Japanese History
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50 free Japanese History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Japan's past reads like several different countries stacked on top of one another: a court of poets and nobles, centuries of rule by warriors, a long stretch with the doors almost shut, and then one of the fastest reinventions any nation has managed. This quiz follows that whole arc. It starts with prehistoric hunters and the first emperors, moves through samurai, shoguns and the age of feuding lords, covers isolation and the arrival of foreign ships, and ends with empire, defeat, occupation and the economic boom that followed. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something. The questions are pitched for curious beginners as much as history buffs. Most cover the famous turning points, with a handful of harder ones for anyone who has watched every samurai drama, or the well-known animated video that races through the country's whole history in nine minutes. Play it solo, or use it in a classroom or at a quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Japanese video game giant began in 1889 as a maker of handmade hanafuda playing cards?
Nintendo
Nintendo was founded by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi to make flower cards by hand. It only turned to video games in the 1970s.
Q 02Which invaders' two 13th-century fleets were wrecked off Japan by typhoons later named kamikaze?
The Mongols
The Mongols under Kublai Khan, founder of China's Yuan dynasty, tried in 1274 and again in 1281. That August a great typhoon smashed their fleet at anchor, and the storms became known as the divine wind.
Q 03Which modern city grew from a fishing village called Edo into the seat of Japan's shoguns?
Tokyo
Tokyo took its present name in 1868, after the last shogun was overthrown and the emperor moved in. As Edo it had about a million people by 1721, perhaps the most of any city on Earth.
Q 04Which Japanese theatre form, founded by a woman in 1603, saw women banned from its stage in 1629?
Kabuki
Kabuki began when former shrine maiden Izumo no Okuni led a troupe of female dancers on a dry riverbed. After the ban, male actors called onnagata took over the women's roles.
Q 05In which country did soldier Hiroo Onoda keep fighting World War II from the jungle until 1974?
The Philippines
The Philippines finally saw him surrender when his old commander, by then a bookseller, flew to Lubang Island to relieve him of duty. Onoda handed his sword to President Marcos.
Q 06Which term describes a samurai without a master, like the forty-seven who avenged their lord in 1703?
Rōnin
Rōnin from the Akō domain waited nearly two years before killing the official behind their master's death. Forty-six were then ordered to take their own lives, and one was pardoned.
Q 07Which US commodore steamed his black ships into Edo Bay in 1853 to force Japan open to trade?
Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry came back in 1854 to sign the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened two ports. His gifts included a miniature steam locomotive and one hundred gallons of whiskey.
Q 08Which city, struck off the 1945 atomic bomb target list, was Japan's imperial capital for over a thousand years?
Kyoto
Kyoto was spared when US Secretary of War Henry Stimson had it removed from the list. Emperors had held court there from 794 until 1869, through wars, fires and earthquakes.
Q 09Which world first in transport opened between Japan's capital and Osaka days before the 1964 Summer Olympics?
A bullet train
A bullet train, the Shinkansen, began running on 1 October 1964 as the world's first high-speed rail line. Its opening was timed to coincide with the Games.
Q 10Which port city became the second and last ever hit by an atomic bomb, three days after Hiroshima?
Nagasaki
Nagasaki was only the secondary target: the bomber Bockscar set out for Kokura and diverted with fuel running low. The two attacks remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in war.
Q 11Which US naval base did Japan strike without warning on 7 December 1941, drawing America into World War II?
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor lost four battleships sunk that morning, but all three of the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers happened to be away. The US declared war on Japan the next day.
Q 12Which native Japanese religion honours spirits called kami and marks its shrines with torii gateways?
Shinto
Shinto has no single founder and no single sacred text, unlike Christianity or Islam. Its kami are believed to inhabit all things, from forces of nature to landmarks.
Q 13Which crop measured a feudal lord's wealth in Japan, counted in units called koku?
Rice
Rice farming ended the hunter-gatherer way of life as people settled in one place. One koku was reckoned enough to feed one person for a year.
Q 21Which country did Japan annex in 1910 and rule as a colony named Chōsen until 1945?
Korea
Korea was renamed Chōsen, the Japanese reading of Joseon, the name of its old ruling dynasty. Japanese rule ended only with defeat in World War II.
