The Land of the Rising Sun, aka the
Kaijus'favorite playground.
"Japan is an island by the sea filled with volcanoes, and it's beautiful!~♪"Japan (Japanese: 日本; Nippon or Nihonnote Yes, it's just Japan and just Nippon. There is no "Kingdom" or "State" in its title. Officially, the monarch of Japan is called "Emperor" (Tennō), which would mean Japan is an empire, but that would bring to mind terrible memories of the 1940s...) is an island country located off Asia's eastern coast. Its territory is comprised of four major islands (from north to south: Hokkaidō, Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū) and thousands of smaller ones.
Known principally as the land of Shinto, Samurai, Ninjas (or Shinobi for those who value historical accuracy), Kabuki Theatre, electronic and general consumer Mega Corps and incredible innovation (although not as much today), one-third of the interactive entertainment industry, Manga, Anime, an interesting fusion of Orientalist and Western architecture, kawaisa, sushi, wartime atrocities, rather-frequent natural disasters, and two cities that bore witness to the true potential of nuclear warfare. With a population of 125 million, it is the sixth most populous country in Asia, and the eleventh most populous in the world.
Japan is a free-market, developed, democratic country, with the world's 4th largest economy, and very high standards of living. While many countries in Asia (and especially East Asia) are today considered developed and high-economic, Japan has the quirk of having experienced mass industrialization and development predating them by decades. Within the span of a mere 30 years, Japan transformed from a poor, loosely-knit, largely-feudal, agriculture-concentric society into an industrial and military powerhouse, enabling it to pursue a campaign of exploration and colonialism abroad and participate in two world wars as key players. For a long time, it was the only Asian country that could "stand on equal footing" with Western Europe and the Anglophone countries in terms of economy and development; it is the only Asian representative of the G7, which grouped the world's seven largest economies when it was created in the 1970s. Up until the asset price bubble and resulting economic turmoil of the 1990s, Japan was even considered to have the potential to upstage the United States as top superpower, because it seemed to have everything penetrated, from consumer goods, automobiles, and an entertainment sector with a commercial and cultural exposure potency rivaling that of the USA.
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Prehistory - Jōmon (12,000- 300 BCE)
Human habitation upon the archipelago that would become modern Japan dates back to 40,000 BCE. The earliest people of Japan, the so-called Jōmon people, consisted of multiple genetically heterogenous groups. The majority of them were short in stature and had a darker skin complexion than the modern Japanese people, and are genetically closest to the Himalayan Kusunda people. In the north, there was gene flow from Ancient North Eurasian people - a basal population to Europeans hence they had physical features resembling Caucasians, including increased body hair and stocky build, and a way of life that revolved around hunting and gathering.
Things changed starting in the early 1st millennium BCE, when sedentary settlements belonging to the Yayoi people began to appear in Western Japan and enveloped most of the country by the 3rd century BCE. They were immigrants from the Korean peninsula, which at that time was settled by Japonic-speaking peoples until they were displaced and assimilated by proto-Koreans in the late 1st millenniumnote Some believe that Japonic peoples still existed in Korea until as late as the 6th century CE, in the form of the Gaya/Kara confederacy, bringing with them new farming techniques, tools, and metallurgy note Japan is interesting as there was no real separate Bronze and Iron age, with both metals being introduced to the archipelago roughly at the same time.
The Jōmon heavily intermarried with the Yayoi but the process of assimilation was gradual; northern Honshū was still inhabited by a Jōmon-descended people until the early Heian period, and Hokkaidō was dominated by the tribal Ainu until after the Meiji Restoration, when Japan began actively colonizing the island to prevent the Russians from claiming it. As for their language, the (now moribund) Ainu language is an isolate, completely unrelated to Japanese or any other language in the world. Some linguists consider Ainu to be an extension of the languages spoken by Paleosiberian peoples in North Asia (e.g. Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukchi) but they are an areal, and not genetic, grouping.
