Free
About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-25 0
For most of the last thousand years, Japan's emperors reigned without ruling. Regents governed through marriage, shoguns through armies, oligarchs through a constitution and generals through fear, while the same imperial family kept its throne. Around that strange continuity swirls a history of startling turns: farmers who made pottery before they planted crops, a warrior who rode a thousand kilometers to ask for his reward, a country that limited its contact with the outside world for two centuries and then remade itself in a single lifetime.
The course follows those turns from the first villages to the bullet train and weighs the arguments that still divide historians and neighbors, about what the samurai really valued, whether the Meiji leaders kept their promises and how Japan should remember its empire and its war. You will come away able to read a source like the Wei zhi or a sword hunt edict with a critical eye, and to see how ideas of rank, loyalty, rights and dignity have been fought over in one of the world's most fascinating societies.
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