Japan

An archipelago that borrowed from China, closed itself for two centuries, then industrialised faster than any country had - and was the only non-western state to become a great power in the nineteenth century, and the only one destroyed by the attempt in the twentieth. Yamato rulers adopted Chinese writing, Buddhism and administrative models from the sixth century and adapted them into something distinct. Warrior government under successive shogunates ran from 1192, and the Tokugawa closed the country from the 1630s, permitting only a Dutch trading post at Nagasaki - two and a half centuries of peace, urbanisation and a literacy rate that was unusually high when the ports were forced open by American warships in 1853. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 replaced the shogunate with rule in the emperor's name, dismantled the samurai class and industrialised deliberately: conscription, a national school system, railways, a modern navy, missions sent abroad to copy what worked, and a constitution in 1889, all in a generation. Victory over China in 1895 brought Taiwan, and victory over Russia in 1905 made Japan the first Asian power to defeat a European empire in modern war, which was noticed across the colonised world. Korea was annexed in 1910. The Meiji constitution contained a flaw that proved fatal: the army and navy reported directly to the emperor rather than to the cabinet and could bring down a government by withdrawing their minister, so civilian control eroded as officers acted on their own. The Kwantung Army manufactured a pretext and seized Manchuria in 1931 without orders. Full war with China from 1937 included the massacre at Nanjing. Embargoes over that war led to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The empire took Southeast Asia in months and at its furthest extent held territory from the Aleutians to New Guinea, then lost it over three years. Firebombing destroyed most Japanese cities, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the emperor announced surrender by radio. The occupation wrote a new constitution, in force from 1947, renouncing war. Growth to 1990 made Japan the second largest economy before a long stagnation. Its population is now falling and among the oldest anywhere. Tokyo is the capital. The country has about 123 million people on around fourteen thousand islands, four of them holding almost everyone. Japanese is written with three scripts used together. The country records around fifteen hundred earthquakes a year. Its rail network runs to a punctuality measured in seconds. Twenty-six of its sites are World Heritage listed. Japan has the highest number of people over a hundred years old relative to population, and its shrinking workforce is the central policy problem.

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