- [Instructor] 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 year 1185,
when the Heian period ends and a general
by the name of Minamoto Yoritomo comes to power.
And what's significant here is the notion of an emperor
continues to exist, but all of the power resides
in what you can essentially 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 where all of the power was.
And this is really the beginning
of medieval Japan.
It's the beginning of the Kamakura period,
named for where the capital of the Kamakura period was.
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 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.
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 conquering much of China
and he also attempts to conquer Japan.
This right over here is a picture of the Mongols
shooting arrows at a samurai warrior.
Now one of the key factors that keeps
Kublai Khan from taking over Japan
is on two different 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.
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 another shogun comes to power
and that is Ashikaga Takauji.
And this is the 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.
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 daimyo,
one of these lords who controlled
what you could kind of consider to be a county of Japan
and using these guns, he's able to put
most of the other daimyos, most of the other lords
into submission, and he begins to significantly 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.
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 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.