History - Yayoi, Kofun, and Asuka ( 300 BCE- 710 CE)
The very first historical inscription mentioning Japan is the so-called King of Na gold seal discovered in Kyūshū, which indicates that a state of Na in the land of Wa was subject to the
Han dynasty, a finding corroborated by a Han dynasty chronicle which mentioned a tribute from the "State of Na of Wa" (倭奴國) in 57 CE. "Wa" is the oldest name for Japan, predating "Nippon" by several centuries, and used to be written with a kanji that means something along the lines of "dwarf people" (倭) until Japan eventually took offense and replaced it with one meaning "harmony" (和). In the 3rd century, a much extensive historical record appeared in the
Records of the Three Kingdomsnote Yes, that Three Kingdoms, the one that followed the fall of the Han dynasty, a Chinese text which detailed correspondences between the state of Wei and Yamataikoku, a country in Wa ruled by a shaman queen named Himiko. The Wa people were described as a bunch of tribal communities who recognized Himiko as their spiritual leader, subsisted on fish, and built grave mounds in the shape of keyholes. These grave mounds, called
kofun, are the namesake of the period following the Yayoi, the Kofun, which is usually grouped together with the following Asuka period as the "Yamato period".
During the Yamato period, the titular state, located in present-day Nara Prefecture and which might or might not be related to the aforementioned Yamataikoku, rose as a regional player by unifying other states in the islands. In the process, its name became synonymous with Japan itself; "Yamato" today is a poetic word for Japan (as in terms like Yamato Nadeshiko).
Relations with China and Korea reached new heights, with large numbers of Chinese and Korean clans settling in Japan. These clans introduced their culture to their archipelago and even spread their genetics into the Japanese population. Japan imported Chinese characters to write records (although all of them have been lost), a legal system based on Confucianism (Ritsuryō), and a series of reforms, including land redistribution, designed to further centralize the state and increase the power of the Yamato court (the Taika reforms). Buddhism was imported via Baekje, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, and after Baekje was destroyed in the 660s, a wave of refugees from the former kingdom escaped to Japan by virtue of strong family ties; a prince of Baekje previously settled in Japan to found a clan, a member of whom married into the Japanese imperial family (which also had its earliest verified emperors in this period) in the following Nara period.
Two principal clans vied for power in the Yamato court in this time: the Buddhist-inclined Soga and the Shinto-inclined Mononobe. The former prevailed and, under the auspices of Prince Shōtoku, disseminated Buddhism, which was quietly merged with Shinto as the dominant faith of Japanese people. The Soga were in turn usurped by the Nakatomi clan, whose leading member Nakatomi no Kamatari enacted the Taika reforms. In recognition of his efforts to unify the country, the emperor bestowed him the new clan name "Fujiwara".
The Yayoi have long been considered the precursors of the modern Japanese people, and the "dual structure model" of Yayoi and Jōmon people mixing with each other - with Yayoi ancestry being dominant - has served as the primary ethnogenesis hypothesis for (Yamato) Japanese people. However, newer genetic research has challenged this long-held belief by demonstrating that there was another third wave of migration during the Kofun period and that modern Japanese people draw more of their ancestry from the "Kofun people" than they do the Yayoi.
History - Nara and Heian (710-1185)
Until the late 8th century, Japan moved its capital in the Kinai region
note Nara, Kyōto, Ōsaka, and the surrounding areasevery time an emperor died, because of the taboo of lands inhabited by dead emperors. This changed with reforms during the Asuka period, but in the 8th century, the capital still moved more than five times, although a good chunk of the century was spent in and around the vicinity of Nara (known then as "Heijō-kyō"), to where the Empress Genmei moved in 710.
While previous history was provided by foreign sources, during the Nara period, Japan started to actively engage in records writing. The first indigenous written works appeared in this time: the Kojiki, an account of Japanese mythology and its association with the imperial family, and Nihon Shoki, which had much the same content but followed it up with history of the imperial court until the contemporary era. Both were written in Classical Chinese, but another work, Man'yōshū, a poem collection, was the first work mostly written in Japanese, using a phonetic system called Man'yōgana, wherein Chinese characters were used to phonetically write Japanese syllables.note Parts of Kojiki were also written using this system. Cultural exchanges with China continued, with Japan modeling Heijō-kyō after the Tang capital of Chang'an.
