Transcript

Shoguns, Samurai and the Japanese

Timing and description Text

00:01 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
Timeline shows the year 1185, when the Heian period ends, and a general by the name of Minamoto
Heian period (794-1185); Yoritomo comes to power. And what’s significant here is, the notion of an emperor
painting of Minamoto continues to exist, but all of the power resides in what you can essentially
Yoritomo 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
Kamakura period (1185- where all of the power was. And this is really the beginning of medieval Japan.
1333) It’s the beginning of the Kamakura period, named for where the capital of the
Kamakura period was.

01:08 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 to 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.

02:17 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
Painting depicts the conquering much of China and he also attempts to conquer Japan. This right over
Mongols shooting at a here is a picture of the Mongols shooting arrows at a samurai warrior. Now, one of
Samurai warrior on the key factors that keeps Kublai Khan from taking over Japan is, on two different
horseback 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.

03:09 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,
Muromachi Period (1336- another shogun comes to power, and that is Ashikaga Takauji. And this is the
1573) 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.
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Transcript
Shoguns, Samurai and the Japanese Middle Ages

Timing and description Text

04:26 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
Portraits of Oda daimyo, one of these lords who controlled what you can kind of consider to
Nobunaga,Toyotomi be a county of Japan, and, using these guns, he’s able to put most of the other
Hideyoshi, Tokugawa daimyos, most of the other lords, into submission, and he begins to significantly
Ieyasu 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.

05:18 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
Edo Period (1600-1868) 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.