Japan

1589

The tactic historians credited to Nobunaga for a century, three-stage volley fire at Nagashino, turns out to be a misreading by twentieth-century army generals rather than anything his own contemporaries described.

American commanders at Pearl Harbor were so convinced Japan would strike Wake Island or the Philippines instead that the record says there was no meaningful plan at all for defending Hawaii's own airspace.

2011

1945

1995

2011

1995

Japanese crowds rioted over the 1905 peace treaty believing their unbroken run of victories had earned far more than it delivered, unaware how close to exhaustion their own war effort actually stood by the time the fighting stopped.

The samurai code most people picture, honour, loyalty, ritual suicide, was written up as a bestseller in 1899, three decades after the samurai class had already been legally abolished.

Historians cannot agree on the year the Sengoku period even began, with three separate incidents each argued as the true starting point of a century of Japanese civil war.

Japan's two-century closure was never as closed as the word suggests, and the historians who study it now prefer a different term for what actually happened.

Fought mostly on Korean soil, this eight-month war was decided almost entirely by the two larger powers contesting it, and the surviving record still shows it.

1603