How did the sea influence Japan's history in medieval times ?

Question

i am doing a project and i need to know this. can someone please help ??

Answer 1

they isolated themselves from foreign influence. No guns or other western stuff. They were still using swords and bows up into the 19th century

Answer 2

You ever hear someone say of the Japanese "they can't inovate; they only copy ideas and make them better?"

Well, the sea, believe it or not, has something to do with that.  The reason the Japanese are masters of reverse engineering, is because the east sea, called the "sea of Japan" by them, is extremely dangerous.  In fact, one of the reasons the Chinese so willingly built boats for the Mongols to invad Japan, is because the Chinese knew how dangerous that sea was, and were hoping a storm would sink the Mongol fleet see, the Mongols were steppe warriors, not sailors, so the Chinese tricked them.  The local Chinese populace, whatever area of China at that time was known for building boats, they reassured the Mongols that the "east sea was calm as a young man after his wedding night."

A more accurate analogy would be as "temperamental as a middle aged married woman married for 30 years."  So anyway; one Mongol fleet made it to and back, but another sunk to the bottom of the ocean and in effect I believe it was Kublai Khan, lost a whopping 1/4 of his force, that debilitating blow is what ultimately weakened the mongols enough to allow the Ming, along with others, to drive them out.

Case in point, on the left side of the map, the east sea is EXTREMELY dangerous, as storms are frequent there and, don't count on swimming to shore; the waters are ice cold and I believe shark infested.  On the other side you have the pacific, which is pretty d**n huge.  Because of limited contact with the outside world, whenever the Japanese got a hold of new technology which could improve their lives they knew they would not see something like it for years.  So they learned how to reverse engineer.

Because, to survive, they have been reverse engineering everything, that habit, that stereotype of "how does it work?.........." has existed.  Because of their isolation and limited contact with the outside world prior to the 19th and 20th centuries, the Japanese are traditional because tradition is a "safety net," but at the same time they like to innovate because in an island so small and short of resources ANY technology they encounter, ANYTHING that's new that they feel is practical, they will readily learn about it.  In the old days they were forced to reverse engineer, but these days with so many Japanese traveling abroad to study that is no longer necessary.

During the warring states era they had contact with Portuguese and Spaniards, but when a foolish drunken Spaniard stated that "first we send in the priests, then we kill them all" (paraphrasing but that is basically what he said) see, the Shogun heard that, and promptly ordered his Samurai to take the heads of every Spanish soldier, and told the sailors to go back to Spain and never speak of Japan's very existence.  As history would show, the Spanish never came back.

The Portuguese were tolerated because their pressence in Japan was limited.  Also, as a European power, Portugal was interested in selling them weapons, not teaching them how to make them.  However in a typically arrogant European fashion they underestimated them, and a frightened Portuguese envoy was once faced with Japanese made flintlocks.  When the improved models, which had a more efficient firing rate than any European guns of that time, obviously enough proved superior to European guns, the Japanese told the Portuguese to get the h**l out.

Regarding Japanese guns, this is the part where it gets kinda scary; a black smith, and sword makers had to adapt their skills to make firearms, talked about a "system that could hold more than one bullet" meaning, the Japanese were theorizing about the clip.  This is centuries before the invention of the revolver.  Some black smith manuals even told of the idea of bolt action shooting, and here is where it gets even worse; you know the idea of the spiral regarding shooting a gun?  How there are grooves in the barrel to make a bullet spin?

That idea, believe it or not, was invented in Japan 3 centuries before it was used in Europe.  Actually I think more than that because I don't think the principle of the spiral was adopted until the late 19th century.

What I am trying to say is, had the Tokugawa government not banned "all things western" including technology, if you had given them only one more century, the Japanese may have even made machine guns.  In other words, the Japanese owe the Samurai their lives but at the same time, the Samurai, namely the one who took power who wasn't even born a Samurai, Tokugawa Ieasu, are responsible for the outcome of WWII.  

A military dictatorship that brutalized its population may have never have taken power if the government had kept that technology.  Also with more advanced weaponry, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki would have felt the atom bomb.  What I am saying is, had weapons development been allowed to continue in Japan, in WWII, the Japanese would have had late 20th century armaments, against the U.S. WWII armaments, and the outcome of the war would have been very different.

Ultimately though history is history and that stuff is speculation and besides, who wants a bunch of cute Japanese girls living in the west coast anyway?

I'm so glad America won, and women with feet the size of rowboats live in the west coast instead of adorable Japanese women.

Thank you Tokugawa Ieasu, the king of turds.

Answer 3

The sea has always been a strong influence on Japan because it's everywhere. It was and is a major source of food, and helps to isolate the country from the rest of the world. But the famous isolation of Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate era (1603-1868) came after the middle ages.