title: History of Japan

text: Japan nevertheless entered a period of prosperity and population growth starting around 1250. In rural areas, the greater use of iron tools and fertilizer, improved irrigation techniques, and double-cropping increased productivity and rural villages grew. Fewer famines and epidemics allowed cities to grow and commerce to boom. Buddhism, which had been largely a religion of the elites, was brought to the masses by prominent monks, such as Hōnen (1133–1212), who established Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, and Nichiren (1222–1282), who founded Nichiren Buddhism. Zen Buddhism spread widely among the samurai class.


title: History of Japan

text: Takauji and many other samurai soon became dissatisfied with Emperor Go-Daigo's Kenmu Restoration, an ambitious attempt to monopolize power in the imperial court. Takauji rebeled after Go-Daigo refused to appoint him shōgun. In 1338, Takauji captured Kyoto and installed a rival member of the imperial family to the throne, Emperor Kōmyō, who did appoint him shogun. Go-Daigo responded by fleeing to the southern city of Yoshino, where he set up a rival government. This ushered in a prolonged period of conflict between the Northern Court and the Southern Court.


title: History of Japan

text: Takauji set up his shogunate in the Muromachi district of Kyoto. However, the shogunate was faced with the twin challenges of fighting the Southern Court and of maintaining its authority over its own subordinate governors. Like the Kamakura shogunate, the Muromachi shogunate appointed its allies to rule in the provinces, but these men increasingly styled themselves as feudal lords—called "daimyōs"—of their domains and often refused to obey the shogun. The Ashikaga shogun who was most successful at bringing the country together was Takauji's grandson Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who came to power in 1368 and remained influential until his death in 1408. Yoshimitsu expanded the power of the shogunate and in 1392, brokered a deal to bring the Northern and Southern Courts together and end the civil war. Henceforth, the shogunate kept the emperor and his court under tight control.


title: History of Japan

text: During the final century of the Ashikaga shogunate the country descended into another, more violent period of civil war. This started in 1467 when the Ōnin War broke out over who would succeed the ruling shogun. The "daimyōs" each took sides and burned Kyoto to the ground while battling for their preferred candidate. By the time the succession was settled in 1477, the shogun had lost all power over the "daimyō", who now ruled hundreds of independent states throughout Japan. During this Warring States period, "daimyōs" fought among themselves for control of the country. Some of the most powerful "daimyōs" of the era were Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen. One enduring symbol of this era was the ninja, skilled spies and assassins hired by "daimyōs". Few definite historical facts are known about the secretive lifestyles of the ninja, who became the subject of many legends. In addition to the "daimyōs", rebellious peasants and "warrior monks" affiliated with Buddhist temples also raised their own armies.


title: History of Japan

text: Amid this on-going anarchy, a trading ship was blown off course and landed in 1543 on the Japanese island of Tanegashima, just south of Kyushu. The three Portuguese traders on board were the first Europeans to set foot in Japan. Soon European traders would introduce many new items to Japan, most importantly the musket. By 1556, the "daimyōs" were using about 300,000 muskets in their armies. The Europeans also brought Christianity, which soon came to have a substantial following in Japan reaching 350,000 believers. In 1549 the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier disembarked in Kyushu.


title: History of Japan

text: Initiating direct commercial and cultural exchange between Japan and the West, the first map made of Japan in the west was represented in 1568 by the Portuguese cartographer Fernão Vaz Dourado.


title: History of Japan

text: The Portuguese were allowed to trade and create colonies where they could convert new believers into the Christian religion. The civil war status in Japan greatly benefited the Portuguese, as well as several competing gentlemen who sought to attract Portuguese black boats and their trade to their domains. Initially, the Portuguese stayed on the lands belonging to Matsura Takanobu, Firando (Hirado), and in the province of Bungo, lands of Ōtomo Sōrin, but in 1562 they moved to Yokoseura when the Daimyô there, Omura Sumitada, offered to be the first lord to convert to Christianity, adopting the name of Dom Bartolomeu. In 1564, he faced a rebellion instigated by the Buddhist clergy and Yokoseura was destroyed.


title: History of Japan

text: In 1561 forces under Ōtomo Sōrin attacked the castle in Moji with an alliance with the Portuguese, who provided three ships, with a crew of about 900 men and more than 50 cannons. This is thought to be the first bombardment by foreign ships on Japan. The first recorded naval battle between Europeans and the Japanese occurred in 1565. In the Battle of Fukuda Bay, the "daimyō" Matsura Takanobu attacked two Portuguese trade vessels at Hirado port. The engagement led the Portuguese traders to find a safe harbor for their ships that took them to Nagasaki.


title: History of Japan

text: In 1571, Dom Bartolomeu, also known as Ōmura Sumitada, guaranteed a little land in the small fishing village of "Nagasáqui" to the Jesuits, who divided it into six areas. They could use the land to receive Christians exiled from other territories, as well as for Portuguese merchants. The Jesuits built a chapel and a school under the name of São Paulo, like those in Goa and Malacca. By 1579, Nagasáqui had four hundred houses, and some Portuguese had gotten married. Fearful that Nagasaki could fall into the hands of its rival Takanobu, Omura Sumitada (Dom Bartolomeu) decided to guarantee the city directly to the Jesuits in 1580. After a few years, the Jesuits came to realize that if they understood the language they would achieve more conversions to the Catholic religion. Jesuits such as João Rodrigues wrote a Japanese dictionary. Thus Portuguese became the first Western language to have such a dictionary when it was published in Nagasaki in 1603.


title: History of Japan

text: Oda Nobunaga used European technology and firearms to conquer many other "daimyōs"; his consolidation of power began what was known as the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573–1603). After Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582 by Akechi Mitsuhide, his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified the nation in 1590 and launched two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597. Before the invasion, Hideyoshi tried to hire two Portuguese galleons to join the invasion but the Portuguese refused the offer.


title: History of Japan

text: Tokugawa Ieyasu served as regent for Hideyoshi's son Toyotomi Hideyori and used his position to gain political and military support. When open war broke out, Ieyasu defeated rival clans in the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. In 1603 the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo enacted measures including "buke shohatto", as a code of conduct to control the autonomous "daimyōs", and in 1639 the isolationist "sakoku" ("closed country") policy that spanned the two and a half centuries of tenuous political unity known as the Edo period (1603–1868), this act ended with Portuguese influence after 100 years in Japanese territory, also aiming to limit the political presence of any foreign power.


title: History of Japan

text: In spite of the war, Japan's relative economic prosperity, which had begun in the Kamakura period, continued well into the Muromachi period. By 1450 Japan's population stood at ten million, compared to six million at the end of the thirteenth century. Commerce flourished, including considerable trade with China and Korea. Because the "daimyōs" and other groups within Japan were minting their own coins, Japan began to transition from a barter-based to a currency-based economy. During the period, some of Japan's most representative art forms developed, including ink wash painting, "ikebana" flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, Japanese gardening, "bonsai", and "Noh" theater. Though the eighth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimasa, was an ineffectual political and military leader, he played a critical role in promoting these cultural developments. He had the famous Kinkaku-ji or "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" built in Kyoto in 1397.


title: History of Japan

text: During the second half of the 16th century, Japan gradually reunified under two powerful warlords: Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The period takes its name from Nobunaga's headquarters, Azuchi Castle, and Hideyoshi's headquarters, Momoyama Castle.


title: History of Japan

text: Nobunaga was the "daimyō" of the small province of Owari. He burst onto the scene suddenly, in 1560, when, during the Battle of Okehazama, his army defeated a force several times its size led by the powerful "daimyō" Imagawa Yoshimoto. Nobunaga was renowned for his strategic leadership and his ruthlessness. He encouraged Christianity to incite hatred toward his Buddhist enemies and to forge strong relationships with European arms merchants. He equipped his armies with muskets and trained them with innovative tactics. He promoted talented men regardless of their social status, including his peasant servant Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became one of his best generals.


