The Nijō Castle, Kyoto

The first Europeans arrived in Japan in 1543. Some writers say 1542, but 1543 is the more likely date when a few Portuguese traders were blown off course and landed on a small island off Kyushu. They arrived at a time of strife and almost endemic warfare among feudal lords. Most were small local military leaders whose headquarters were hilltop fortresses which hardly deserved the name of castle. The Portuguese brought with them muskets which interested the Japanese immensely. Before long they were manufacturing their own, and those leaders who used them best, developing European-like tactics and later using cannons, succeeded in gaining regional and, finally, national power. In the last thirty years of the sixteenth century there was such a building boom in castles and castle towns that some historians see it as the most rapid urbanisation in Japan's history.