The Last Samurai: How Japan Shut Down for 250 Years and Then Opened All at Once

Stop. Look around. You're at Senso-ji, Tokyo's oldest temple, founded in 628 AD. Legend says two fishermen pulled a statue of the goddess Kannon from the Sumida River. A temple was built to enshrine her. Today it receives over 30 million visitors a year — the most visited religious site in the world. But this place represents something more than a religious story. It represents the Japan that existed before the closure. In the 16th century, Japan was a relatively open country. Portuguese and Spanish traders arrived in the 1540s. Jesuit missionaries came with them. By 1600, there were over …

You're standing outside the Imperial Palace gardens. What you're looking at was for 260 years the real center of Japanese power. Edo Castle, built in 1457, became the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate from 1603. The Emperor remained in Kyoto. But power was here. In 1637, the Shimabara Rebellion erupted. On the Shimabara Peninsula near Nagasaki, 37,000 people — mostly Catholic peasants — rose up against the Shogunate. It took four months to crush them. More than 10,000 government soldiers died. The Shogunate blamed the Portuguese. In 1639 they were expelled. By 1641, the only Westerners remain…

You're in the East Gardens, within the old grounds of Edo Castle. Let's look at what Sakoku actually was. It wasn't total isolation. Trade continued at Dejima, Nagasaki, with Chinese and Dutch merchants. But the Dutch — around twenty men — lived confined on that 120-by-75-meter island. Once a year they traveled to Edo to pay respects to the Shogun. Japanese people were banned from leaving. Those who returned from abroad were executed. Building large ships was also prohibited. But internally, Japan flourished. By 1800, Edo had over a million inhabitants — one of the world's largest cities. …

You're at Nihonbashi, the Bridge of Japan. In the Edo period, this was the country's kilometer zero. All distances were measured from this bridge. The Tōkaidō road, linking Edo to Kyoto, started right here. On July 8, 1853, four black steam warships appeared in Uraga Bay, near Edo. They were commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy. The Japanese called them Kurofune — the Black Ships. The Shogunate panicked. Japanese wooden sailing ships were no match for iron steam-powered warships. Perry had cannons. And he had a letter from President Fillmore demanding open ports. …

Welcome to Yanaka. This is one of the strangest places in Tokyo. On March 10, 1945, American firebombing raids destroyed much of the city. Around 100,000 people died in a single night. The wooden Tokyo that had existed for centuries burned almost entirely. Yanaka survived. Nobody knows exactly why this neighborhood escaped the bombs. But it did. And it preserves an atmosphere from the Edo era that barely exists anywhere else in the city. Narrow streets. Small wooden houses. Temples and shrines every hundred meters. Craftsmen's shops that have been in the same spot for decades. The Yanaka …

You're in Ueno Park. On May 15, 1868, the last battle of the Shogunate was fought here. About 2,000 samurai loyal to the Shogun — called the Shogitai — barricaded themselves in the Kan'ei-ji temple that occupied these hills. The new government's army crushed them in half a day. Most of the temple burned in the fighting. Some context: the fall of the Shogunate wasn't a long war. It was the Boshin War, lasting from January 1868 to May 1869. The Shogunate collapsed because the forces of the Satsuma and Choshu domains, led by samurai Saigo Takamori, outnumbered and outgunned them. Months earli…

You're outside the Tokyo National Museum, Japan's oldest and largest museum. This is a good place to talk about what a samurai really was. The romantic image — the lone warrior with a katana — is partially true. But in Edo Japan, samurai made up between 5 and 7 percent of the population. Most didn't fight. They served as administrators, officials, teachers. Two hundred fifty years without major wars turned most of them into bureaucrats with swords. The sword was a symbol more than a weapon. It was what identified them as a privileged class. In 1871, the new Meiji government abolished the f…

You've arrived at Meiji Shrine. This shrine is dedicated to Emperor Meiji and his consort, Empress Shōken. It was built in 1920, in a 70-hectare forest in the heart of Tokyo. Emperor Meiji was born in 1852 and died in 1912. He reigned for 45 years. In those 45 years, Japan did what no country had done before or since at that speed. 1871: abolition of the feudal domain system. 1872: creation of a modern school system. 1873: compulsory military service. 1889: Imperial Constitution. 1895: victory in the war against China. 1905: victory in the war against Russia — the first time an Asian nation…

Walk a moment through this forest. Saigo Takamori was born in 1828 in Satsuma, the feudal domain that is today Kagoshima Prefecture. Son of a low-ranking samurai family, he became the country's most respected military leader. He was one of the architects of the Meiji Restoration. He forged the alliance between Satsuma and Choshu that toppled the Shogunate. He negotiated the peaceful surrender of Edo Castle. After the Restoration, he held positions in the new government. But he drifted away. He watched as samurai lost everything: lands, stipends, the right to carry a sword. And he believed t…

You've arrived at Omotesando. The name means "the approach road to the shrine." This avenue was designed as the main entrance to Meiji Shrine. Today it's Tokyo's most famous luxury boulevard, with Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Dior side by side. That irony is exactly the point. Saigo Takamori fought to preserve the old Japan. He lost. And the Japan that emerged from that defeat modernized so radically that in 50 years it went from samurai with swords to warships, from warships to bombers over Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the ashes to becoming the world's secon…