title: History of Japan

text: The Azuchi–Momoyama period began in 1568, when Nobunaga seized Kyoto and thus effectively brought an end to the Ashikaga shogunate. He was well on his way towards his goal of reuniting all Japan in 1582 when one of his own officers, Akechi Mitsuhide, killed him during an abrupt attack on his encampment. Hideyoshi avenged Nobunaga by crushing Akechi's uprising and emerged as Nobunaga's successor. Hideyoshi completed the reunification of Japan by conquering Shikoku, Kyushu, and the lands of the Hōjō family in eastern Japan. He launched sweeping changes to Japanese society, including the confiscation of swords from the peasantry, new restrictions on "daimyōs", persecutions of Christians, a thorough land survey, and a new law effectively forbidding the peasants and samurai from changing their social class. Hideyoshi's land survey designated all those who were cultivating the land as being "commoners", an act which effectively granted freedom to most of Japan's slaves.


title: History of Japan

text: As Hideyoshi's power expanded, he dreamed of conquering China and launched two massive invasions of Korea starting in 1592. Hideyoshi failed to defeat the Chinese and Korean armies on the Korean Peninsula and the war ended after his death in 1598. In the hope of founding a new dynasty, Hideyoshi had asked his most trusted subordinates to pledge loyalty to his infant son Toyotomi Hideyori. Despite this, almost immediately after Hideyoshi's death, war broke out between Hideyori's allies and those loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu, a "daimyō" and a former ally of Hideyoshi. Tokugawa Ieyasu won a decisive victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, ushering in 268 uninterrupted years of rule by the Tokugawa clan.


title: History of Japan

text: The Edo period was characterized by relative peace and stability under the tight control of the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled from the eastern city of Edo (modern Tokyo). In 1603, Emperor Go-Yōzei declared Tokugawa Ieyasu "shōgun", and Ieyasu abdicated two years later to groom his son as the second "shōgun" of what became a long dynasty. Nevertheless, it took time for the Tokugawas to consolidate their rule. In 1609, the "shōgun" gave the "daimyō" of Satsuma Domain permission to invade the Ryukyu Kingdom for perceived insults towards the shogunate; the Satsuma victory began 266 years of Ryukyu's dual subordination to Satsuma and China. Ieyasu led the Siege of Osaka that ended with the destruction of the Toyotomi clan in 1615. Soon after the shogunate promulgated the Laws for the Military Houses, which imposed tighter controls on the "daimyōs", and the alternate attendance system, which required each "daimyō" to spend every other year in Edo. Even so, the "daimyōs" continued to maintain a significant degree of autonomy in their domains. The central government of the shogunate in Edo, which quickly became the most populous city in the world, took counsel from a group of senior advisors known as "rōjū" and employed samurai as bureaucrats. The emperor in Kyoto was funded lavishly by the government but was allowed no political power.


title: History of Japan

text: The Tokugawa shogunate went to great lengths to suppress social unrest. Harsh penalties, including crucifixion, beheading, and death by boiling, were decreed for even the most minor offenses, though criminals of high social class were often given the option of "seppuku" ("self-disembowelment"), an ancient form of suicide that became ritualized. Christianity, which was seen as a potential threat, was gradually clamped down on until finally, after the Christian-led Shimabara Rebellion of 1638, the religion was completely outlawed. To prevent further foreign ideas from sowing dissent, the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, implemented the "sakoku" ("closed country") isolationist policy under which Japanese people were not allowed to travel abroad, return from overseas, or build ocean-going vessels. The only Europeans allowed on Japanese soil were the Dutch, who were granted a single trading post on the island of Dejima at Nagasaki from 1634 to 1854. China and Korea were the only other countries permitted to trade, and many foreign books were banned from import.


title: History of Japan

text: During the first century of Tokugawa rule, Japan's population doubled to thirty million, mostly because of agricultural growth; the population remained stable for the rest of the period. The shogunate's construction of roads, elimination of road and bridge tolls, and standardization of coinage promoted commercial expansion that also benefited the merchants and artisans of the cities. City populations grew, but almost ninety percent of the population continued to live in rural areas. Both the inhabitants of cities and of rural communities would benefit from one of the most notable social changes of the Edo period: increased literacy and numeracy. The number of private schools greatly expanded, particularly those attached to temples and shrines, and raised literacy to thirty percent. This may have been the world's highest rate at the time and drove a flourishing commercial publishing industry, which grew to produce hundreds of titles per year. In the area of numeracy – approximated by an index measuring people's ability to report an exact rather than a rounded age (age-heaping method), and which level shows a strong correlation to later economic development of a country – Japan's level was comparable to that of north-west European countries, and moreover, Japan's index came close to the 100 percent mark throughout the nineteenth century. These high levels of both literacy and numeracy were part of the socio-economical foundation for Japan's strong growth rates during the following century.


title: History of Japan

text: The Edo period was a time of cultural flourishing, as the merchant classes grew in wealth and began spending their income on cultural and social pursuits. Members of the merchant class who patronized culture and entertainment were said to live hedonistic lives, which came to be called the "ukiyo" ("floating world"). This lifestyle inspired "ukiyo-zōshi" popular novels and "ukiyo-e" art, the latter of which were often woodblock prints that progressed to greater sophistication and use of multiple printed colors.


title: History of Japan

text: Forms of theater such as kabuki and "bunraku" puppet theater became widely popular. These new forms of entertainment were (at the time) accompanied by short songs ("kouta") and music played on the "shamisen", a new import to Japan in 1600. "Haiku", whose greatest master is generally agreed to be Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), also rose as a major form of poetry. Geisha, a new profession of entertainers, also became popular. They would provide conversation, sing, and dance for customers, though they would not sleep with them.


title: History of Japan

text: The Tokugawas sponsored and were heavily influenced by Neo-Confucianism, which led the government to divide society into four classes based on the four occupations. The samurai class claimed to follow the ideology of bushido, literally "the way of the warrior".


title: History of Japan

text: By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the shogunate showed signs of weakening. The dramatic growth of agriculture that had characterized the early Edo period had ended, and the government handled the devastating Tenpō famines poorly. Peasant unrest grew and government revenues fell. The shogunate cut the pay of the already financially distressed samurai, many of whom worked side jobs to make a living. Discontented samurai were soon to play a major role in engineering the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate.


title: History of Japan

text: At the same time, the people drew inspiration from new ideas and fields of study. Dutch books brought into Japan stimulated interest in Western learning, called "rangaku" or "Dutch learning". The physician Sugita Genpaku, for instance, used concepts from Western medicine to help spark a revolution in Japanese ideas of human anatomy. The scholarly field of "kokugaku" or "national learning", developed by scholars such as Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane, promoted what it asserted were native Japanese values. For instance, it criticized the Chinese-style Neo-Confucianism advocated by the shogunate and emphasized the Emperor's divine authority, which the Shinto faith taught had its roots in Japan's mythic past, which was referred to as the "Age of the Gods".


title: History of Japan

text: The arrival in 1853 of a fleet of American ships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry threw Japan into turmoil. The US government aimed to end Japan's isolationist policies. The shogunate had no defense against Perry's gunboats and had to agree to his demands that American ships be permitted to acquire provisions and trade at Japanese ports. The Western powers imposed what became known as "unequal treaties" on Japan which stipulated that Japan must allow citizens of these countries to visit or reside on Japanese territory and must not levy tariffs on their imports or try them in Japanese courts.


title: History of Japan

text: The shogunate's failure to oppose the Western powers angered many Japanese, particularly those of the southern domains of Chōshū and Satsuma. Many samurai there, inspired by the nationalist doctrines of the kokugaku school, adopted the slogan of "sonnō jōi" ("revere the emperor, expel the barbarians"). The two domains went on to form an alliance. In August 1866, soon after becoming shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, struggled to maintain power as civil unrest continued. The Chōshū and Satsuma domains in 1868 convinced the young Emperor Meiji and his advisors to issue a rescript calling for an end to the Tokugawa shogunate. The armies of Chōshū and Satsuma soon marched on Edo and the ensuing Boshin War led to the fall of the shogunate.


title: History of Japan

text: The emperor was restored to nominal supreme power, and in 1869, the imperial family moved to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo ("eastern capital"). However, the most powerful men in the government were former samurai from Chōshū and Satsuma rather than the emperor, who was fifteen in 1868. These men, known as the Meiji oligarchs, oversaw the dramatic changes Japan would experience during this period. The leaders of the Meiji government desired Japan to become a modern nation-state that could stand equal to the Western imperialist powers. Among them were Ōkubo Toshimichi and Saigō Takamori from Satsuma, as well as Kido Takayoshi, Ito Hirobumi, and Yamagata Aritomo from Chōshū.


