Japan

Origins and formation

The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago are traced to the Paleolithic, about 38,000 to 39,000 years ago. The Jomon period, named for cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC, when new techniques arrived from Asia. Around the third century BC, Yayoi migrants brought iron and agriculture, and the population grew. The first known written reference to Japan is in the Chinese Book of Han, in the first century AD. A game civilization called Japan begins long after that pottery if its face is a sixteenth-century unifier. The archipelago is older than the shogunate.¹

Defining periods

Tokugawa Ieyasu was born Matsudaira Takechiyo on 31 January 1543 and died on 1 June 1616. He was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was the third of the three Great Unifiers, with Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He had lived as a hostage, succeeded as a minor daimyo, and built his strength under Nobunaga. The shogunate is one political form. The Jomon pottery is another age. The published Civilization VII essays split the islands into Heian, Sengoku, and Meiji. Those three are the counterparts. This page keeps the single Civ6 slot.^{1 2}

Leaders

The Leader Pass Great Commanders Pack includes Tokugawa of Japan. The English page and the Chinese page agree on the pack. They do not, in the text retrieved here, name the launch leader. This essay does not supply that name from memory. Tokugawa’s biography is the unifier who outlived Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and held the shogunate from 1603. A commander pack is a sales bundle with a Persian and an Ottoman leader beside him. Those neighbors are not his vassals.^{2 3 4}

The Chinese update notes mention a Japanese samurai unit in a list of unique replacements. A unit confirms that the civilization has a military face in the game. It does not identify who leads it at launch.⁵

Legacy and interpretation

Ieyasu’s legacy is the shogunate that lasts until 1868. Hideyoshi, who is a published Civilization VII leader, died in 1598, before that shogunate began. Nobunaga is earlier still. The three unifiers are a sequence. Civilization VI, on the pages retrieved here, officially names only the third. The Heian, Sengoku, and Meiji essays carry the other centuries.²

A closer look

The commander’s pack does not state an extra expansion requirement next to Tokugawa’s name. Other leaders on the same page do: Nader Shah needs the Persia pack, and Suleiman needs Gathering Storm. The absence of a mark is part of the official footnote, not a guess that Tokugawa was in the base game. The civilization’s own pack remains unconfirmed.^{3 4}

In Civilization VI

Japan stays unconfirmed as a civilization pack. Tokugawa is Leader Pass. The Heian, Sengoku, and Meiji essays are the Civilization VII counterparts. Keep the Jomon period, the three unifiers, the shogunate of 1603, and 1868 apart.^{1 2 3}