In "Spectacular Accumulation" Morgan Pitelka relates the thrilling interactions between three "unifiers" of Japan in the tumultuous decades of the late 16th century and early 17th century. This trio of warlords includes the bloodthirsty Oda Nobunaga, the vainglorious Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu who ...
The open valley basins of Gifu Prefecture at the very center of Honshu, where the town of Sekigahara lies, were easily co-opted as theaters of war. It's no coincidence, given the martial history of the region, that the town of Seki was once known ...
Japan may come off to the outsider as a repressive society, but on homosexuality, the country has consistently been fairly liberal and permissive.
The city of Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture this year is doubling efforts to attract visitors from its neighbors in East Asia, especially China and Taiwan. The city is famous as the birthplace of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who founded the Tokugawa shogunate in the 17th ...
The transformation of Edo from a mosquito-infested fishing village to seat of power and cultural center has endlessly fascinated lovers of history. After the imperial capital Kyoto fell to military rule in 1185, ensuing battles for power saw the capital move to Kamakura, then ...
As a garden, Chishaku-in has many of the attributes of Japanese landscape design that should attract a good number of visitors. The fact that the temple in Kyoto's southeastern Higashikawara-cho district is rarely crowded, and that scant attention is paid to it in guidebooks, ...
Renovation work at the famed Yomeimon Gate of Toshogu Shrine in the tourist city of Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, has revealed wall paintings hidden for more than 200 years. It is believed the depictions of cranes were painted in 1752 on the west side of Yomeimon, ...
There aren't many people as important in the history of Japan as Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the man who, in 1603, seized power over the whole country as he launched the Tokugawa Shogunate, which lasted until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Since he is such ...
Here's a beguiling irony: Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), architect of Tokugawa Japan's rigid class structure and the author, in 1587, of a firm ban (not firmly enforced) on surnames for commoners, was himself born without a surname. "Toyotomi," the family name under which his memory survives, ...