title: History of Japan

text: The Meiji government abolished the Edo class structure and replaced the feudal domains of the "daimyōs" with prefectures. It instituted comprehensive tax reform and lifted the ban on Christianity. Major government priorities also included the introduction of railways, telegraph lines, and a universal education system. The Meiji government promoted widespread Westernization and hired hundreds of advisers from Western nations with expertise in such fields as education, mining, banking, law, military affairs, and transportation to remodel Japan's institutions. The Japanese adopted the Gregorian calendar, Western clothing, and Western hairstyles. One leading advocate of Westernization was the popular writer Fukuzawa Yukichi. As part of its Westernization drive, the Meiji government enthusiastically sponsored the importation of Western science, above all medical science. In 1893, Kitasato Shibasaburō established the Institute for Infectious Diseases, which would soon become world-famous, and in 1913, Hideyo Noguchi proved the link between syphilis and paresis. Furthermore, the introduction of European literary styles to Japan sparked a boom in new works of prose fiction. Characteristic authors of the period included Futabatei Shimei and Mori Ōgai, although the most famous of the Meiji era writers was Natsume Sōseki, who wrote satirical, autobiographical, and psychological novels combining both the older and newer styles. Ichiyō Higuchi, a leading female author, took inspiration from earlier literary models of the Edo period.


title: History of Japan

text: Government institutions developed rapidly in response to the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, a grassroots campaign demanding greater popular participation in politics. The leaders of this movement included Itagaki Taisuke and Ōkuma Shigenobu. Itō Hirobumi, the first Prime Minister of Japan, responded by writing the Meiji Constitution, which was promulgated in 1889. The new constitution established an elected lower house, the House of Representatives, but its powers were restricted. Only two percent of the population were eligible to vote, and legislation proposed in the House required the support of the unelected upper house, the House of Peers. Both the cabinet of Japan and the Japanese military were directly responsible not to the elected legislature but to the emperor. Concurrently, the Japanese government also developed a form of Japanese nationalism under which Shinto became the state religion and the emperor was declared a living god. Schools nationwide instilled patriotic values and loyalty to the emperor.


title: History of Japan

text: In December 1871, a Ryukyuan ship was shipwrecked on Taiwan and the crew were massacred. In 1874, using the incident as a pretext, Japan launched a military expedition to Taiwan to assert their claims to the Ryukyu Islands. The expedition featured the first instance of the Japanese military ignoring the orders of the civilian government, as the expedition set sail after being ordered to postpone. Yamagata Aritomo, who was born a samurai in the Chōshū Domain, was a key force behind the modernization and enlargement of the Imperial Japanese Army, especially the introduction of national conscription. The new army was put to use in 1877 to crush the Satsuma Rebellion of discontented samurai in southern Japan led by the former Meiji leader Saigo Takamori.


title: History of Japan

text: The Japanese military played a key role in Japan's expansion abroad. The government believed that Japan had to acquire its own colonies to compete with the Western colonial powers. After consolidating its control over Hokkaido (through the Hokkaidō Development Commission) and annexing the Ryukyu Kingdom (the "Ryūkyū Disposition"), it next turned its attention to China and Korea. In 1894, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed in Korea, where they were both stationed to suppress the Donghak Rebellion. During the ensuing First Sino-Japanese War, Japan's highly motivated and well-led forces defeated the more numerous and better-equipped military of Qing China. The island of Taiwan was thus ceded to Japan in 1895, and Japan's government gained enough international prestige to allow Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu to renegotiate the "unequal treaties". In 1902 Japan signed an important military alliance with the British.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan next clashed with Russia, which was expanding its power in Asia. The Battle of Yalu River was the first time in decades that an Asian power defeated a western power. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 ended with the dramatic Battle of Tsushima, which was another victory for Japan's military. Japan thus laid claim to Korea as a protectorate in 1905, followed by full annexation in 1910. The defeat of Russia in the war had set in motion a change in the global world order with the emergence of Japan as not only a regional power, but rather, the main Asian power.


title: History of Japan

text: During the Meiji period, Japan underwent a rapid transition towards an industrial economy. Both the Japanese government and private entrepreneurs adopted Western technology and knowledge to create factories capable of producing a wide range of goods.


title: History of Japan

text: By the end of the period, the majority of Japan's exports were manufactured goods. Some of Japan's most successful new businesses and industries constituted huge family-owned conglomerates called "zaibatsu", such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo. The phenomenal industrial growth sparked rapid urbanization. The proportion of the population working in agriculture shrank from 75 percent in 1872 to 50 percent by 1920. In 1927 the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line opened and it is the oldest subway line in Asia.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan enjoyed solid economic growth at this time and most people lived longer and healthier lives. The population rose from 34 million in 1872 to 52 million in 1915. Poor working conditions in factories led to growing labor unrest, and many workers and intellectuals came to embrace socialist ideas. The Meiji government responded with harsh suppression of dissent. Radical socialists plotted to assassinate the emperor in the High Treason Incident of 1910, after which the Tokkō secret police force was established to root out left-wing agitators. The government also introduced social legislation in 1911 setting maximum work hours and a minimum age for employment.


title: History of Japan

text: During the short reign of Emperor Taishō, Japan developed stronger democratic institutions and grew in international power. The Taishō political crisis opened the period with mass protests and riots organized by Japanese political parties, which succeeded in forcing Katsura Tarō to resign as prime minister. This and the rice riots of 1918 increased the power of Japan's political parties over the ruling oligarchy. The Seiyūkai and Minseitō parties came to dominate politics by the end of the so-called "Taishō democracy" era. The franchise for the House of Representatives had been gradually expanded since 1890, and in 1925 universal male suffrage was introduced. However, in the same year the far-reaching Peace Preservation Law also passed, prescribing harsh penalties for political dissidents.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan's participation in World War I on the side of the Allies sparked unprecedented economic growth and earned Japan new colonies in the South Pacific seized from Germany. After the war, Japan signed the Treaty of Versailles and enjoyed good international relations through its membership in the League of Nations and participation in international disarmament conferences. The Great Kantō earthquake in September 1923 left over 100,000 dead, and combined with the resultant fires destroyed the homes of more than three million.


title: History of Japan

text: The growth of popular prose fiction, which began during the Meiji period, continued into the Taishō period as literacy rates rose and book prices dropped. Notable literary figures of the era included short story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and the novelist Haruo Satō. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, described as "perhaps the most versatile literary figure of his day" by the historian Conrad Totman, produced many works during the Taishō period influenced by European literature, though his 1929 novel "Some Prefer Nettles" reflects deep appreciation for the virtues of traditional Japanese culture. At the end of the Taishō period, Tarō Hirai, known by his penname Edogawa Ranpo, began writing popular mystery and crime stories.


title: History of Japan

text: Emperor Hirohito's sixty-three-year reign from 1926 to 1989 is the longest in recorded Japanese history. The first twenty years were characterized by the rise of extreme nationalism and a series of expansionist wars. After suffering defeat in World War II, Japan was occupied by foreign powers for the first time in its history, and then re-emerged as a major world economic power.


title: History of Japan

text: Left-wing groups had been subject to violent suppression by the end of the Taishō period, and radical right-wing groups, inspired by fascism and Japanese nationalism, rapidly grew in popularity. The extreme right became influential throughout the Japanese government and society, notably within the Kwantung Army, a Japanese army stationed in China along the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railroad. During the Manchurian Incident of 1931, radical army officers bombed a small portion of the South Manchuria Railroad and, falsely attributing the attack to the Chinese, invaded Manchuria. The Kwantung Army conquered Manchuria and set up the puppet government of Manchukuo there without permission from the Japanese government. International criticism of Japan following the invasion led to Japan withdrawing from the League of Nations.


