Hot answers tagged japan
11
As mentioned in this Wikipedia article, Japan's reasons for attacking the US were mostly because of the US stopping oil and other material shipments to Japan and Japanese belief that further Japanese aggression in Asia (which they were intent on pursuing and not just or even primarily in Philippines) would lead to a war with the US anyway. Thus Japan ...
8
Japan agreed to pay war reparations of 1.3 trillion yen. The Japanese GDP in 1952 was 6,217 billion yen. So the reparation was 20.91% of the Japanese GDP. The Japanese GDP in 2011 was equivalent to $5.869 trillion 2011 USD. So the reparations were equivalent to 1,224 billion 2011 USD. This was all proposed at the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952. The soviet ...
7
Turns out it was teak wood.
Teak was the preferred would and the red brown color wouldn't be a mahogony stain, but the natural color. As teak is sourced from the Thai/Burma area, Dec. 7th ended the supply chain. Douglas-Fir was substituted on the newer carriers in WWII, and that would have to have been stained and subsequently painted.
...
6
Yip man was real (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). He was a famous student of Wing Chun. My guess is that you're referring to the 2008 movie, Ip Man. However, it was not historically accurate. Quoting its Wikipedia page:
Film4's review detailed the departures from history: "The real Ip Man was never, despite the film's assertions to the contrary, forced from ...
6
This blog states that the company that produced this image was a Japanese company whose purpose in making the lithographs was to celebrate the Japanese victory. The blog also linked to multiple other related images.
The images are held at the Library of Congress so it is reasonable to assume that they were consumed in the United States.
The Wikipedia ...
6
Here is a rough translation of a page in Spanish:
In 1712, it is said that a thief named Kakinoki Kinsuke used a large kite to be transported to the top of Nagoya Castle. There, under cover of darkness, Kinsuke stole scales of a few gold dolphins.
And another page:
In 1712, a thief named Kakinoki Kinsuke is said to have used a large kite to carry ...
5
Onsen Geisha is not a specific Rank or similar within a national Geisha hierarchy.
Onsen Geisha refer much more for the location where they can be found. You can see Onsen Geisha at several resort towns in Japan, for example Akita;
Sample resorts that allow booking of shows or private entertainment:
http://www.atami-furuya.co.jp/geisha/
...
5
This is probably the Ichihara pump, from late 19th century Japan - their first four-wheeled horse drawn engine was built in 1899. There is very little english language information on the company online.
Japan has a long and fascinating tradition of firefighting, the hikeshi, going back centuries. They used hollow bamboo ladders and portable hand-pumps to ...
5
There are basically two answers to your question. The first comes from the legal precedents in the Japanese constitution, peace treaties, etc. The second is the de facto version of what actually happened after the war, and up to now.
Legally speaking, Japan was forbidden from having any kind of standing army, though they were permitted to have forces for ...
4
Apparently, Yoshioka Matashichiro was the 12 year old son of Seijūrō:
This second defeat was a complete loss of face for the Yoshioka family and their school. Looking for revenge, the school challenged Musashi again. This time, 12 year old Yoshioka Matashichiro, the oldest son of Seijuro was chosen as the leader of the challenge. However, because of his ...
4
In China, there were warriors similar to ronin - the xia. As a link, I found only those regarding their philosophy or literature about them. GURPS Martial Arts (it's no solid historical work and I didn't manage to find any better source) states they were more like Robin Hood than Lancelot - they were not upper class like samurai.
Korean Hwarang are ...
4
Your definition of "military target" is incorrect. The entire cities WERE military targets because military installations and arms factories/storage facilities were located inside the city limits.
Quite apart from that, the policy of carpetbombing cities was well established at the time and was being performed on a daily basis by B-29s carrying conventional ...
4
The Japanese had 4 terms they were demanding in order to "surrender":
The emperor would remain inviolate.
Japan's borders would be restored to those of summer of 1942, requiring the allies to return to Japanese control every island and country that they had been thrown off of, such as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines.
Japanese troops would ...
4
Rather than saying they had X number of wars, it would probably be more accurate to say that the two countries had a continuous ongoing conflict from 1895 until 1947, with occassional brief breaks for recuperation and retooling. In fact, the territorial disputes didn't even really end there, but the fighting did due to the Cold War.
Since then I think just ...
3
Do Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands count?
Land-starved Japan ceding territory to the Soviet Union, a nation that ruled a landmass larger than some continents with only twice Japan's population, had to hurt, and bad... and still hurts to this day.
