Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm

I'm Lily Korthorn.

Welcome to the latest episode in our Everything You Wanted to

series.

In today's episode, we'll be taking a whistle stop tour through the

history of Japan with Christopher Harding. Christopher is a historian at the

University of Edinburgh and the author of books including the upcoming The Japanese A History in 20 Lives, to be published

by Alan Lane in November.

Putting the questions to Christopher was our world history editor Matt Elton.

What do we know about very early Japanese civilization and how old? How old is it?

So we think there have been people living in Japan on the Japanese islands probably for about 30,000 years,

maybe 35,000 years you can dig up edge ground axes and all this kind of thing.

So we're fairly sure they've been there for a while, but the first written records for Japan to actually find out in detail what was going on. We don't really have those until the early centuries AD.

So Chinese visitors came across and had a look at what was going on there.

They discovered these sort of a series of small chieftains dotted around the archipelago. So there's no place yet that

would understand itself as being Japan, just these different chieftains. And the

first known and named person in Japanese history is a shaman queen called

Hemico who was in power, she came to power almost as a teenager in her early

20s in about 190 AD and she was a combination of a shaman and a military ruler and so

the picture we get from the Chinese observers talking about her kingdom. They call her, they sort of saw her as ruling by magic and sorcery as well as force of arms.

So you get a sense of a community which is ruled by her from behind Palisades guarded no one ever

...