title: History of Japan

text: Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai of the Seiyūkai Party attempted to restrain the Kwantung Army and was assassinated in 1932 by right-wing extremists. Because of growing opposition within the Japanese military and the extreme right to party politicians, who they saw as corrupt and self-serving, Inukai was the last party politician to govern Japan in the pre-World War II era. In February 1936 young radical officers of the Imperial Japanese Army attempted a coup d'état. They assassinated many moderate politicians before the coup was suppressed. In its wake the Japanese military consolidated its control over the political system and most political parties were abolished when the Imperial Rule Assistance Association was founded in 1940.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan's expansionist vision grew increasingly bold. Many of Japan's political elite aspired to have Japan acquire new territory for resource extraction and settlement of surplus population. These ambitions led to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. After their victory in the Chinese capital, the Japanese military committed the infamous Nanjing massacre. The Japanese military failed to defeat the Chinese government led by Chiang Kai-shek and the war descended into a bloody stalemate that lasted until 1945. Japan's stated war aim was to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a vast pan-Asian union under Japanese domination. Hirohito's role in Japan's foreign wars remains a subject of controversy, with various historians portraying him as either a powerless figurehead or an enabler and supporter of Japanese militarism.


title: History of Japan

text: The United States opposed Japan's invasion of China and responded with increasingly stringent economic sanctions intended to deprive Japan of the resources to continue its war in China. Japan reacted by forging an alliance with Germany and Italy in 1940, known as the Tripartite Pact, which worsened its relations with the US. In July 1941, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands froze all Japanese assets when Japan completed its invasion of French Indochina by occupying the southern half of the country, further increasing tension in the Pacific.


title: History of Japan

text: In late 1941, Japan's government, led by Prime Minister and General Hideki Tojo, decided to break the US-led embargo through force of arms. On 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This brought the US into World War II on the side of the Allies. Japan then successfully invaded the Asian colonies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, including the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies.


title: History of Japan

text: In the early stages of the war, Japan scored victory after victory. The tide began to turn against Japan following the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and the subsequent Battle of Guadalcanal, in which Allied troops wrested the Solomon Islands from Japanese control. During this period the Japanese military was responsible for such war crimes as mistreatment of prisoners of war, massacres of civilians, and the use of chemical and biological weapons. The Japanese military earned a reputation for fanaticism, often employing banzai charges and fighting almost to the last man against overwhelming odds. In 1944 the Imperial Japanese Navy began deploying squadrons of "kamikaze" pilots who crashed their planes into enemy ships.


title: History of Japan

text: Life in Japan became increasingly difficult for civilians due to stringent rationing of food, electrical outages, and a brutal crackdown on dissent. In 1944 the US Army captured the island of Saipan, which allowed the United States to begin widespread bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. These destroyed over half of the total area of Japan's major cities. The Battle of Okinawa, fought between April and June 1945, was the largest naval operation of the war and left 115,000 soldiers and 150,000 Okinawan civilians dead, suggesting that the planned invasion of mainland Japan would be even bloodier. The Japanese superbattleship "Yamato" was sunk en route to aid in the Battle of Okinawa.


title: History of Japan

text: However, on 6 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing over 70,000 people. This was the first nuclear attack in history. On 9 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchukuo and other territories, and Nagasaki was struck by a second atomic bomb, killing around 40,000 people. The surrender of Japan was communicated to the Allies on 14 August and broadcast by Emperor Hirohito on national radio the following day.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan experienced dramatic political and social transformation under the Allied occupation in 1945–1952. US General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, served as Japan's "de facto" leader and played a central role in implementing reforms, many inspired by the New Deal of the 1930s.


title: History of Japan

text: The occupation sought to decentralize power in Japan by breaking up the "zaibatsu", transferring ownership of agricultural land from landlords to tenant farmers, and promoting labor unionism. Other major goals were the demilitarization and democratization of Japan's government and society. Japan's military was disarmed, its colonies were granted independence, the Peace Preservation Law and Tokkō were abolished, and the International Military Tribunal of the Far East tried war criminals. The cabinet became responsible not to the Emperor but to the elected National Diet. The Emperor was permitted to remain on the throne, but was ordered to renounce his claims to divinity, which had been a pillar of the State Shinto system. Japan's new constitution came into effect in 1947 and guaranteed civil liberties, labor rights, and women's suffrage, and through Article 9, Japan renounced its right to go to war with another nation.


title: History of Japan

text: The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 officially normalized relations between Japan and the United States. The occupation ended in 1952, although the US continued to administer a number of the Ryukyu Islands. In 1968, the Ogasawara Islands were returned from US occupation to Japanese sovereignty. Japanese citizens were allowed to return. Okinawa was the last to be returned in 1972. The US continues to operate military bases throughout the Ryukyu Islands, mostly on Okinawa, as part of the US-Japan Security Treaty.


title: History of Japan

text: Shigeru Yoshida served as prime minister in 1946–1947 and 1948–1954, and played a key role in guiding Japan through the occupation. His policies, known as the Yoshida Doctrine, proposed that Japan should forge a tight relationship with the United States and focus on developing the economy rather than pursuing a proactive foreign policy. Yoshida was one of the longest serving prime ministers in Japanese history. Yoshida's Liberal Party merged in 1955 into the new Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which went on to dominate Japanese politics for the remainder of the Shōwa period.


title: History of Japan

text: Although the Japanese economy was in bad shape in the immediate postwar years, an austerity program implemented in 1949 by finance expert Joseph Dodge ended inflation. The Korean War (1950–1953) was a major boon to Japanese business. In 1949 the Yoshida cabinet created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) with a mission to promote economic growth through close cooperation between the government and big business. MITI sought successfully to promote manufacturing and heavy industry, and encourage exports. The factors behind Japan's postwar economic growth included technology and quality control techniques imported from the West, close economic and defense cooperation with the United States, non-tariff barriers to imports, restrictions on labor unionization, long work hours, and a generally favorable global economic environment. Japanese corporations successfully retained a loyal and experienced workforce through the system of lifetime employment, which assured their employees a safe job.


title: History of Japan

text: By 1955, the Japanese economy had grown beyond prewar levels, and by 1968 it had become the second largest capitalist economy in the world. The GNP expanded at an annual rate of nearly 10% from 1956 until the 1973 oil crisis slowed growth to a still-rapid average annual rate of just over 4% until 1991. Life expectancy rose and Japan's population increased to 123 million by 1990. Ordinary Japanese people became wealthy enough to purchase a wide array of consumer goods. During this period, Japan became the world's largest manufacturer of automobiles and a leading producer of electronics. Japan signed the Plaza Accord in 1985 to depreciate the US dollar against the yen and other currencies. By the end of 1987, the Nikkei stock market index had doubled and the Tokyo Stock Exchange became the largest in the world. During the ensuing economic bubble, stock and real-estate loans grew rapidly.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan became a member of the United Nations in 1956 and further cemented its international standing in 1964, when it hosted the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Japan was a close ally of the United States during the Cold War, though this alliance did not have unanimous support from the Japanese people. As requested by the United States, Japan reconstituted its army in 1954 under the name Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), though some Japanese insisted that the very existence of the JSDF was a violation of Article 9 of Japan's constitution. In 1960, the massive Anpo protests saw hundreds of thousands of citizens take to the streets in opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty. Japan successfully normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1956, despite an ongoing dispute over the ownership of the Kuril Islands, and with South Korea in 1965, despite an ongoing dispute over the ownership of the islands of Liancourt Rocks. In accordance with US policy, Japan recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China after World War II, though Japan switched its recognition to the People's Republic of China in 1972.


title: History of Japan

text: Among cultural developments, the immediate post-occupation period became a golden age for Japanese cinema. The reasons for this include the abolition of government censorship, low film production costs, expanded access to new film techniques and technologies, and huge domestic audiences at a time when other forms of recreation were relatively scarce. On 1 October 1964, Japan's first high-speed rail line was built called the Tokaido Shinkansen. It is also the oldest high-speed rail system in the world.


title: History of Japan

text: Emperor Akihito's reign began upon the death of his father, Emperor Hirohito. The economic bubble popped in 1989, and stock and land prices plunged as Japan entered a deflationary spiral. Banks found themselves saddled with insurmountable debts that hindered economic recovery. Stagnation worsened as the birthrate declined far below replacement level. The 1990s are often referred to as Japan's Lost Decade. Economic performance was often poor in the following decades, and the stock market never returned to its pre-1989 highs. Japan's system of lifetime employment largely collapsed and unemployment rates rose. The faltering economy and several corruption scandals weakened the LDP's dominant political position. Japan was nevertheless governed by non-LDP prime ministers only in 1993–1996 and 2009–2012.


