Japanese Timelines, Tables, Maps and Family Tree

The Origin of the Name

Along with its history, Japan got known by several epithets. The current official name of the country in Japanese is Nihon or Nippon, written 日本 in kanji characters, which mean ‘the origin of the sun’. However, in ancient times, China used to call Japan the ‘Land of Wa‘, using the Chinese character 倭 (phonetically ‘wa’), which means ‘dwarf‘. Only after the diplomatic re-establishment between the two countries, and Japan had shown to its ‘master – China‘ that it could obtain a degree of development commensurable to theirs; the ‘master’ agreed to replace 倭 with 和, also phonetically ‘wa’, but meaning ‘harmony‘. In ancient times, the world Yamato was introduced in Japanese history as the old name of the Main Island (Honshū). Once Yamato became the central court of the Japanese rulers, the word was then used to qualify its people and as an alternative name for the country – the country of Yamato, written with the kanji characters 大和 – (大 – great) + (和 – harmony). The character 和 (wa) alone is used today as a prefix to qualify anything ‘Japanese’. Neither ‘Nihon‘ nor ‘Nippon‘ sounds much like ‘Japan‘ to justify its Western denomination. One theory of its origin comes from Marco Polo, who never visited Japan, only China, but in his book ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, published in the late 13th century, mentions Japan as the island of ‘Jipangu/Zipangu/Cipangu‘, based on the Chinese name, 日本國; ‘sun source country’. As the story goes, it might have been corrupted into the word ‘Japan’.

The Alphabet

The modern Japanese writing system has three alphabets: the ‘kanji’ (the commonly used characters exceed 2,100), which are ideograms stemming from the Chinese writing (called ‘hanji’ in Chinese), which was adopted by the country by the end of the 6th century, and the ‘kanas’ – two parallel syllabaries (consisting on 48 characters each), known as katakana and hiragana, created during the Heian period and whose authorship is attributed to Kūkai. The katakana is commonly used to transliterate foreign words and is employed by the electronic media such as e-mail and text messages. Whereas the hiragana is primarily used to perform grammatical functions, such as indicating inflection and possession, or identifying direct objects in sentences or phrases.

The Lunisolar Calendar

The ancient Japan had adopted the Chinese Lunisolar Calendar – also called Sexagenary Cycle. It was a system based on exact astronomical observations of the sun’s longitude and the moon’s phases. It consisted of two components – celestial and terrestrial branches. As the first branch had ten elements and the second twelve, it took sixty years to align again the first elements. The first year of Jimmu Reign (660 BCE) is known as Kanoto-tori (金の弟 + 酉). Later, the Japanese Imperial Calendar (kōki) was adopted and 660 BCE became its first year. In 1873, Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar, whose current year is 2018. However, the Japanese date system of designating years as era names based on the reign of Emperors still remains in place and runs concurrently along with the Gregorian system. Each Emperor is designated an era name (gengō) which commences the day the Emperor ascends to the throne and ends on the day of the Emperor’s death. Therefore, year 2018 is equivalent to Heisei 30.

The Senmyo-reki Calendar

From 9th to late 17th century, Japan adopted the Senmyo-reki Calendar. It was a simplified version of the Lunisolar and had only one branch aligned with twelve months. Each month had a ‘traditional’ name applied to it.

The Ancient Unit of Measure

The 12-Hour System

The Medieval and Modern Maps

In 1871, after the Meiji Restoration, all remaining (more than 300) feudal domains (han) were changed into prefectures. The number was reduced to 72 in the latter part of 1871, and 47 in 1888. The 47 prefectures (都道府県 Todōfuken), form today the first level of jurisdiction and administrative division of the country. They consist of 43 prefectures (県 ken), two urban prefectures (府 fu, Osaka and Kyoto), one “circuit” or “territory” (道 dō, Hokkaido) and one “metropolis” (都 to, Tokyo).