Japan
The Bombing of Hiroshima
6 August 1945 Piloted by Paul Tibbets Jr, the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay approached the south-western Japanese city of Hiroshima. Six hours had passed since the plane’s take-off from the western Pacific island of Tinian – a base taken from the Japanese by US forces in the previous year and whose runways at the time were the world’s longest.…
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Martial Art – archery (kyudo/kyujutsu)
Archery (kyudo; literally “the way of the bow”) was the weapon most closely associated with warriors and was in common use by the end of the prehistoric era, during the fourth or fifth centuries C.E. While the term kyudo is more common today, kyujutsu (“technique of the bow”) was used…
Ceylon 1942
IJN AKAGI by dugazm This island and British colony off the southeast tip of India was most significant during the Pacific war because of Japanese raids on and near it in April 1942. These raids accomplished little tactically or operationally; what they failed to do, however, was of critical strategic…
Ritual War in Japan
Foreign powers, domestic lawbreakers, and personal enemies were not the only antagonists against whom early bushi and their institutional forebears directed their martial power. For not all adversaries of the state or the throne were human. Under the ritsuryo polity and its antecedents, the Japanese emperor emerged as a sacerdotal…
Meiji emperor
The Emperor Meiji in Western Military Attire. A palace coup of 1868, which overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate and “restored” power to the Japanese emperor, followed by the rapid socioeconomic and political changes that occurred during the reign of the Meiji emperor from 1868 to 1912. In 1868, a coup led…
ShĹŤ-Go Plan
The ShĹŤ-Go Plan (Short for ShĹŤ-Itchi-Go, Operation Victory One) marked the last attempt of the combined Imperial Japanese Navy to defend its empire during the war in the Pacific. Japan’s strategy at the dawn of war in the Pacific had called for the occupation of all areas west of a…
The Ikko-ikki
With his frontiers relatively secure, Oda Nobunaga prepared for a threat much closer to home: the Ikko-ikki. These religious communities comprised new-style warrior monks of the Shinshu sect. Turnbull explains, “The second term in the name, ikki, strictly means league. … The other word, Ikko, provides a clue to their…