In 794, the court moved to Heian-kyō, present-day Kyōto. The emperor would not move again until a whopping 1,074 years later, when Emperor Meiji moved to Edo. The period that followed, Heian, is considered the "golden age" of Japan, as traditional arts and culture flourished in the court, which put an emphasis on high culture. Buddhism further developed along the teachings of the monk Kūkai, who founded Shingon Buddhism. With the end of the Tang and the ensuing era of civil war in China, exchanges with China ground to a halt, allowing indigenous Japanese culture to show its teeth. The kana writing systems appeared during this period from the aforementioned Man'yōgana, albeit through different channels; hiragana developed out of a cursive script that was used by Japanese women, who were forbidden to use kanji, while katakana was created in Buddhist monasteries to abbreviate written works. Famous writers and poets such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon, and Ariwara no Narihira lived in this time, and works such as The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and Iroha (a poem used as the main alphabetical rendering of the kana system until the Meiji Restoration) also appeared. Finally, the period produced Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo", one of the poems in the Kokin Wakashū anthology.
However, the Heian period also saw the first cracks of the centralized Japanese state that would grow into a full-blown civil war. Since the court spent so much time being cloistered in the palaces, they left the care of the country to regional clans to police the country. The Fujiwara, who had been the most important clan in Japan since their ascendancy in the 7th century, became even powerful in the court, gaining the ire of the other three high clans of Japan: the Minamoto (also known as Genji), the Taira (also known as Heishi), and the Tachibana. In 1156, the first two briefly allied to support a potential emperor in a succession crisis against the Fujiwara — who were defeated and subsequently lost much of their power — before turning on each other. With the breakdown of centralized rule, many feudal lords (daimyō) hired the samurai, originally civil servants turned paramilitary units to help them consolidate their lands (which they previously gained in the shōen system, under which the lords were allowed to claim the lands as their private properties in exchange for loyalty towards the emperor) against rival clans.
Eventually, the Taira clan seized power after a war with the Minamoto, who barely survived. After 20 years, the Minamoto returned and declared rebellion against the Taira, triggering the Genpei War. When the war ended, the Taira were destroyed, the Minamoto assumed control, the emperor lost his powers and became mostly symbolic, the samurai were formally recognized, the country turned into a military dictatorship (bakufu, or in Western translations, "shogunate"), and, though the emperor stayed in Kyōto, the administrative capital moved to the eastern Kantō region. In 1185, the age of feudalism began.
History - Kamakura (1185-1333)
History - Muromachi and Azuchi-Momoyama (1336-1600)
Emperor Go Daigo conspired with the Ashikaga clan to overthrow the Hōjō in 1333. After this, the emperor briefly reasserted control for three years in a period known as the Kenmu Restoration, the first time any emperor exercised control since the end of the Heian period, but the Ashikaga quickly turned their backs and, under Takauji, overthrew the emperor and exiled him, beginning another shogunate under their name and starting the Muromachi period. The administrative capital was moved back to Kyōto. The former emperor did not go down without a fight, creating a separate court in the south which existed until 1392, challenging the legitimacy of the new shogunate.
However, even after unification, it became apparent that the Ashikaga were not as strong as the Kamakura bakufu. After the death of the third shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the daimyō regained power and could back candidates of the shoguns. This culminated in the 1460s, when a succession crisis over the shogunate escalated into a war that completely obliterated Kyōto, leaving the winner, the Hosokawa clan, to install their preferred candidate as the rest of Japan descended into total chaos, with the country being split into dozens of competing lands ruled by daimyō. This period, from the start of the war in 1467 until 1600, is better known by another name: the "Warring States" (Sengoku, after an unrelated period in Chinese history). For more information about it, see this page. The civil war era saw the first contact between Japan and Europeans, as the Portuguese and the Dutch established trading posts in the country, and some cultural and technological exchanges were conducted (notably firearms).
The last years of the Warring States period, from 1568 to 1600, were known as the Azuchi-Momoyama period. During this time, the shogunate was hijacked by a certain warlord named Oda Nobunaga, who campaigned for a unification of Japan and almost succeeded until he committed seppuku during a coup. Before his death, Nobunaga first attempted to install a shogun of his choice before scrapping the shogunate completely in 1573. Afterwards, his retainer, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, ascended as leader and resumed the works of his master, finally uniting Japan in 1590. After a failed invasion of Korea, Hideyoshi died of illness, triggering a succession crisis between his son and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had played the long game to become ruler. The Battle of Sekigahara confirmed Tokugawa's power, resulting in the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate, the last feudal period of Japan.