3
Well, there is something on the internet.
I found an article which deals with the classification of samurai suicides by their motivations (along the lines of the discussion I had with Anixx in the comments). The authors have also compiled some statistics from a survey of Japanese literary sources (chronicles etc., I presume). They rightly call this ...
3
I do not have numbers but I am quite sure that in most cases the samurais killed themselves either when ordered to do so by the superiors or expected the superiors to order so.
In fact the samurais in Japan enjoyed one privilege that the lower classes did not: they had the right to "honorably" commit suicide instead of being dishonorably executed. So ...
3
Japan did not attack the US because of the oil embargo. They went to war, in part, because of the oil embargo. But their most important territorial objective was the Dutch East Indies, with their oilfields.
The Japanese chose to attack the US, rather than just the European colonial powers, because the Philippines would have been a bone in their throat in ...
3
Russia and Japan had one war, and several smaller scale conflicts, in the 50 years between 1895-1945. They are NOT natural enemies.
Their emnity arose out of the power vacuum created by the collapse of China in the lat 19th, early 20th century. This caused them to both covet Manchuria, for two different reasons.
Russia wanted a warm water port on the ...
3
Well, R. Van Bergen, in Story of Japan, describes the writing of the letter as a psychological trick by Hideyoshi. See here at section [78].
The peasants also believe that the fox is the servant of the rice god, and that he can bewitch people. One of Hideyoshi's maidservants took a notion that a fox had bewitched her, and was so convinced of the fact ...
2
The people already living in the Ezo, the Ainu, were no joke militarily, and tangled regularly with the Mongolian Empire on Sakhalin, and later, the Ming in the Amur Valley. It's not clear the Japanese could have taken the island completely if they wanted to, not before they modernized in the 19th century.
This also highlights another point - the islands ...
2
In the struggle for the Pacific Islands, Japanese infantry launched nocturnal "Banzai" bayonet attacks on the Americans that were basically suicidal. In the battle for Okinawa, the "superbattleship" Yamato was given enough fuel for a one-way trip (from Japan), and expected to sink as many American ships has possible, but not return. (She was sunk by American ...
2
Wikipedia's entry for a king in ~500BCE China has this note:
King Goujian's army was known for scaring its enemies before battle by forcing its front line, composed of criminals sentenced to death, to commit suicide by decapitating themselves.
Wikipedia cites Sima Qian, Shiji (史記), Ch. 41, 中華書局, 2006, p. 272.
(Personally, I am rather sceptical about ...
2
Based on a cursory reading, I don't believe the United States underestimated the death toll. The bomb itself was known to be devastating. Einstein himself petitioned the government to with hold the use of the bomb, knowing full well that the weapon was many orders of magnitude more dangerous than conventional firebombing.
You can see in both the crewman's ...
2
There is a Chinese saying (in pinyin), "Hao tie bu da ding, hao ren bu dang bing."
(Good iron is not used to make nails. Good men do not become soldiers.)
For most of Chinese history, soldiers were vilified, rather than honored. Hence, they would not generally be regarded as members of the upper class, which was occupied by landowners and philosophers.
...
2
In 1942, the United States offered to accelerate the independence of the Philippines (scheduled for 1946) if Japan would stay out of this country, thereby "neutralizing" it. Japan did not accept.
There were two reasons why. First, the Philippines were a key "stop" on the way "south" (to the East Indies (modern Indonesia), and ultimately, Australia.
The ...
2
The first influence of this kind of the thing is the arms race. In the case of weapons they are always racing against armour.
Japanese weapons evolved to the point where they were able to defeat the type of armour they would encounter and Western weapons did the same.
Due to the increased diverity of cultures, greater natural resources, farming ...
1
Not limited to Nazi-Germany and Imperial Japan the following belligerents are implicated in providing women for sex to military authorities, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand.
A series of searches revealed an informative article. A snippet of this credibly sourced article is provide below.
During the Second World War, ...
1
The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English reached Japan during the 1500s. And many Jesuit priests were sent there to spread Catholic doctrine.
The two historically most important things they imported to Japan were gunpowder and Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism. —Wikipedia
The Japanese daimyo on Kyūshū welcomed foreign trade because of ...
1
US oil sanctions were crippling Japan and they came after the US to try and force FDR into negotiations and cripple our Navy that he had moved from San Diego to Honolulu, the only force capable of stopping the Japanese from taking the oil fields in the Indies. In other words they were desperate for oil and had to remove the threat of the US Navy before they ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
