Feudal Japan
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50 free Feudal Japan trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For nearly seven hundred years Japan was governed by its warriors. Emperors kept their thrones, but real power lay with the shoguns, the daimyo who held the provinces and the samurai who followed them. It is one of history's best-known feudal societies, and it left behind castles, legends and a vocabulary that other languages still borrow. This quiz follows the story from the rise of the first shogunate through the invasions, civil conflicts and unification that came after, and on to the long peace under the Tokugawa and its sudden end. Along the way it covers how the system worked, who owed what to whom, the weapons and beliefs of the warrior class, the foreigners who reached Japanese shores, and the theatre, poetry and art that flourished in the cities. The questions suit students revising a unit on medieval Japan or Japanese feudalism, teachers who want a ready-made multiple-choice quiz, and anyone who enjoys samurai history. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word did Japan give the typhoons that wrecked two Mongol invasion fleets in 1274 and 1281?
Kamikaze
Kamikaze means 'divine wind', and the name was revived in the Second World War for pilots sent to sweep an enemy from the seas once more.
Q 02Which modern city was known as Edo when the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan from its castle?
Tokyo
Tokyo means 'eastern capital', a name Edo received in 1868 when the shogunate fell and the emperor moved his residence there.
Q 03Which long, curved sword did samurai of feudal Japan wear thrust through the belt with its edge facing upward?
Katana
Katana were worn edge-up so that a samurai could draw and strike in a single motion, unlike the older tachi, which hung edge-down.
Q 04The forty-seven warriors who avenged Lord Asano in 1703 are known by which word for a samurai without a master?
Ronin
Ronin is written with the characters for 'wave' and 'person', a warrior adrift, and the forty-seven lie buried in front of their lord's tomb at Sengaku-ji.
Q 05Which samurai code of honour did Nitobe Inazo introduce to Western readers in his book subtitled The Soul of Japan?
Bushido
Bushido means 'the way of the warrior', and the word only came into common use around the world after Nitobe's book appeared.
Q 06Which covert agents, trained in Iga and Koga, did warlords of feudal Japan hire as spies and mercenaries?
Ninja
Ninja were known in their own day as shinobi, and the families of Iga and Koga sold their skills to rival daimyo for almost a century.
Q 07Which animals form the famous see-no-evil trio carved at the Nikko shrine where Tokugawa Ieyasu is enshrined?
Monkeys
Monkeys covering eyes, ears and mouth sit over the door of the shrine's stable, a 17th-century carving that made the image famous worldwide.
Q 08Which animals did the Tokugawa shogun Tsunayoshi protect with laws so strict that they earned him a nickname?
Dogs
Dogs mattered to Tsunayoshi because he was born in the Year of the Dog, and his kennels at Nakano housed tens of thousands of strays.
Q 09Which Japanese entertainers, now famously women, were all men when the profession first appeared in the Edo period?
Geisha
Geisha were at first male entertainers; the first woman known to use the title, a Fukagawa dancer called Kikuya, appeared around 1750 and was an immediate success.
Q 10Which English navigator reached Japan in 1600, became a samurai and inspired the hero of the novel Shogun?
William Adams
William Adams was the first Englishman to reach Japan, where Tokugawa Ieyasu made him a direct retainer under the name Miura Anjin.
Q 11Which city stayed the emperors' home for eleven centuries while shoguns ruled Japan from Kamakura and Edo?
Kyoto
Kyoto was chosen as the seat of the imperial court in 794, and its name simply means 'capital city'.
Q 12Which American commodore sailed his Black Ships into Edo Bay in 1853 to force Japan to open its ports?
Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry came on the orders of President Millard Fillmore, and the shogunate that had kept Japan closed fell just fifteen years after his arrival.
Q 13In feudal Japan a daimyo's wealth and a samurai's pay were both reckoned in koku, a measure of which crop?
Rice
Rice was counted in koku because one koku was thought enough to feed one person for a year, so a domain's rating showed how many mouths it could fill.
Q 21Which European traders alone were allowed in Japan during its long seclusion, confined to the island of Dejima?