title: History of Japan

text: Japan's dealing with its war legacy strained relations with China and Korea. Japanese officials and emperors have made over 50 formal war apologies since the 1950s. However, some politicians of China and Korea found the official apologies, such as those of the Emperor in 1990 and the Murayama Statement of 1995, inadequate or insincere. Nationalist politics have exacerbated this, such as denial of the Nanjing Massacre and other war crimes, revisionist history textbooks, which provoked protests in East Asia. Japanese politicians make frequent visits to Yasukuni Shrine to commemorate the people who died in wars from 1868 to 1954, but convicted war criminals are among the enshrined.


title: History of Japan

text: The population of Japan peaked at 128,083,960 in 2008. It had decreased by 2,373,960 by December 2020. In 2011, the economy of China became the world's second largest. Japan's economy descended to third largest by nominal GDP. Despite Japan's economic difficulties, this period also saw Japanese popular culture, including video games, anime, and manga, expanding worldwide, especially among young people. In March 2011, the Tokyo Skytree became the tallest tower in the world at , displacing the Canton Tower. It is the second tallest structure in the world after the Burj Khalifa ().


title: History of Japan

text: On 11 March 2011, one of the largest earthquakes recorded in Japan occurred in the northeast. The resulting tsunami damaged the nuclear facilities in Fukushima, which suffered a nuclear meltdown and severe radiation leakage.


title: History of Japan

text: In 2020, Tokyo was due to host the Summer Olympics for the second time since 1964. Japan was the first Asian country to host the Olympics twice. However, due to the global outbreak and economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic, the Summer Olympics were postponed to 2021; they took place from 23 July to 8 August 2021. Japan ranked third place, with 27 gold medals.


title: History of Japan

text: When the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Japan condemned and levied sanctions on Russia for its actions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised Japan as the "first Asian nation that has begun exerting pressure on Russia." Japan froze the assets of Russia's central bank and other major Russian banks and assets owned by 500 Russian citizens and organizations. Japan banned new investments and the export of high tech to the country. Russia's trade status as favored nation was revoked. Japan's swift actions shows its becoming a leading power in the world. The war in Ukraine and threats from China and North Korea caused a shift in Japan's security policy with higher defense spending which erodes its former pacifist stance.


title: History of Japan

text: On 8 July 2022, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was assassinated in the city of Nara by former Japan Self-Defense Force Marine Tetsuya Yamagami while campaigning two days before the 2022 House of Councillors election. This shocked the public, because firearm fatalities are very rare in Japan. There were only 10 shooting deaths from 2017 to 2020 and 1 gun death incident in 2021.


title: History of Japan

text: After 2022 visit by Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, China conducted “precision missile strikes” in the ocean around Taiwan's coastline on August 4, 2022. These military exercises raised tensions in the region. The Japanese Ministry of Defense reported that this was the first time ballistic missiles launched by China landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone and lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing. Five Chinese missiles landed in Japan’s EEZ off Hateruma which is near Taiwan. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said these missiles are “serious threats to Japan’s national security and the safety of the Japanese people.”


title: History of Japan

text: Social stratification in Japan became pronounced during the Yayoi period. Expanding trade and agriculture increased the wealth of society, which was increasingly monopolized by social elites. By 600 AD, a class structure had developed which included court aristocrats, the families of local magnates, commoners, and slaves. Over 90% were commoners, who included farmers, merchants, and artisans. During the late Heian period, the governing elite consisted of three classes. The traditional aristocracy shared power with Buddhist monks and samurai, though the latter became increasingly dominant in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. These periods witnessed the rise of the merchant class, which diversified into a greater variety of specialized occupations.


title: History of Japan

text: Women initially held social and political equality with men, and archaeological evidence suggests a prehistorical preference for female rulers in western Japan. Female Emperors appear in recorded history until the Meiji Constitution declared strict male-only ascension in 1889. Chinese Confucian-style patriarchy was first codified in the 7th–8th centuries with the "ritsuryō" system, which introduced a patrilineal family register with a male head of household. Women until then had held important roles in government which thereafter gradually diminished, though even in the late Heian period women wielded considerable court influence. Marital customs and many laws governing private property remained gender neutral.


title: History of Japan

text: For reasons that are unclear to historians the status of women rapidly deteriorated from the fourteenth century and onwards. Women of all social classes lost the right to own and inherit property and were increasingly viewed as inferior to men. Hideyoshi's land survey of the 1590s further entrenched the status of men as dominant landholders. During the US occupation following World War II , women gained legal equality with men, but faced widespread workplace discrimination. A movement for women's rights led to the passage of an equal employment law in 1986, but by the 1990s women held only 10% of management positions.


title: History of Japan

text: Hideyoshi's land survey of the 1590s designated all who cultivated the land as commoners, an act which granted effective freedom to most of Japan's slaves.


title: History of Japan

text: The Tokugawa shogunate rigidified long-existent class divisions, placing most of the population into a Neo-Confucian hierarchy of four occupations, with the ruling elite at the top, followed by the peasants who made up 80% of the population, then artisans, and merchants at the bottom. Court nobles, clerics, outcasts, entertainers, and workers of the licensed quarters fell outside this structure. Different legal codes applied to different classes, marriage between classes was prohibited, and towns were subdivided into different class areas. The social stratification had little bearing on economic conditions: many samurai lived in poverty and the wealth of the merchant class grew throughout the period as the commercial economy developed and urbanization grew. The Edo-era social power structure proved untenable and gave way following the Meiji Restoration to one in which commercial power played an increasingly significant political role.


title: History of Japan

text: Although all social classes were legally abolished at the start of the Meiji period, income inequality greatly increased. New economic class divisions were formed between capitalist business owners who formed the new middle class, small shopkeepers of the old middle class, the working class in factories, rural landlords, and tenant farmers. The great disparities of income between the classes dissipated during and after World War II, eventually declining to levels that were among the lowest in the industrialized world. Some postwar surveys indicated that up to 90% of Japanese self-identified as being middle class.


title: History of Japan

text: Populations of workers in professions considered unclean, such as leatherworkers and those who handled the dead, developed in the 15th and 16th centuries into hereditary outcast communities. These people, later called "burakumin", fell outside the Edo-period class structure and suffered discrimination that lasted after the class system was abolished. Though activism has improved the social conditions of those from "burakumin" backgrounds, discrimination in employment and education has lingered into the 21st century.


title: Papal States

text: The Papal States ( ; , ), officially the State of the Church (, ; ;), were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope from 756 until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from the 8th century until the unification of Italy, between 1859 and 1870.


title: Papal States

text: The state had its origins in the rise of Christianity throughout Italy, and with it the rising influence of the Christian Church. By the mid-8th century, with the decline of the Byzantine Empire in Italy, the Papacy became effectively sovereign. Several Christian rulers, including the Frankish kings Charlemagne and Pepin the Short, further donated lands to be governed by the Church. During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly and the pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (which includes Rome), Marche, Umbria and Romagna, and portions of Emilia. These holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.


title: Papal States

text: However, by 1861, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy. Only Lazio, including Rome, remained under the pope's temporal control. In 1870, the pope lost Lazio and Rome and had no physical territory at all, except St. Peter's Basilica and the papal residence and related buildings around the Vatican quarter of Rome, which the new Italian state did not occupy militarily, despite annexation of Lazio. In 1929 the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the head of the Italian government, ended the "Prisoner in the Vatican" problem involving a unified Italy and the Holy See by negotiating the Lateran Treaty, signed by the two parties. This treaty recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See over a newly created international territorial entity, a city state within Rome limited to a token territory which became the Vatican City.


title: Papal States

text: The Papal States were also known as the "Papal State" (although the plural is usually preferred, the singular is equally correct as the polity was more than a mere personal union). The territories were also referred to variously as the "State(s) of the Church", the "Pontifical States", the "Ecclesiastical States", or the "Roman States" (, also ', ', ', and '; , also "" "papal rule"). To some extent the name used varied with the preferences and habits of the European languages in which it was expressed.


title: Papal States

text: For its first 300 years, within the Roman Empire, the Church was persecuted and unrecognized, unable to hold or transfer property. Early congregations met in rooms set aside for that purpose in the homes of well-to-do individuals, and a number of early churches, known as titular churches and located on the outskirts of ancient Rome, were held as property by individuals, rather than by the Church itself. Nonetheless, the properties held nominally or actually by individual members of the Roman churches would usually be considered as a common patrimony handed over successively to the legitimate "heir" of that property, often its senior deacons, who were, in turn, assistants to the local bishop. This common patrimony attached to the churches at Rome and thus, under its ruling bishop, became quite considerable, including as it did not only houses etc. in Rome or nearby but landed estates, such as latifundias, whole or in part, across Italy and beyond.


title: Papal States

text: This system began to change during the reign of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity lawful within the Roman Empire and restored to it any properties that had been confiscated; in the larger cities of the empire this would have been quite considerable, and the Roman patrimony not least among them. The Lateran Palace was the first significant new donation to the Church, most probably a gift from Constantine himself.


title: Papal States

text: Other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. However, the Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the papacy found itself increasingly placed in a precarious and vulnerable position. As central Roman authority disintegrated throughout the late 5th century, control over the Italian peninsula repeatedly changed hands, falling under Arian suzerainty during the reign of Odoacer and, later, the Ostrogoths. The Church organization in Italy, with the pope at its head, submitted of necessity to their sovereign authority, while asserting its spiritual primacy over the whole Church.


title: Papal States

text: The seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the 6th century. Beginning in 535, under Emperor Justinian I, the Eastern Roman Empire – referred to by most historians as the Byzantine Empire to distinguish the Greek-speaking and religiously Byzantine polity based in Constantinople from the Latin-speaking, Roman Catholic Empire ruled from Rome – launched the Gothic War to reconquer Italy. This lasted until 554 and devastated Italy's political and economic structures. Then in 568 the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north, establishing their own Italian kingdom, and over the next two centuries would conquer most of the Italian territory recently regained by Byzantium. By the 7th century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from Ravenna, where the emperor's representative, or Exarch, was located, to Rome and south to Naples, plus coastal exclaves. North of Naples, the band of Byzantine control contracted, and the borders of the "Rome-Ravenna corridor" were extremely narrow.


title: Papal States

text: With effective Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to take on much of the ruling authority that the Byzantines were unable to exercise in the areas surrounding the city of Rome. While the popes legally remained “Roman subjects” under Byzantine authority, in practice the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly equivalent to modern-day Latium, became an independent state ruled by the pope.


title: Papal States

text: The Church's independence, aided by popular support for the papacy in Italy, enabled various popes to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor: Pope Gregory II even excommunicated Emperor Leo III during the Iconoclastic Controversy. Nevertheless, the pope and the exarch still worked together to check the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the papacy assumed an ever-larger role in protecting Rome from the Lombards, but lacking direct control over sizable military assets, the Pope relied mainly on diplomacy to achieve as much. In practice, these papal efforts served to focus Lombard aggrandizement on the exarch and Ravenna. A climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries embodied in the Lombard King Liutprand's "Donation of Sutri" (728) to Pope Gregory II.


title: Papal States

text: When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751, the Duchy of Rome was completely cut off from the Byzantine Empire, of which it was theoretically still a part. The popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the support of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead king Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the title "Patrician of the Romans". Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756. Pepin defeated the Lombards – taking control of northern Italy – and made a gift (called the Donation of Pepin) of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope.


title: Papal States

text: In 781, Charlemagne codified the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to include Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as 'Emperor of the Romans'.


title: Papal States

text: The precise nature of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – is disputed. It was unclear whether the Papal States were a separate realm with the pope as their sovereign ruler, merely a part of the Frankish Empire over which the popes had administrative control, as suggested in the late-9th-century treatise "Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma", or whether the Holy Roman emperors were vicars of the pope (as a sort of archemperor) ruling Christendom, with the pope directly responsible only for the environs of Rome and spiritual duties.


title: Papal States

text: Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict. The Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren. Imperial power in Italy waned and the papacy's prestige declined. This led to a rise in the power of the local Roman nobility, and the control of the Papal States during the early 10th century passed to a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti. This period was later dubbed the "Saeculum obscurum" ("dark age"), and sometimes as the "rule by harlots".


title: Papal States

text: In practice, the popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty over the extensive and mountainous territories of the Papal States, and the region preserved its old system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, each centred upon a fortified "rocca".


title: Papal States

text: Over several campaigns in the mid-10th century, the German ruler Otto I conquered northern Italy; Pope John XII crowned him emperor (the first so crowned in more than forty years) and the two of them ratified the Diploma Ottonianum, by which the emperor became the guarantor of the independence of the Papal States. Yet over the next two centuries, popes and emperors squabbled over a variety of issues, and the German rulers routinely treated the Papal States as part of their realms on those occasions when they projected power into Italy. As the Gregorian Reform worked to free the administration of the church from imperial interference, the independence of the Papal States increased in importance. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. In response to the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Treaty of Venice made official the independence of the Papal States from the Holy Roman Empire in 1177. By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.


title: Papal States

text: From 1305 to 1378, the popes lived in the papal enclave of Avignon, surrounded by Provence and under the influence of the French kings. This period was known as the "Avignonese" or "Babylonian Captivity". During this period the city of Avignon itself was added to the Papal States; it remained a papal possession for some 400 years even after the popes returned to Rome, until it was seized and incorporated into the French state during the French Revolution.


title: Papal States

text: During the Avignon Papacy, local despots took advantage of the absence of the popes to establish themselves in nominally papal cities: the Pepoli in Bologna, the Ordelaffi in Forlì, the Manfredi in Faenza, and the Malatesta in Rimini all gave nominal acknowledgment to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church.


title: Papal States

text: In Ferrara, the death of Azzo VIII d'Este without legitimate heirs (1308) encouraged Pope Clement V to bring Ferrara under his direct rule: however, it was governed by his appointed vicar, King Robert of Naples, for only nine years before the citizens recalled the Este from exile (1317); interdiction and excommunications were in vain: in 1332 John XXII was obliged to name three Este brothers as his vicars in Ferrara.


title: Papal States

text: In Rome itself the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy, dividing the city's "rioni" between them. The resulting aristocratic anarchy in the city provided the setting for the fantastic dreams of universal democracy of Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347, and met a violent death in early October 1354 as he was assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family. To many, rather than an ancient Roman tribune reborn, he had become just another tyrant using the rhetoric of Roman renewal and rebirth to mask his grab for power. As Prof. Guido Ruggiero states, "even with the support of Petrarch, his return to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."


title: Papal States

text: The Rienzo episode engendered renewed attempts from the absentee papacy to re-establish order in the dissolving Papal States, resulting in the military progress of Cardinal Albornoz, who was appointed papal legate, and his condottieri heading a small mercenary army. Having received the support of the archbishop of Milan and Giovanni Visconti, he defeated Giovanni di Vico, lord of Viterbo, moving against Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì, the Montefeltro of Urbino and the da Polenta of Ravenna, and against the cities of Senigallia and Ancona. The last holdouts against full papal control were Giovanni Manfredi of Faenza and Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì. Albornoz, at the point of being recalled, in a meeting with all the Papal vicars on 29 April 1357, promulgated the "Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ", which replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional 'liberties' with a uniform code of civil law. These "Constitutiones Egidiane" mark a watershed in the legal history of the Papal States; they remained in effect until 1816. Pope Urban V ventured a return to Italy in 1367 that proved premature; he returned to Avignon in 1370 just before his death.


title: Papal States

text: During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, notably under the popes Alexander VI and Julius II. The pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church, signing treaties with other sovereigns and fighting wars. In practice, though, most of the Papal States were still only nominally controlled by the pope, and much of the territory was ruled by minor princes. Control was always contested; indeed it took until the 16th century for the pope to have any genuine control over all his territories.


title: Papal States

text: Papal responsibilities were often in conflict. The Papal States were involved in at least three wars in the first two decades of the 16th century. Julius II, the "Warrior Pope", fought on their behalf.


title: Papal States

text: The Reformation began in 1517. In 1527, before the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestants, troops loyal to Emperor Charles V brutally sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII, as a side effect of battles over the Papal States. Thus Clement VII was forced to give up Parma, Modena, and several smaller territories. A generation later the armies of King Philip II of Spain defeated those of Pope Paul IV over the same issues.


title: Papal States

text: This period saw a gradual revival of the pope's temporal power in the Papal States. Throughout the 16th century, virtually independent fiefs such as Rimini (a possession of the Malatesta family) were brought back under Papal control. In 1512 the state of the church annexed Parma and Piacenza, which in 1545 became an independent ducate under an illegitimate son of Pope Paul III. This process culminated in the reclaiming of the Duchy of Ferrara in 1598, and the Duchy of Urbino in 1631.


title: Papal States

text: At its greatest extent, in the 18th century, the Papal States included most of central Italy – Latium, Umbria, Marche and the Legations of Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna extending north into the Romagna. It also included the small enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger Comtat Venaissin around Avignon in southern France.


title: Papal States

text: The French Revolution affected the temporal territories of the Papacy as well as the Roman Church in general. In 1791 an election in Comtat Venaissin and Avignon was followed by occupation by Revolutionary France. Later, with the French invasion of Italy in 1796, the Legations (the Papal States' northern territories) were seized and became part of the Cisalpine Republic.


title: Papal States

text: Two years later, French forces invaded the remaining area of the Papal States, and in February 1798 General Louis-Alexandre Berthier declared a Roman Republic. Pope Pius VI fled from Rome to Siena and died in exile in Valence in 1799. The French Consulate restored the Papal States in June 1800, and the newly elected Pope Pius VII took up residence in Rome, but in 1808 the French Empire under Napoleon invaded again, and this time on 17 May 1809 the remainder of the States of the Church were annexed to France, forming the "départements" of "Tibre" and "Trasimène".


title: Papal States

text: Following the fall of the Napoleonic system in 1814, the Congress of Vienna formally restored the Italian territories of the Papal States, but not the Comtat Venaissin or Avignon, to Vatican control.


title: Papal States

text: Upon restitution of sovereignty to the Papal States, Pius VII decided to abolish feudalism, transforming all the noble titles (temporarily abolished during the Napoleonic occupation) into honorifics disconnected from territorial privileges. In 1853, Pius IX put an end to the centuries-old duality between the papal nobility and the Roman baronial families by equating the civic patriciate of the city of Rome with the nobility created by the Pope.


title: Papal States

text: From 1814 until the death of Pope Gregory XVI in 1846, the popes followed a reactionary policy in the Papal States. For instance, the city of Rome maintained the last Jewish ghetto in Western Europe. There were hopes that this would change when Pope Pius IX (in office 1846–1878) succeeded Gregory XVI and began to introduce liberal reforms.


title: Papal States

text: Italian nationalism had been stoked during the Napoleonic period but dashed by the settlement of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which sought to restore the pre-Napoleonic conditions: most of northern Italy was under the rule of junior branches of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. The Papal States in central Italy and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south were both restored. Popular opposition to the reconstituted and corrupt clerical government led to numerous revolts, which were suppressed by the intervention of the Austrian army.


title: Papal States

text: The nationalist and liberal revolutions of 1848 affected much of Europe. In February 1849 a Roman Republic was declared, and the hitherto liberally-inclined Pope Pius IX had to flee the city. The revolution was suppressed with French help in 1849 and Pius IX switched to a conservative line of government. Until his return to Rome in 1850, the Papal States were governed by a group of cardinals known as the Red Triumvirate.


title: Papal States

text: As a result of the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859, Sardinia-Piedmont annexed Lombardy, while Giuseppe Garibaldi overthrew the Bourbon monarchy in the south. Afraid that Garibaldi would set up a republican government, the Piedmont government petitioned French Emperor Napoleon III for permission to send troops through the Papal States to gain control of the south. This was granted on the condition that Rome be left undisturbed.


title: Papal States

text: In 1860, with much of the region already in rebellion against Papal rule, Sardinia-Piedmont conquered the eastern two-thirds of the Papal States and cemented its hold on the south. Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento and Pontecorvo were all formally annexed by November of the same year. While considerably reduced, the Papal States nevertheless still covered the Latium and large areas northwest of Rome.


title: Papal States

text: A unified Kingdom of Italy was declared and in March 1861 the first Italian parliament, which met in Turin, the old capital of Piedmont, declared Rome the capital of the new Kingdom. However, the Italian government could not take possession of the city because a French garrison in Rome protected Pope Pius IX.


title: Papal States

text: The opportunity for the Kingdom of Italy to eliminate the Papal States came in 1870; the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July prompted Napoleon III to recall his garrison from Rome and the collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan deprived Rome of its French protector.


title: Papal States

text: King Victor Emmanuel II at first aimed at a peaceful conquest of the city and proposed sending troops into Rome, under the guise of offering protection to the pope. When the pope refused, Italy declared war on 10 September 1870, and the Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the frontier of the papal territory on September 11 and advanced slowly toward Rome.


title: Papal States

text: The Italian Army reached the Aurelian Walls on September 19 and placed Rome under a state of siege. Although the pope's tiny army was incapable of defending the city, Pius IX ordered it to put up more than token resistance to emphasize that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. This incidentally served the purposes of the Italian State and gave rise to the myth of the Breach of Porta Pia, in reality, a tame affair involving a cannonade at close range that demolished a 1600-year-old wall in poor repair. The defence of Rome was not however bloodless, with 12 dead and 47 wounded amongst the Papal forces and 32 dead plus 145 wounded of the Italian troops.


title: Papal States

text: Pope Pius IX ordered the commander of the papal forces to limit the defence of the city in order to avoid bloodshed. The city was captured on 20 September 1870. Rome and what was left of the Papal States were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy as a result of a plebiscite the following October. This marked the definite end of the Papal States.


title: Papal States

text: Despite the fact that the traditionally Catholic powers did not come to the pope's aid, the papacy rejected the 1871 "Law of Guarantees" and any substantial accommodation with the Italian Kingdom, especially any proposal which required the pope to become an Italian subject. Instead, the papacy confined itself (see Prisoner in the Vatican) to the Apostolic Palace and adjacent buildings in the loop of the ancient fortifications known as the Leonine City, on Vatican Hill. From there it maintained a number of features pertaining to sovereignty, such as diplomatic relations since in canon law these were inherent in the papacy.


title: Papal States

text: In the 1920s, the papacy – then under Pius XI – renounced the bulk of the Papal States. The Lateran Treaty with Italy (then ruled by the National Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini) was signed on 11 February 1929, creating the State of the Vatican City, forming the sovereign territory of the Holy See, which was also indemnified to some degree for loss of territory.


title: Papal States

text: As the plural name Papal States indicates, the various regional components retained their identity under papal rule. The pope was represented in each province by a governor, who bore one of a number of titles. These included "papal legate", as in the former principality of Benevento, or at Bologna, in Romagna, and the March of Ancona; and "papal delegate", as in the former duchy of Pontecorvo and in the Campagne and Maritime Province. Other titles like "Papal Vicar", "Vicar General", and also several titles of nobility, such as "count" or even "prince" were used. However, throughout the history of the Papal States, many warlords and even bandit chieftains controlled cities and small duchies without having received any title from the Pope of the day.


title: Papal States

text: Historically the Papal States maintained military forces composed of volunteers and mercenaries, including Catholic military orders. Between 1860 and 1870 the Papal Army ("Esercito Pontificio" in Italian) comprised two regiments of locally recruited Italian infantry, two Swiss regiments and a battalion of Irish volunteers, plus artillery and dragoons.


title: Papal States

text: In 1861 an international Catholic volunteer corps, called Papal Zouaves after a kind of French colonial native Algerian infantry, and imitating their uniform type, was created. Predominantly made up of Dutch, French and Belgian volunteers, this corps saw service against Garibaldi's Redshirts, Italian patriots, and finally the forces of the newly united Italy.


title: Papal States

text: The Papal Army was disbanded in 1870, leaving only the Palatine Guard, which was itself disbanded on 14 September 1970 by Pope Paul VI; the Noble Guard, which also disbanded in 1970; and the Swiss Guard, which continues to serve both as a ceremonial unit at the Vatican and as the pope's protective force.


title: Papal States

text: A small Papal Navy was also maintained, based at Civitavecchia on the west coast and Ancona on the east. With the fall of the Papal States in 1870, the last ships of the flotilla were sailed to France, where they were sold after the death of Pius IX.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.


title: Mel Blanc

text: However, he became known worldwide for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and numerous other characters from the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble and Dino on "The Flintstones", Mr. Spacely on "The Jetsons", Secret Squirrel on "Secret Squirrel", and Captain Caveman on "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels".


title: Mel Blanc

text: Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry, and as one of the greatest voice actors of all time.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing "shtick" in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program "The Hoot Owls", where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his "Cobweb and Nuts" show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined "The Johnny Murray Show", but the following year switched to CBS Radio and "The Joe Penner Show".