History - Edo (1600-1868)
The last of the pre-modern Japanese period also happened to be its most restrictive one. After the defeat of the Toyotomi, Tokugawa Ieyasu ruled, under the policy of
sakoku, that Japan would no longer be affected by foreign influences and closed all entrances to the country. Except for the Dutch, who had a small trading post in Dejima, foreigners were forbidden from trading with Japan. Christianity (which had gained small but burgeoning followers in Japan) was outlawed under the threat of death. Tired of wars, Tokugawa also restricted the movement of people into the established lands of the daimyō. Finally, he moved the administrative capital of Japan again to a small hamlet in the eastern Kantō region known as "Edo".
Tokugawa was kind of right in the minds. Without war or foreign interference, Japan experienced an economic growth not seen since the breakdown of social order two centuries earlier, as well as a stable population growth. Culture and arts flourished in the cities, including Geisha and Kabuki. During this period, Japan annexed the Ryūkyū Islands (present-day Okinawa and some parts of Kagoshima Prefectures) to the southwest of Kyūshū, which up to 1609 was ruled by an independent kingdom. The kingdom however continued to exist until 1879, when it was absorbed by Imperial Japan. Culturally, the Ryūkyū people are more influenced by China (practically next door) compared to Japan, though their languages are part of the Japonic family, albeit mutually unintelligible with Japanese or even with each other. A notable cultural import from the Ryūkyū Islands is Karate, often mistaken to be Japan's quintessential martial art (Judo is more apt to the title).
However, the period was also notorious for its Confucian-inspired rigid social order. Power was inherited rather than gained, and everyone were basically stuck in their assigned status from their birth until death. There's also the neverending rivalries between feudal lords, some of whom were on the losing side of the Battle of Sekigahara and as a result were demoted to the lowest of the low, causing deep-held resentment. And though economic growth was gained, Japan remained an agricultural country all the way to 1800s, with no industrialization of any kind. As a result, when Commodore Perry arrived offshore Edo in steam-powered ships to force Japan to end sakoku, people were understandably scared.
The last years of the Tokugawa shogunate were a chaotic one. With the country opened, foreign countries were free to trade in Japan. The Shimazu and Mōri clans, who ruled the southern domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, respectively, were on the aforementioned losing side and were furious by the Tokugawa's handling of the opening, surmising that it would subject Japan to unequal treaties as what were happening in other Asian countries at the time. These domains courted the young Emperor Meiji to regain control of the country and reassert Japan's position. In 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu abdicated his position, ending the shogunate. Supporters of the Tokugawa refused to accept the new government and fled north to Hokkaidō, where they established a short-lived republic. In response, with the support of Britain and the US, the imperial government launched a war against them and secured the country. Emperor Meiji permanently moved from Kyōto to Edo, now renamed Tōkyō ("Eastern Capital"). Japan entered a new era of modernization, and Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
History - Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa (1868-1945)
History - Shōwa, Heisei, and Reiwa (1945-present)
After Japan surrendered in WWII, the Allied Powers occupied Japan for seven years, the only time in history that Japan was ruled by a foreign power. The
Trumanadministration didn't allow the Soviet Union to partition any territory in Japan proper, although it did allow it to take
North Korea(which Japan had been administering since 1910) as well as southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands (the former of which was gained by Japan after winning the Russo-Japanese War). All political prisoners were released, and tribunals for war criminals were held. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, Douglas
MacArthur, who presided over the occupation, gave political immunity to the Emperor, whom many in the Allies had wanted to be punished, by deflecting the blame towards ultranationalists and rogue generals for starting the war. He also protected some bonafide war criminals from prosecution, including a couple of members of the imperial family and the people who oversaw Unit 731, a biological and chemical research development department which notoriously performed human experimentation.
