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Japanese

A civilization in Civilization Revolution 2

Era Bonuses
Leaders Himiko
Tōgō Heihachirō
Tokugawa
Oda Nobunaga
Begin the game with Ceremonial Burial

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The Japanese people represent a civilization in Civilization Revolution 2. Their color is brown.

The Japanese have only one leader, Tokugawa Ieyasu, in the iOS and Android versions of the game. However, in Civilization Revolution 2 Plus on PlayStation Vita, he is replaced by a set of three leader options: Himiko, Oda Nobunaga, and Tōgō Heihachirō.[1]

Japanese

History[]

It is not known when humans first settled on the Japanese archipelago, but the unification of Japan under the Yamato court, with the tenno ("Emperor of Heaven") at its center, occurred around the mid-4th century AD. It was during this Yamato period that Japan first began to experience significant contact with the mainland. Buddhism was introduced to Japan by Korean monks around 530 AD and was shortly adopted by the emperor's court. Rather than displacing Japan's native Shinto religion, Buddhism would eventually merge with it to form the synthesis that characterizes modern Shintoism.

The Heian Period (794-1185) was characterized by a slow decline of Chinese influence in favor of the development of native Japanese customs. In the late Heian period, the more powerful of the Samurai gathered in or near the capital, where they served both the military needs of the emperor and also as bodyguards for the great noble houses.

Although Japan was nominally united under the emperor and the shogun in Kyoto, by the end of the Muromachi period Japan had largely disintegrated into a hodgepodge of warring feudal states. Many of the most famous stories of the samurai date from this "Sengoku" Period. Eventually, Japan was reunited through the efforts of three men: Oda Nobunaga, his general Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Hideyoshi's successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. Tokugawa founded the Edo shogunate (1603-1867), which ended the incessant conflicts and brought reform and peace to the islands. The following two and a half centuries of peace brought prosperity to Japan, but the isolationist policy of the shoguns left the nation backwards technologically.

The arrival of a squadron of U.S. warships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in Uraga Bay in July 1853 finally opened Japan to Western influence. The opening up of Japan brought pressure for political reforms and a national identity that the outdated shogunate was unable to meet, leading to a revolution in the 1860s. Under the new Meiji government, Japan's stunning victories over China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-05) announced its presence as a world power, but the same nationalistic forces that led to Japan's resurgence also caused xenophobia and violent excesses against non-Japanese peoples. Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s, including invasions of China, Vietnam, and Indonesia brought it into increasing conflict with the United States, another growing Pacific power. In late 1941, in one of history's great miscalculations Japan allied itself with Germany and Italy and launched a surprise attack against the US navy at Pearl Harbor.

After initial successes in World War II, the summer of 1945 brought disaster for the Japanese: the Americans took Okinawa in a bloody invasion, in August the Soviet Union declared war and swept over Manchuria, and atomic bombs largely destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, respectively. The Pacific War came to an end on August 14, with the formal surrender signed on September 2 in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship USS Missouri. With postwar American aid, from 1952 to 1973 Japan experienced accelerated economic growth and social change. By the 1990s, Japan was again a first-class power, the senior partner in the emerging Asian economic bloc.

Fun Facts[]

"The Japanese Miracle" refers to the development of the Japanese economy after World War II. Nearly obliterated during the war, the Japanese economy over the next forty years became the second most powerful in the world, behind only the United States.

Surimono are Japanese woodblock prints adorned with an image and a short haiku poem that were often sent to loved ones on holidays.

Mount Fuji, the iconic mountain in central of Japan, is actually a dormant volcano. It last erupted in 1707.


References[]

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