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first glance at a map of Japan shows 3,000 islands (but four main
ones) strung along the 135th and 140th lines of east longitude and
swinging westward toward Korea in the south, suggesting a north-
south axis. But the Japanese have always thought of their history unfolding
east-and-west: The 35th parallel falls just south of Tokyo, cuts right through
Kyoto, skims the lowest tip of Korea, and then cuts westward across China’s
ancient capitals: Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Chang’an (Xi’an). (Beijing rides
higher on the 40th latitude.) Latitude-wise, at least, ancient Japan and ancient
China were on a par.
The drama of Japanese history was enacted on two main geographical
stages, a western one with a Kyoto focus and an eastern one with a Tokyo
focus. The western region is the most ancient, woven into the mythology of a
Sun Goddess who sends her grandson to the southern island of Kyushu, carry-
ing rice shoots; his grandson conquers areas to the northeast through the
Inland Sea (the Seto Sea) to the coastal shores of Honshu at modern Osaka,
and then inland to the Nara Basin. The Yamato River drains this region from
eastern hills, where sacred mountains rise, and gives its name to the highlands
known as the Yamato Peninsula; beyond them toward the sunrise, at the east-
ern coast, is a sacred place called Ise. From Osaka Bay to Ise is the oldest
heartland of Japanese culture. For many centuries rice cultivation went no far-
ther north than modern Nagoya. But by the twelfth century, a new, vigorous
provincial society had emerged in the west, where later extensions of rice culti-
vation had made the land valuable to people from the imperial court. Land
had value in those days only to the extent there were peasants to make it pro-
duce; by the twelfth century the fertile regions lying in a rough oval, with mod-
ern Tokyo at the bottom, supported an aristocratic rural elite, many of them
descendants of junior lines of the imperial family with names like Taira and
Minamoto. Kyoto in the west was culturally refined, spiritually rich with
many sects of Buddhism and Shinto temples, but effete and without even a
standing army. Tokyo did not yet exist, but there in the region known as “the
Kanto,” powerful military leaders and a class of aristocratic warriors estab-
lished a second center of power. Until 1867 a dual system of government and
an increasingly complex culture fused into modern society, which, after the
transformations of the Meiji period, made Japan the richest and most powerful
Asian nation of the twentieth century. (China has surpassed Japan on many
dimensions in the twenty-first century.)
A
Chapter opener photo: A Japanese girl dressed in a traditional kimono prays in a
Kyoto shrine.