Japan
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Japan’
Japan’s first Shogun owed his life and his rise to power to a spider and two harmless doves.
This tale from Japanese history tells how Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), a contemporary of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, rose to power and became the first of the Shoguns, military dictators who sidelined the Emperors and wielded supreme authority in Japan until 1868.
An Elizabethan mariner reaches Japan under terrible hardships, only to find himself under sentence of death at the hands of his fellow Europeans.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were Elizabeth I’s Protestant allies against Europe’s Catholic states and the cruel Inquisition. This made trade with South America and the Far East, where Spanish and Portuguese merchants were already established, a matter of bitter and bloody rivalry.
As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
A Japanese swordsman confronts a Russian monk for... actually, he’s not really quite sure.
In 1859, Hakodate in Japan became one of the first Japanese cities to establish trade relations with foreign nations, with the opening of a Russian Consulate. Fear of Westernisation was high, and Russian missionary Fr Nicholas Kasatkin went there determined to ensure that Christianity would be as authentically Japanase as possible, but for one proud warrior that was not sufficient.