Japanese

The Japanese group gathers the peoples of the Japanese islands, divided by region into the Saigoku of the west, the Tōgoku of the east, the Tōhoku of the north and the Kyūshū of the southwest. China and Korea long supplied the Japanese with writing, Buddhism and Confucian thought.

In 1336 Ashikaga Takauji set up the Muromachi shogunate in Kyoto, and rival Northern and Southern imperial courts fought until 1392. The Ōnin War of 1467 began a century of warring daimyo. Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi reunified the country by 1590, and Tokugawa Ieyasu founded the shogunate at Edo in 1603, which later closed the country to most foreign contact.