Q 22Which European power did Japan stun in a 1904–05 war, destroying its fleet at the Battle of Tsushima?
Russia
Russia's Baltic Fleet sailed for seven months to reach the fight, only to be destroyed. It was the first major victory of the modern era by an Asian power over a European nation.
Q 23Which Japanese volcano's last confirmed eruption, in 1707, blanketed the east of the country in ash?
Mount Fuji
Mount Fuji erupted from December 1707 into February 1708, in what is called the Hōei eruption. The ash-fall was followed by landslides and starvation.
Q 14Which emperor, whose 1945 radio broadcast announced Japan's surrender, reigned for 62 years until his death in 1989?
Hirohito
Hirohito had never been heard by ordinary Japanese before that broadcast, and his formal Classical Japanese was unfamiliar to many listeners. No emperor in Japan's history has reigned longer.
Q 15Which American general ran the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 until President Truman removed him in 1951?
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur oversaw reforms that gave Japanese women the vote. His land reform bought up more than a third of Japan's farmland and resold it to the farmers who worked it.
Q 16Which warlord, the third of Japan's three great unifiers, won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600?
Tokugawa Ieyasu
Tokugawa Ieyasu, once a child hostage of a rival clan, founded a shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603 until 1868. Oda Nobunaga, the first unifier, had long been his ally.
Q 17Which country's traders, the first Europeans to reach Japan, brought firearms ashore on Tanegashima in 1543?
Portugal
Portugal gave Japan more than guns: tempura and pan, the word for bread, both arrived with its ships. For centuries the Japanese simply called a firearm a tanegashima.
Q 18Which 11th-century work by court lady Murasaki Shikibu is often called the world's first novel?
The Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji came from a woman whose real name is unknown: Murasaki Shikibu is only a descriptive name. She had mastered Chinese, a language Heian women were not meant to learn.
Q 19Which flower gives its name to the throne of Japan's emperors and appears on Japanese passport covers?
Chrysanthemum
Chrysanthemum blooms with sixteen petals form the imperial crest. During the Meiji period nobody but the emperor was permitted to use it.
Q 20Which samurai moral code became known worldwide through Nitobe Inazō's bestselling book on the soul of Japan?
Bushido
Bushido reached the West through a book Nitobe wrote in English while living in the United States. US President Theodore Roosevelt was among its readers.
Q 24Which Japanese prefecture's Daiichi nuclear plant suffered meltdowns after the tsunami of March 2011?
Fukushima
Fukushima was the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, rated Level 7, the top of the international scale. The wave struck the plant about 50 minutes after the earthquake.
Q 25Which port, a fishing village until foreign trade arrived in 1859, was levelled by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake?
Yokohama
Yokohama lost nearly all its buildings, and fires fanned by the winds of a nearby typhoon did most of the damage. Some 2.5 million people across the region were left homeless.
Q 26Which Europeans alone could trade with Japan during two centuries of isolation, confined to the tiny island of Dejima?
The Dutch
The Dutch were moved to the fan-shaped artificial island in 1641 and kept apart from Japanese society. Only their ships and Chinese ones were allowed in.
Q 27Which artist, known by at least thirty names in his lifetime, made the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa?
Hokusai
Hokusai influenced Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet when a craze for Japanese art swept Europe in the late 19th century. The wave is his most famous print.
Q 28Which city, Japan's first permanent capital from 710, is home to Tōdai-ji and its giant bronze Buddha?
Nara
Nara held the court until 784. Its roaming deer are regarded as heavenly animals, because legend says a god rode in on a white one to guard the new capital.
Q 29Which sovereign right does Article 9 of Japan's 1947 constitution, written under US occupation, forever renounce?
Waging war
Waging war was renounced, along with the threat or use of force to settle disputes. Japan nonetheless founded its Self-Defense Forces in 1954.
Q 30Which island's 1945 battle produced the famous photograph of US Marines raising a flag on Mount Suribachi?
Iwo Jima
Iwo Jima's famous image actually shows the second flag-raising, when a larger replacement flag went up. It won the Pulitzer Prize in the same year it was taken.