Japan

Shipwrecked in 1609, Spanish administrator Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco became a guest of the shogun and wrote a detailed account of his 10 months in Japan.

Peter Mandler explains how the anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of best-selling studies of ‘primitive’ peoples, became a major influence on US military thinking during the Second World War.

J.D. Hargreaves reviews the delicate truce that existed between Britain and Japan in the early years of the twentieth century.

David Woodward recounts how, after a voyage from the Baltic of 11,000 miles, the Russian Second Pacific Fleet was dramatically destroyed off the coast of Korea by the Japanese.

Roger Hudson expands on an image of Russian ships destroyed by the Japanese at Port Arthur, 1904.

Japan flexed its muscles and launched a full-scale invasion of China following an incident on July 7th, 1937.

For over two centuries from 1641, Nagasaki – and the island of Dejima – was the only place in Japan open to foreigners. How were Europeans received there?

The historical roots of the dispute between China and Japan over control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands reveal a great deal about the two countries’ current global standing, says Joyman Lee.

The American soldiers who fought their way through the islands of the Pacific during the Second World War encountered fierce Japanese resistance but few local people. That all changed with the invasion of the Mariana Islands, says Matthew Hughes.

A history of the country’s love affair with the cherry blossom.