Under a new constitution, the Allies had planned to demilitarize Japan completely and prevent it from being able to wage war by stripping it of its industry. However, the Cold War stymied that plan; after mainland China fell to the communists, Japan suddenly became an important bulwark in Asia against communism in China and the Soviet Union, both of which are only a short distance away; this role became more pronounced when The Korean War broke out in June 1950, less than 9 months after Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People's Republic of China. Although the constitution prohibited Japan from creating a standing army, it was allowed to exploit a loophole by creating the so-called "Japan Self-Defense Forces", originally a police force that later morphed into an army. It was from Japan that the US launched its Eighth Army in defense of South Korea during the Korean War. The country subsequently received generous funding from the US, in a similar way to Western Europe's Marshall Plan, enabling it to recover quickly from the war devastation and basically returning it to pre-war levels at the end of the 1950s. The Japanese postwar economic miracle reached its peak in the 1960s, when the country shockingly became the world's second biggest economy in a very short time. This continued in the next few decades, but began winding down come the 1990s, when an asset price bubblenote A state when the stock market and real estate prices are grossly inflated in regards to intrinsic value. This bubble was so enormous at its peak that there was a time when one could add up the theoretical "paper" worth of the city of Tokyo and it would be greater than the total equivalent worth of California. As in, the entire state. popped, causing an economic stagnation that lasted for an entire decade. Its influence is still felt in many places today.
In the face of a huge rival in China, Japan's influence is not really as strong as it was in the 20th century, but it's still a force to be reckoned with, being the world's sixth largest exporter and having the fourth biggest economy and fifth largest military strength and ninth by expenditure. An issue plaguing Japan today is its aging problem: with people aged 65 and above forming a quarter of the population, Japan has the oldest population in the world. Thanks to better education about health, the relaxation of abortion laws, and changing social norms, many people are marrying later, if at all. This is the same case with many developed countries, including those in Europe, but Japan is a special case because unlike Europe or North America, Japan (and East Asia in general) is infamously xenophobic when it comes to the treatment of foreigners, who are always treated as the "other", causing it to adopt a very low quota for immigrants each year, preventing the population from growing even more. Another issue is the rising ultranationalism among the population since the 1970s, especially in regards to China and Korea. The latter two sometimes feel that Japan doesn't do enough to fess up to its crimes during WWII, which, to their credit, isn't unfounded. Unlike Germany, Japan has no equivalent policy of denazification and never truly educated its population about its role in WWII. It doesn't help that the government (led mainly by the conservative and right-wing Liberal Democratic Party since the 1950s) tends to avoid the issue when asked and sometimes deliberately aggravates it (e.g. the repeated visitations of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines several A-Class war criminals, by politicians).
The Chrysanthemum Throne
Japan is famously a monarchy, with an imperial family that has been around for more than 1000 years, making it the oldest ruling dynasty in the world. Traditional order of succession found in court chronicles claims that the first emperor, Jimmu, was the great-great-great-grandson of
sun goddessAmaterasu, the chief god of the Japanese pantheon, making the imperial family descendants of the goddess and playing into the belief that the Japanese nation is the "Child of the Sun", as indicated in the name
Nippon(the kanji for 日本 means "origin of the sun").
note Actually, the fact that Nippon means "origin of the sun" and the Japanese worship a sun goddess is a happy coincidence; "Nippon" was originally selected in a Sino-Japanese court correspondence to indicate Japan's position relative to China, i.e. east.. However, Jimmu's existence is seen by modern historians today as a legend, since his claimed years of reign (6th century BCE) clashes with the widely accepted findings that Japan was a primarily hunter-gatherer society until the 3rd century BCE. They could only verify links of the family up to
Kinmeic. 6th century CE during the Asuka period. Nevertheless, as the purported descendants of the goddess, the family have a special role in Shintoism, and the emperor used to claim himself and be worshiped by the people as
god incarnate. This changed when
Japan's attempt at global conquest ended in failure in 1945, leading to the emperor at the time, Hirohito, to publicly renounce his divine status.
The current emperor is Hirohito's grandson, Naruhito, who succeeded his father, Akihito, after the latter abdicated in 2019 so he could focus on his ailing health. Every emperor carries a specific era name, a relic from when an emperor's reign was classified into periods based on a particular event (e.g. floods, high agricultural productivity, etc.). Before the Meiji Restoration, three era names were accorded per emperor, but today, each only has one. The date of an emperor's ascension marks year one of the new calendar, so for example the year "Heisei 13" means the year 2001 in the Gregorian calendar, since it is 13 years after the ascension of Akihito in 1989. The name is official; all formal Japanese documents must carry an era name and year. Naruhito's era name, as revealed in a highly publicized event on 1 April 2019, is "Reiwa". The emperors traditionally sat in a throne called the "Chrysanthemum Throne" (kōi), now kept as a relic in Kyōto, the former imperial capital. Still in use to enthrone new emperors, the throne has been used metonymically to refer to the Japanese imperial family itself (much like how "The Crown" is used to refer to the British monarchy).
