A suit of Japanese samurai armour
Armor (<i>Dō-maru</i>), armor, ca. 1550; helmet, 18th century
Marked Kamakura

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Samurai and shoguns

For nearly seven centuries, military rulers called shoguns governed Japan in the emperor’s name, served by warriors called samurai. Under the Tokugawa from 1603, Japan had two centuries of peace and closed itself to most foreigners.

Place
Kamakura · Kyoto · Edo (Tokyo) · Himeji · SekigaharaAsia
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IKamakura and the first shogun
  2. IIThe Mongol invasions
  3. IIIWarring states
  4. IVThree unifiers
  5. VEdo, a city of a million
  6. VIThe ships of 1853

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Minamoto no Yoritomo
  • Oda Nobunaga
  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi
  • Tokugawa Ieyasu
  • Tomoe Gozen

Objects

  • Samurai armour
  • Ukiyo-e prints
  • Himeji Castle

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1185 to 1868. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?