The Dutch
The Dutch were moved in 1641 to the fan-shaped artificial island off Nagasaki, where they were kept apart from Japanese society.
Q 22Which neighbouring kingdom did Japan's armies invade in 1592 and again in 1597, in the conflict known as the Imjin War?
Korea
Korea was overrun quickly at first, but reinforcements from Ming China and naval attacks on Japan's supply fleets forced the invaders back.
Q 23The word samurai is thought to come from an old Japanese verb, saburau, with which meaning?
To serve
To serve is the root sense, so a samurai was first of all a retainer in attendance on a lord rather than simply a fighter.
Q 14Which school of Buddhism, brought from China by the monk Eisai, won the patronage of Japan's new samurai rulers?
Zen
Zen appealed to warriors through its discipline, and a Japanese saying held that its Rinzai branch was for the shogun while its Soto branch was for the peasants.
Q 15Which theatre form, begun by the shrine dancer Izumo no Okuni, has been all-male since women were banned in 1629?
Kabuki
Kabuki began in 1603 on a dry riverbed, where Okuni's troupe of young women danced; men known as onnagata took over the female roles after the ban.
Q 16Matsuo Basho, the wandering poet of Edo-period Japan, is remembered as the greatest master of which short verse form?
Haiku
Haiku was known as hokku in Basho's day, the opening verse of a longer group poem, and only centuries later stood alone under its modern name.
Q 17Which Edo-period artist included The Great Wave off Kanagawa in his woodblock series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji?
Hokusai
Hokusai made the series in answer to a boom in domestic travel, and it secured his fame both in Japan and overseas.
Q 18The squeaking corridor floors of Nijo Castle, long said to warn of intruders, are named after which songbird?
Nightingale
Nightingale floors chirp as their nails rub against metal clamps, though a sign at the castle says the sound comes from wear rather than design.
Q 19Which religion did the Tokugawa shogunate outlaw, making suspects trample sacred images to prove their innocence?
Christianity
Christianity was tested with fumi-e, likenesses of Jesus or Mary that suspects had to step on; those who refused faced torture or death.
Q 20Travellers from which European country landed on Tanegashima in 1543 and introduced the matchlock gun to Japan?
Portugal
Portugal was home to the two adventurers whose matchlocks the island's lord bought and had his smiths copy, and the guns took the island's name.
Q 24Which upheaval of 1868 ended the Tokugawa shogunate and returned power to the throne under a teenage emperor?
Meiji Restoration
The Meiji Restoration takes its name from the emperor's reign, and his new government set about Westernising Japan.
Q 25Which warlord, the first of Japan's three great unifiers, died in 1582 when a general turned on him at Honno-ji temple?
Oda Nobunaga
Oda Nobunaga was mocked in his youth as the Fool of Owari, yet he was on the verge of ruling all Japan when his own vassal attacked.
Q 26Bakufu, the Japanese name for a shogun's government, literally describes rule from which kind of field headquarters?
A tent
A tent stood for the shogun's role as commander in the field, and it also implied that his office was only meant to be temporary.
Q 27The title shogun shortens sei-i taishogun, a commander-in-chief appointed to lead expeditions against which enemies?
Barbarians
Barbarians here meant the Emishi of northern Japan, who resisted the imperial court, and the title was first granted only for the length of a campaign.
Q 28Which Japanese castle, a World Heritage Site since 1993, is nicknamed the White Heron for its brilliant white walls?
Himeji
Himeji came through the bombing of 1945 intact: one firebomb landed on the castle's top floor and failed to explode.
Q 29Which ritual did the master Sen no Rikyu refine in tiny thatched huts before his warlord patron ordered his death?
The tea ceremony
The tea ceremony took its love of rough bowls and bare rooms from Rikyu, who taught that beauty lies in the very simple.
Q 30Which duellist, said to have won all of his 62 fights, set down his strategy in The Book of Five Rings?
Miyamoto Musashi
Miyamoto Musashi was famed for fighting with a blade in each hand, and he wrote the book in his final years.