Constitutional monarchy (in the sense that monarchs don't rule) has always been a fact of life in Japan for hundreds of years: traditionally, emperors do not rule. This is not always the case; emperors did in fact rule until near the end of the Heian period circa 12th century (it was considered the time when imperial power was at its peak), when court politics, several backstabbings, and a nasty war relegated the power over the government to hereditary military dictators called the shogun. After this, the monarchy became completely symbolic and at times even dirt-poor, since it didn't actually rule anything. Things briefly changed after the Meiji Restoration, which abolished the shogunate and the feudal system and gave some actual decision-making powers to the emperors. Much influence for this new system was taken from the relatively hot-off-the-presses German constitution studied by Japanese legal scholars, which allowed for suffrage among most of the adult male population and a strong monarchial role, a mix of liberal and reactionary ideas that had strong appeal.
This changed after World War II, when Japan was directly occupied by the United States and the U.S. unilaterally drafted a new western democratic constitution that all but eliminated the monarchy's role on government. Serious thought was given to removing the institution completely; the only reason that it did not do so was because of the vociferous objections of General Douglas MacArthur, the military governor, who felt that eliminating the Japanese crown would eliminate its important role in national unity and identity. Nonetheless, the new constitution made the new government a monarchy In Name Only; most other constitutional monarchies like the United Kingdom or Spain allow the monarch certain reserve powers or responsibilities, break-glass-in-emergency authorities that could theoretically let them take action, though a vast majority are exercisable only with the advice of government officials, but the Japanese monarch has no reserve powers. No signing of laws, no declaring war, no official appointing of officials, no military commissions, nothing. All of his roles and responsibilities are purely symbolic, and even the national soverignty is vested in the Japanese people and not the emperor; because of this, he can no longer even claim to "reign but not rule", though he remains the country's titular head of state.
But despite their role being diminished to the point of being symbolic, Japan as a whole believes strongly in symbolic gestures and so the royal family continues to be seen as a cornerstone of Japan's unity. They issue state awards to worthy recipients and patronize cultural achievements in a role similar to their European counterparts. Despite the emperor's perceived role in Japan's involvement in World War II and its military dictatorship, there has never been a serious Japanese republican movement in the modern era. Unlike in, say China, where imperial families regularly came and went as the popular mandate fluctuated, the fact that Japan has been ruled by the same family for over a thousand years is a sign that, in spite of constant conflicts and wars, Japan never truly disintegrated as a country. Warlords, samurai, and feudal lords fought each other all the time, but they always paid respects to the imperial family.
Not to be confused with the band Japan, who were from England.
Settings and Useful Notes related to Japanopen/close all folders
Religion
Military
Politics
Geography
History
Culture and Customs
Language
Works and Tropes from Japan Japan in non-Japanese popular cultureMost works in Japanese Media are set in Japan (and a lot in Tokyo at that), obviously enough. The below list concerns non-Japanese media about the country.
Comic Book
Film
Live-Action Television
Music
Theatre
Video Games
Web Animation
Western Animation
The Japanese flagAlso known as the
Hinomaru("Disc of the Sun"), the red disc on a white field has long been a symbol of the nation since the feudal era, playing on the
Alternate Character Readingof Japan's name (日本), which can mean "sun-origin" or "sunrise".
Imperial Seal of JapanThe imperial seal is one of the national seals (mon) used by the country.note The government uses the Paulownia Seal, that depicited a Paulownia with 5-7-1 (which is a haiku) flowers It can be used by the royal family. The seal is a yellow or orange chrysanthemum flower with sixteen petals.
The Japanese national anthem君が代は
千代に八千代に
細石の
巌となりて
苔の生すまで
noteKimigayo wa
Chiyo ni yachiyo ni
Sazare-ishi no
Iwao to narite
Koke no musu made
—
May your reign
Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations,
Until the tiny pebbles
Grow into massive boulders
Lush with moss
GovernmentWhere
isthe Land of the Rising Sun?
I don't know, I never get up that early.
Do-ho-ho-ho-ho!
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