Who are the Japanese?
From Jōmon pottery to bullet trains — how an archipelago at the edge of Asia survived Mongols, shoguns, and ruin to become an economic miracle.
Last updated: October 2026
No people on earth has reinvented itself more completely — or more often — than the Japanese. An archipelago nation at the edge of Asia took Chinese writing, Buddhist faith, and Western industry, and made each of them unmistakably its own. Then, after the worst defeat of the twentieth century, it rebuilt into an economic miracle in a single generation.
Japan is an archipelago of thousands of islands stretching along the eastern edge of Asia, from the cold waters off Hokkaido in the north to the subtropical islands of Okinawa in the south. Four main islands — Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku — hold most of the land and nearly all of the population. The country is mountainous, volcanic, and earthquake-prone; most of its roughly 125 million people live in a narrow belt of coastal plains and cities. Tokyo, the capital, anchors the largest metropolitan area in the world. Japan is divided into forty-seven prefectures, and its landscape of volcanoes, forests, and carefully tended rice fields has shaped its art, its food, and its sense of itself.
Japan's position — close enough to the Asian mainland to borrow from it, far enough away to choose what to borrow — is the key to its history. The sea protected Japan from invasion; no foreign army successfully conquered the main islands until 1945. That security gave Japan room to absorb outside influences on its own terms, and to develop institutions and arts that are unmistakably its own. It also, at times, bred a dangerous confidence that Japan could stand apart from the world.
Japan's earliest known culture, the Jomon, left some of the world's oldest pottery, dating back more than ten thousand years. From around 300 BCE, the Yayoi period brought rice farming, metalworking, and new waves of migrants from the Korean peninsula, transforming Japanese society. From the fifth and sixth centuries CE, Japan imported the great tools of civilisation from China, largely via Korea: writing, Buddhism, Confucian statecraft, city planning, and court ritual. The Japanese adapted Chinese characters into a writing system of their own, combining Chinese-derived kanji with two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana, that remain in use today.
The Heian period, from 794 to 1185, is remembered as a golden age of court culture in Kyoto. Aristocrats wrote poetry, kept diaries, and composed what is often called the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji, written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century. Beneath the court's refinement, however, power was shifting to warriors in the provinces. In 1185, the samurai commander Minamoto no Yoritomo established a military government, the shogunate, at Kamakura, beginning centuries in which emperors reigned while shoguns ruled.
The samurai, Japan's warrior class, dominated the country's politics for nearly seven hundred years. Their code, later idealised as bushido, prized loyalty, discipline, and honour, and their image — the sword, the armour, the duel — still colours how the world imagines Japan. In 1274 and again in 1281, Mongol fleets sent by Kublai Khan attempted to invade Japan; both were scattered by typhoons, remembered in Japanese tradition as the kamikaze, or divine winds. The Mongol threat passed, but the memory of a country saved by storm and sea endured.
From 1603, the Tokugawa shoguns unified Japan and imposed a long peace. They moved the capital of power to Edo, modern Tokyo, and from the 1630s they restricted foreign contact to a narrow window: Dutch and Chinese traders at Nagasaki, and diplomatic ties with Korea and the Ryukyu kingdom. This policy, later called sakoku, or the closed country, was never total isolation — Japanese scholars studied Dutch books, and trade continued — but it kept Japan out of the colonial scramble that was consuming the rest of Asia. In the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace, Japan's cities grew, its merchant culture flourished, and its literacy rates rose to levels that rivalled Europe's.
The closed country ended when American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853 and demanded that Japan open its ports. The shock helped topple the shogunate. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration returned the emperor to the centre of politics and launched one of the fastest modernisations in history: a conscript army, a national school system, railways, factories, a constitution in 1889, and a parliament. Japan's leaders studied Western models deliberately, sending missions abroad and hiring foreign advisers, while insisting that Japan would modernise on Japanese terms.
Modernisation brought military power, and military power brought empire. Japan defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, annexed Korea in 1910, and seized territories in the First World War. In the 1930s, militarist governments invaded Manchuria and then China, and in 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into the Second World War. The war ended in August 1945 with Japan's surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only uses of nuclear weapons in war. The war had killed millions, devastated Japanese cities, and ended the empire. It also forced Japan to confront, as it still does, the question of responsibility for its wartime aggression — a question that remains politically sensitive in relations with China and Korea.
Under American occupation, Japan adopted a new constitution in 1947, written with American input, which renounced war as a means of settling international disputes — the famous Article 9 — and established parliamentary democracy, the equality of the sexes, and fundamental rights. The emperor remained, but as a symbol of the state rather than a sovereign. Japan kept a close security alliance with the United States, and American bases remain on Japanese soil, above all in Okinawa, to this day.
What followed is often called the Japanese economic miracle. From the ruins of 1945, Japan rebuilt into the world's second-largest economy by the late 1960s, powered by exports of cars, electronics, and steel, by high savings, and by firms that became household names across the globe. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics announced Japan's return to the world stage. Growth slowed after the asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, and Japan entered decades of low growth and deflation that economists still study. But the country's achievements in manufacturing quality, infrastructure, public safety, and longevity remain remarkable: Japan has one of the highest life expectancies in the world.
Today Japan faces a challenge no country has met before at this scale: a rapidly ageing society. Birth rates are low, the population is shrinking, and a growing share of Japanese are over sixty-five. Successive governments have debated immigration, automation, and support for families, and Japan has quietly become more diverse, with growing communities from China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brazil. The question of how to keep the economy and the social safety net running as the population ages is the central domestic issue of modern Japan.
Culturally, Japan's influence has never been larger. Anime and manga reach audiences on every continent; Japanese cuisine, from sushi to ramen, is a global staple; Japanese video games, fashion, and design shape tastes worldwide. The country's two native faiths — Shinto, the indigenous tradition of shrines and nature spirits, and Buddhism, which arrived from the mainland — coexist in most Japanese lives, with shrines and temples visited for births, marriages, and New Year. Japan today is a democracy, an American ally, and a country still arguing with itself about its past and its future — a people that has reinvented itself, from court to shogunate to empire to democracy, more completely and more often than any other, and that is now being asked to reinvent itself once more.
Further reading in works of reference and scholarship:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on Japan, the Tokugawa period, and the Meiji Restoration
- Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford University Press)
- John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W. W. Norton)
- Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, in translation (Penguin Classics)
- The Constitution of Japan (1947), including Article 9
- United Nations, World Population Prospects, estimates for Japan