counterparts.[162] Advances in other areas such as agriculture were also aided by technology and artisans acquired and captured during the invasions. Japanese typography advanced with the adoption of Chinese fonts.[277] Because Korean pottery was highly prized in Japan, many Japanese lords established pottery-producing kilns with captured Korean potters in Kyūshū and other parts of Japan.[278] The production of Arita porcelain in Japan began in 1616 at the town of Imari with the aid of Korean potters who had been enticed to relocate there after the war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%9398)#Losses_and_gains(9 votes)
- What is the political system the Japanese use today?(1 vote)
- Today, Japan is still a Constitutional Monarchy. It has a parliamentary system and a unitary state.(6 votes)
- Why are Samurai Warriors so... so... scary?(2 votes)
- They were intended to be scary to frighten off their enemies.(3 votes)
- Please, please at least try to learn how to properly pronounce japanese words?(3 votes)
- The lesson is many years old. If you would like corrections inserted, make a list of specific instances of mispronunciation and send it to the help center, which you'll find at the bottom of the page. If the staff there find the mispronunciations egregious enough, they will insert corrections into the old video.(2 votes)
- Why do the emperors wear so much makeup?(3 votes)
- Did they? I saw no photographs, only artists' depictions of what the artists may have thought was the most honorable way to depict an emperor. What photographic evidence are you using?(2 votes)
- Did the wars between the Japanese clans suffice to the time of the Medieval ages all the way to the coming of the European influences.(2 votes)
- Well the Europeans were knights and Japanese were Samurai, they are linked to them in the same period.(2 votes)
- Did the Portuguese have any influence on the Japanese language such as the word "né" in Portuguese which I believe is used in the same way in Japanese. Is this a coincidence? Did one learn from the other?(1 vote)
- I live in Taiwan, from whence the word for tea (te) migrated through several European languages to become "the" in French and "tea" in English. By contrast, the word "chai" (which is tea) came from northern China and made its way into English centuries later.
"Almost 5,000 years ago, when folks in China started sipping a yummy, steeped beverage made from dried leaves and buds, different regions had different names for it. Most Chinese languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, referred to the stuff by a word that is pronounced like “chá.” But other dialects, including Min Nan Chinese, which was spoken around Fujian, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan, referred to it by a word that sounds more like "te.""
http://mentalfloss.com/article/28559/dont-chai-and-tea-both-mean-same-thing(3 votes)
- In the Bakufu system of Japan, The shogun(military leader) had the real power instead of the Emperor even though he was supposed to be respected like a god; he was only a name to the local people.(2 votes)
- why are the last 3 people (Oda Nobunaga,Toyotomi Hideyoshi,and Tokugawa Ieyasu) holding fans and squatting? Is it some kind of imperial pose?(2 votes)
- As for their poses- they weren't squatting but were rather sitting on the floor. This was a normal pose, similar to that of sitting on a chair in Europe (there was no point of having a chair in Japan since their floor was covered with straw mats called tatami). As for the fan, the folding fan was seen as a symbol of wealth and power and overall high status.(0 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] As we get
into the late Heian period, you start to have the emergence of a increasingly powerful warrior class. And all of that comes to
a head in the year 1185, when the Heian period ends and a general by the name of Minamoto
Yoritomo comes to power. And what's significant here
is the notion of an emperor continues to exist, but
all of the power resides in what you can essentially
consider a military dictator, or a shogun. And the system that emerges
is known as the bakufu system or the shogunate. And Minamoto Yuritomo
was the first shogun. So you can see here, the
emperor still was there, but the shogun was where
all of the power was. And this is really the beginning of medieval Japan. It's the beginning of the Kamakura period, named for where the capital
of the Kamakura period was. Now what's distinctive
about medieval Japan and the bakufu system, is that it becomes much more decentralized than what we had under the Heian period. It's often called a feudal system, because it has parallels
to what was going on in Europe at around the same time. Where at the top you had this
military ruler, the shogun, and then beneath the shogun you had this decentralized structure of these lords, essentially, that controlled significant
regions of Japan. They were called the daimyo. And there were roughly
300 daimyo in Japan, roughly county sized districts. And the daimyo, in order conquer land, or to protect their own land, they would support a warrior
class known as the samurai. And so they would take their agricultural surplus from their lands, and use that to support
this warrior class. And this warrior class, the samurai, they were analogous to
knights in medieval Europe and just as the knights
had chivalry in Europe, the samurai in Japan had bushido which eventually emerges
as their code of conduct. Despite that decentralized nature, they were able to fend off
invasions from Kublai Khan. So as we've mentioned in other videos in the 1270s, Kublai Khan
is conquering much of China and he also attempts to conquer Japan. This right over here is
a picture of the Mongols shooting arrows at a samurai warrior. Now one of the key factors that keeps Kublai Khan from taking over Japan is on two different occasions
as they send their boats from what we now consider
to be Korea to Japan they encounter significant
storms that destroy most of the boats, and so the Mongols who are able to get to land
are significantly depleted and they're pushed back
by the samurai warriors. Now the Kamakura period
continues on until 1333 when there is a brief, only
a few years restoration of the power of the emperor, but a few years after that
another shogun comes to power and that is Ashikaga Takauji. And this is the beginning
now of the Muromachi period. The Muromachi period is often
known as the Ashikaga period or the Ashikaga shogunate,
but it's named Muromachi for the district of Kyoto
at which it had its capital. And even though over the
course of the Muromachi period the emperor at different points was subsumed into the power of the shogun, this is considered especially
the later Muromachi period as one of the more fragmented
times of Japanese history. You had many civil wars. You had a lot of internal conflict, and it was only at the end as we get to the end of the 16th Century
that Japan gets reunified. And one of the key factors that allows it to get reunified is that in
the middle of the 16th Century Portuguese traders show up and
they introduce guns to Japan. And one daimyo in
particular is able to take significant advantage of those guns, and that is Oda Nobunaga. Oda Nobunaga as I mentioned
was a powerful daimyo, one of these lords who controlled what you could kind of consider
to be a county of Japan and using these guns, he's able to put most of the other daimyos,
most of the other lords into submission, and he begins
to significantly unify Japan. Now he is eventually
assassinated and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi continues
to unify Japan even further. When he dies, Tokugawa Ieyasu takes power and he's able to consolidate even further and definitively becomes
the ruling shogun of Japan. Now even though this
period that we're entering, the Edo period and it's
named for the castle Edo from which the Tokugawa shogunate ruled, even though this continues
to be a shogunate with a shogun in power at
the top, the bakufu system, the reason why this is
considered the beginning of the modern period or
the early modern period is that Japan was finally unified again. Now one thing that we will see as we get into the 19th Century, as we get into the end of the Edo period and then you have the Meiji restoration where you have imperial rule again is that Japan is very good
at borrowing technology and ideas from other cultures
and then making it their own. We saw that in the classical period where they imported ideas
of Confucianism, Buddhism, imperial government from the Chinese, but adding their own flavor to it and we will see it again as
we get into the 19th Century when Japan is one of the first
countries not just in Asia, but in the world to truly industrialize by learning many of the technologies that get pioneered in the west.