At dawn over Tokyo, the bullet train slips past a line of low cloud, and beyond the city the mountains rise steeply from the coast. This is Japan, an island country in East Asia, stretched from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea in the south, with 47 prefectures, four major islands, and more than 14,000 smaller ones.

Its story begins deep in prehistory, with human habitation dating to about 36,000 BC. By the 4th to 6th centuries, kingdoms had been brought under an emperor in Nara and later Heian-kyō, while from the 12th century real power passed to shōgun, daimyō, and samurai. The Taika Reforms of 645, driven by Prince Naka no Ōe and Fujiwara no Kamatari, and the Taihō Code after the Jinshin War of 672, built a centralised state on Chinese models.

Buddhism arrived from Baekje in 552 and spread under rulers such as Prince Shōtoku. In the Nara period, Heijō-kyō produced the Kojiki in 712 and the Nihon Shoki in 720, while a smallpox epidemic in 735 to 737 may have killed a third of the population. Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō in 794, and in that courtly age Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, often called the world’s first novel.

Feudal Japan was shaped by war and consolidation. Minamoto no Yoritomo founded the Kamakura shogunate in 1185, the Mongol invasions were repelled in 1274 and 1281, and Ashikaga Takauji overthrew Emperor Go-Daigo in 1336. After the century-long Sengoku period, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu forged unity; Ieyasu won Sekigahara in 1600, became shōgun in 1603, and shut the country with sakoku in 1639 from Edo, modern Tokyo.

That isolation ended when Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived at Uraga with the Black Ships in July 1853. The Convention of Kanagawa followed in March 1854, the shōgun resigned, and the Meiji Restoration returned power to the emperor in 1868. Under the Meiji Constitution of 1890, Japan industrialised at speed, defeated China in 1894 to 1895 and Russia in 1904 to 1905, annexed Korea in 1910, and doubled its population to 70 million by 1935.

In the 1930s, expansion turned brutal. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, resigned from the League of Nations in 1933, signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany in 1936, and attacked China again in 1937. On 7 to 8 December 1941 came Pearl Harbor, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, drawing Japan into World War II as an Axis power. After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally.