Born in 1542, Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Edo kingdom, which effectively closed Japan to the outside world, between 1600 and 1853. Although he grew up in an era of uncertainty and civil war he managed to become the largest landowner in the country, and by a series of treacherous acts succeeded in seizing supreme power following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, when he defeated the heir of the previous ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He claimed imperial descent and declared himself shogun (military leader), with his new capital in Edo (Tokyo). In 1605 he resigned to ensure the longevity of the new dynasty, and he died in 1616. He had reunited Japan by sheer politicking and ruthlessness, and his successors were able to emulate him only by closing Japan's borders, thereby preventing any contamination from the outside world from seeping in.

One of the founding fathers of Japanese cinema, film director Kurosawa Akira was born in Tokyo in 1910. His work came to international prominence at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, when Rashomon won the grand prize. His 1954 film Shichinin-no-Samurai (The Seven Samurai) was later used as the basis for the epic Western movie The Magnificent Seven. His literary adaptations include Ran (1985, an interpretation of King Lear), and he continued to direct films across a range of genres into old age. He died in 1998.

This British novelist of Japanese extraction was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and came to Britain in 1960. His first novel, written in English, was A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. The narrator is a Japanese widow living in England who has to come to terms with the suicide of her daughter. Her life in Nagasaki at the end of World War II is recalled throughout the book. Ishiguro's subsequent books (after his first two novels) have dealt rather less with Japan, and he is probably now best known for The Remains of the Day which was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins.