Edo CastleEdo Castle is a flatland castle that was built in 1457 by Ōta Dōkan in Edo, Toshima District, Musashi Province. In modern times it is part of the Tokyo Imperial Palace in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and is therefore also known as Chiyoda Castle. Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate there, and it was the residence of the shōgun and the headquarters of the military government during the Edo period (1603–1867) in Japanese history. After the resignation of the shōgun and the Meiji Restoration, it became the Tokyo Imperial Palace.
Edo periodThe Edo period or Tokugawa period is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional daimyo. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, a stable population, perpetual peace, and popular enjoyment of arts and culture, colloquially referred to as Oedo.
Ryukyu IslandsThe Ryukyu Islands also known as the Nansei Islands or the Ryukyu Arc, are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan: the Ōsumi, Tokara, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima Islands (further divided into the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands), with Yonaguni the westernmost. The larger are mostly volcanic islands and the smaller mostly coral. The largest is Okinawa Island. The climate of the islands ranges from humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification Cfa) in the north to tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) in the south.
KobeKobe (ˈkoʊbeɪ , koꜜːbe; officially 神戸市, ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, which makes up the southern side of the main island of Honshū, on the north shore of Osaka Bay. It is part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kyoto. The Kobe city centre is located about west of Osaka and southwest of Kyoto.
Seppuku'cutting [the] belly', also called hara-kiri (腹切り, abdomen/belly cutting, a native Japanese kun reading), is a form of Japanese ritualistic suicide by disembowelment. While harakiri refers to the act of disemboweling oneself, seppuku refers to the ritual and usually would involve decapitation after the act as a sign of mercy. Harakiri refers solely to the act of disembowelment and would only be assigned as a punishment towards acts deemed too heinous for seppuku.
Saga DomainSaga Domain, also known as Hizen Domain, was a Japanese domain in the Edo period. It is associated with Hizen Province in modern-day Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. In the han system, Saga was a political and economic abstraction based on periodic cadastral surveys and projected agricultural yields. In other words, the domain was defined in terms of expected value of tax revenue (kokudaka), not land area. This was different from the feudalism of the West.
RangakuRangaku (Kyūjitai: /Shinjitai: , literally "Dutch learning"), and by extension Yōgaku, is a body of knowledge developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave of Dejima, which allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners from 1641 to 1853 because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation (sakoku).
JidaigekiJidaigeki is a genre of film, television, video game, and theatre in Japan. Literally meaning "period dramas", they are most often set during the Edo period of Japanese history, from 1603 to 1868. Some are set much earlier—Portrait of Hell, for example, is set during the late Heian period—and the early Meiji era is also a popular setting. Jidaigeki show the lives of the samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants of their time. Jidaigeki films are sometimes referred to as chambara movies, a word meaning "sword fight", though chambara is more accurately a subgenre of jidaigeki.
Fukushima PrefectureFukushima Prefecture (ˌfuːkuːˈʃiːmə; Fukushima-ken, ɸɯ̥kɯɕimaꜜkeɴ) is a prefecture of Japan located in the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Fukushima Prefecture has a population of 1,771,100 () and has a geographic area of . Fukushima Prefecture borders Miyagi Prefecture and Yamagata Prefecture to the north, Niigata Prefecture to the west, Gunma Prefecture to the southwest, and Tochigi Prefecture and Ibaraki Prefecture to the south. Fukushima is the capital and Iwaki is the largest city of Fukushima Prefecture, with other major cities including Kōriyama, Aizuwakamatsu, and Sukagawa.
Government of Meiji JapanThe Government of Meiji Japan was the government that was formed by politicians of the Satsuma Domain and Chōshū Domain in the 1860s. The Meiji government was the early government of the Empire of Japan. Politicians of the Meiji government were known as the Meiji oligarchy, who overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration, the leaders of the samurai who overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate had no clear agenda or pre-developed plan on how to run Japan.
