JAPAN'S EARLY MODERN TRANSFORMATION

In 1543 some Portuguese traders in a Chinese junk came ashore on the island of Tanegashima south of Kagoshima, the headquarters city of the Satsuma domain of southernmost Kyushu. This first, and presumably accidental, encounter between Europeans and Japanese proved to be an epochal event, for from the Portuguese the Japanese learned about Western firearms. Within three decades the Japanese civil war that had been growing in intensity among the regional military lords, or daimyō, was being fought with the new technology. In 1549 another Chinese vessel, this time purposefully, set on Japanese soil at Kagoshima the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, one of the founders of the Society of Jesus. This marked the start of a vigorous effort by Jesuit missionaries to bring Christianity to Japan. For another hundred years Japan lay open to both traders and missionaries from the West. And conversely Japan became known to the world beyond its doors.

From a strictly Japanese perspective, the century or so from the middle of the sixteenth century is distinguished by what can be called the “daimyo phenomenon,” that is, the rise of local military lords who first carved out their own domains and then began to war among themselves for national hegemony. Between 1568 and 1590 two powerful lords, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), managed to unite all daimyo under a single military command, binding them together into a national confederation. The most important political development of these years was without question the achievement of military consolidation that led in 1603 to the establishment of a new shogunate, based in Edo.