A. Royden D'souza

The classical period of Japan, culminating in the Tokugawa Pax (Shogunate), bequeathed to modernity a set of unresolved dialectics: the tension between imperial sacrality and military governance; the syncretic entanglement of kami and Buddha; the latent violence of a warrior class stripped of war; and the suspicion of foreign ideologies that nonetheless proved irresistible.

This millennium witnessed profound transformations in every aspect of Japanese civilization: the flowering of court culture in Heian-kyō, the rise of the warrior class and the establishment of the shogunate, the traumatic Mongol invasions, the centuries of civil war known as the Sengoku period, the unification under Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the long peace of Tokugawa rule, and finally the tumultuous collapse of the shogunate and the restoration of imperial authori