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show "The Jack Benny Program" in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.


title: Mel Blanc

text: "Radio Daily" magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on "The Jack Benny Program" led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, "The Mel Blanc Show", which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as "The Abbott and Costello Show", the Happy Postman on "Burns and Allen", and as August Moon on "Point Sublime". During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including "G.I. Journal". Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".


title: Mel Blanc

text: In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined , which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was "Picador Porky" (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in "Porky's Duck Hunt", which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in "A Wild Hare" (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.


title: Mel Blanc

text: In Disney's "Pinocchio", Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the "Woody Woodpecker" cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.


title: Mel Blanc

text: During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact ("Book Revue" and "Baby Bottleneck" are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.


title: Mel Blanc

text: In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of "The Flintstones" and Cosmo Spacely of "The Jetsons". His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for "Wally Gator" and "The Perils of Penelope Pitstop".


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the "Tom and Jerry" series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of "The Bugs Bunny Show", as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie" (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in "4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny" (1974) and "Holly-Daze" (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.


title: Mel Blanc

text: On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh… just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in "The Flintstones". His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other "Flintstones" co-stars gathered around him. He returned to "The Jack Benny Program" to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.


title: Mel Blanc

text: In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called "Ounce of Prevention", which became a 30-minute TV special.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie", "The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie", "", "Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island", and "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters". His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in "Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports" (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.


title: Mel Blanc

text: In the live-action film "Strange Brew" (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for "" (1990).


title: Mel Blanc

text: On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, was also a voice actor.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.


title: Mel Blanc

text: His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspyness.


title: Mel Blanc

text: A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.


title: Mel Blanc

text: After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films "The Flintstones" (1994) and "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas" (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in "" (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated "Looney Tunes" theatrical shorts; "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat" (shown with "Happy Feet Two") and "Daffy's Rhapsody" (shown with "").


title: Mel Blanc

text: For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.


title: Mel Blanc

text: Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.


title: Rumer Willis

text: Rumer Glenn Willis (born August 16, 1988) is an American actress. She is the eldest daughter of actor Bruce Willis and actress Demi Moore. She has appeared in films "Hostage" (2005), "The House Bunny" (2008), "Sorority Row" (2009) and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019). She portrayed Gia Mannetti in CBS' teen drama series "90210" (2009–10) and Tory Ash in FOX's musical drama series "Empire" (2017–18).


title: Rumer Willis

text: Willis won season 20 of ABC's dance competition television series "Dancing with the Stars." She made her Broadway debut in "Chicago" as Roxie Hart on September 21, 2015.


title: Rumer Willis

text: Rumer Glenn Willis was born on August 16, 1988, at Western Baptist Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, while her father, Bruce Willis, was filming "In Country". She was named after author Rumer Godden. Her mother, actress Demi Moore, hired a cameraman to videotape her birth. She has two younger sisters, Scout LaRue Willis (born 1991), and Tallulah Belle Willis (born 1994), as well as two younger paternal half-sisters from her father's marriage to model Emma Heming, born in April 2012 and May 2014.


title: Rumer Willis

text: Raised in Hailey, Idaho, Willis enrolled as a freshman at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan. In January 2004, she enrolled as a sophomore at Wildwood Secondary School in Los Angeles, California. She attended the University of Southern California for one semester before dropping out.


title: Rumer Willis

text: In 1995, Willis made her film debut alongside her mother in "Now and Then". The following year she appeared in "Striptease" (1996). She has worked with her father three times: in "The Whole Nine Yards" in 2000, "Hostage" in 2005 and "Air Strike" in 2018. She portrayed Joanne in the comedy film "The House Bunny" (2008) alongside Emma Stone, Colin Hanks and Anna Faris. The film was a commercial success, grossing $70 million worldwide. She played Natalie Wilburn in the horror film "From Within" (2008), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 25, 2008. In 2009, she appeared in two films, the slasher film "Sorority Row" and the high school comedy film "Wild Cherry." She won "Breakthrough Performance Female" award at Young Hollywood Awards for her performance in "Wild Cherry." She was nominated for "Choice Movie Actress: Horror/Thriller" at Teen Choice Awards for "Sorority Row". In 2013, Willis landed the lead role of Maya in the drama film "The Odd Way Home". She also appeared in films "There's Always Woodstock" (2014), "Return to Sender" (2014), "The Escort" (2015) and "Hello Again" (2017).


title: Rumer Willis

text: She had guest roles in television shows "Miss Guided", "Army Wives", "", "Medium," "The Secret Life of the American Teenager", "Hawaii Five-0 "and "Workaholics". Willis portrayed Gia Mannetti in ten episodes of the teen drama television series "90210" (2009–2010). In May 2013, "The Hollywood Reporter" announced that Willis will portray Zoe in the fourth season of Freeform's teen drama series "Pretty Little Liars". She was a judge at "Miss USA" beauty pageant in 2014. In May 2015, Willis and professional dancer Valentin Chmerkovskiy won season 20 of ABC's dance competition television series "Dancing with the Stars". From September 21 to November 1, 2015, Willis starred as Roxie Hart in "Chicago" on Broadway. "W" magazine noted that the past six months have been "a major breakout" for Willis." "W" magazine praised "her astonishing routines on the spring season of the show "Dancing with the Stars", which she won with her partner Valentin Chmerkovskiy, that propelled Willis to new heights of fame. It also revealed the actress-singer to be a triple threat."


title: Rumer Willis

text: In 2016, she had a voice role on the stop-motion sketch comedy series "Robot Chicken", in the episode "Yogurt in a Bag." On March 22, 2017, she had a recurring role in the third season of FOX's musical drama series "Empire" as Tory Ash. She became a series regular in "Empire" during the show's fourth season. In 2019, she appeared as a guest co-host in three episodes of CBS' talk show "The Talk".


title: Rumer Willis

text: On February 20, 2019, she was revealed to be "Lion" on the first season of Fox's reality singing competition series "The Masked Singer". "Entertainment Weekly" wrote that "Willis had commanded the stage with her vocal prowess and magnetic presence during the last eight weeks of the competition, proving time and again how powerful and versatile her singing skills truly are."


title: Rumer Willis

text: Willis portrayed Joanna Pettet in the comedy-drama film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019) written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The film has grossed $368.9 million worldwide, with "The Hollywood Reporter" writing that critics had "an overall positive view" of the film, calling it "Tarantino's love letter to '60s L.A."


title: Rumer Willis

text: She has appeared on the cover of several magazines, such as "Page Six", "Prestige" and "Us Weekly", and pictorials for "Vanity Fair", "Harper's Bazaar" and "The Sunday Times". In 2008, Willis ventured into the role of spokesperson for clothing brand Ocean Pacific.


title: Rumer Willis

text: On February 24, 2015, Willis was announced as one of the celebrities to compete on season 20 of "Dancing with the Stars". Her professional partner was Valentin Chmerkovskiy. Her performance during week 1 earned her the highest score of the night (32 out of 40), and her performance during two rounds of competition in week 8 landed her two perfect scores.


title: Rumer Willis

text: On May 19, 2015, Willis and Chmerkovskiy were crowned the season's champions, winning over singer and actor Riker Lynch and army veteran Noah Galloway who took second and third place, respectively. Willis joined partner Valentin Chmerkovskiy and other Dancing with the Stars professionals on the 40-city "Dancing with the Stars: Perfect 10 Tour" during the summer of 2015.


title: Luke Macfarlane

text: Thomas Luke Macfarlane (born January 19, 1980) is a Canadian-American actor and former singer. He is known for playing Scotty Wandell on the ABC television drama "Brothers & Sisters" (2006–2011), RAC Agent D'avin Jaqobis on the Space television science fiction series "Killjoys" (2015–2019) and the romantic lead in a number of Hallmark Channel movies.