1.
Shizuoka Prefecture
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Shizuoka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. The capital is the city of Shizuoka, while Hamamatsu is the largest city by population, Shizuoka Prefecture was formed from the former Tōtōmi, Suruga and Izu provinces. The area was the home of the first Tokugawa Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu held the region until he conquered the lands of the Hōjō clan in the Kantō region and placed land under the stewardship of Oda Nobunaga. After becoming shogun, Tokugawa took the back for his family. With the creation of Shizuoka han in 1868, it again became the residence of the Tokugawa family. Shizuoka Prefecture is an elongated region following the coast of the Pacific Ocean at the Suruga Bay, in the west, the prefecture extends deep into the Japan Alps. In the east, it becomes a narrower coast bounded in the north by Mount Fuji, until it comes to the Izu Peninsula, throughout history, a disastrous earthquake called the Tokai earthquake has hit Shizuoka every 100 to 150 years. On Tuesday, March 15,2011, Shizuoka Prefecture was hit with a magnitude 6.2 earthquake approximately 42 km NNE of Shizuoka City, ISBN 978-0-674-01753-5, OCLC58053128 Official Shizuoka Prefecture website Official Shizuoka Guide
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Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
3.
Gold
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Gold is a chemical element with symbol Au and atomic number 79. In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly yellow, dense, soft, malleable. Chemically, gold is a metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions, Gold often occurs in free elemental form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins, and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the element silver and also naturally alloyed with copper. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium, golds atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher numbered, naturally occurring elements. It is thought to have produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, from the collision of neutron stars. Because the Earth was molten when it was formed, almost all of the present in the early Earth probably sank into the planetary core. Gold is resistant to most acids, though it does dissolve in aqua regia, a mixture of acid and hydrochloric acid. Gold also dissolves in solutions of cyanide, which are used in mining and electroplating. Gold dissolves in mercury, forming amalgam alloys, but this is not a chemical reaction, as a precious metal, gold has been used for coinage, jewelry, and other arts throughout recorded history. A total of 186,700 tonnes of gold is in existence above ground, the world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry. Gold is also used in infrared shielding, colored-glass production, gold leafing, certain gold salts are still used as anti-inflammatories in medicine. As of 2014, the worlds largest gold producer by far was China with 450 tonnes, Gold is cognate with similar words in many Germanic languages, deriving via Proto-Germanic *gulþą from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃-. The symbol Au is from the Latin, aurum, the Latin word for gold, the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of aurum was *h₂é-h₂us-o-, meaning glow. This word is derived from the root as *h₂éu̯sōs, the ancestor of the Latin word Aurora. This etymological relationship is presumably behind the frequent claim in scientific publications that aurum meant shining dawn, Gold is the most malleable of all metals, a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of 1 square meter, and an avoirdupois ounce into 300 square feet. Gold leaf can be thin enough to become semi-transparent
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Silver
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Silver is a metallic element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47. The symbol Ag stems from Latin argentum, derived from the Greek ὰργὀς, a soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. The metal is found in the Earths crust in the pure, free form, as an alloy with gold and other metals. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, Silver is more abundant than gold, but it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is measured on a per mille basis, a 94%-pure alloy is described as 0.940 fine. As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had a role in most human cultures. Silver has long valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many premodern monetary systems in bullion coins, Silver is used in numerous applications other than currency, such as solar panels, water filtration, jewelry, ornaments, high-value tableware and utensils, and as an investment medium. Silver is used industrially in electrical contacts and conductors, in specialized mirrors, window coatings, Silver compounds are used in photographic film and X-rays. Dilute silver nitrate solutions and other compounds are used as disinfectants and microbiocides, added to bandages and wound-dressings, catheters. Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to its two neighbours in group 11 of the periodic table, copper and gold. This distinctive electron configuration, with an electron in the highest occupied s subshell over a filled d subshell. Silver is a soft, ductile and malleable transition metal. Silver crystallizes in a cubic lattice with bulk coordination number 12. Unlike metals with incomplete d-shells, metallic bonds in silver are lacking a covalent character and are relatively weak and this observation explains the low hardness and high ductility of single crystals of silver. Silver has a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a polish. Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminium at all wavelengths longer than ~450 nm, at wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silvers reflectivity is inferior to that of aluminium and drops to zero near 310 nm. The electrical conductivity of silver is the greatest of all metals, greater even than copper, during World War II in the US,13540 tons of silver were used in electromagnets for enriching uranium, mainly because of the wartime shortage of copper
5.
Tokugawa shogunate
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The Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the Tokugawa bakufu and the Edo bakufu, was the last feudal Japanese military government, which existed between 1600 and 1868. The head of government was the shogun, and each was a member of the Tokugawa clan, the Tokugawa shogunate ruled from Edo Castle and the years of the shogunate became known as the Edo period. This time is called the Tokugawa period or pre-modern. Following the Sengoku period, the government had been largely re-established by Oda Nobunaga during the Azuchi–Momoyama period. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, central authority fell to Tokugawa Ieyasu, society in the Tokugawa period, unlike the shogunates before it, was supposedly based on the strict class hierarchy originally established by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The daimyō were at the top, followed by the warrior-caste of samurai, with the farmers, artisans, and traders ranking below. In some parts of the country, particularly smaller regions, daimyō and samurai were more or less identical, since daimyō might be trained as samurai, otherwise, the largely inflexible nature of this social stratification system unleashed disruptive forces over time. Taxes on the peasantry were set at fixed amounts which did not account for inflation or other changes in monetary value, as a result, the tax revenues collected by the samurai landowners were worth less and less over time. This often led to confrontations between noble but impoverished samurai and well-to-do peasants, ranging from simple local disturbances to much bigger rebellions. None, however, proved compelling enough to challenge the established order until the arrival of foreign powers. The Tokugawa Shogunate came to an end in 1868 with the resignation of the 15th Tokugawa Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu. The bakuhan taisei was the political system in the Edo period of Japan. Baku is an abbreviation of bakufu, meaning military government—that is, the han were the domains headed by daimyō. Vassals held inherited lands and provided service and homage to their lords. The bakuhan taisei split feudal power between the shogunate in Edo and provincial domains throughout Japan, provinces had a degree of sovereignty and were allowed an independent administration of the han in exchange for loyalty to the shogun, who was responsible for foreign relations and national security. The shogun and lords were all daimyō, feudal lords with their own bureaucracies, policies, the shogun also administered the most powerful han, the hereditary fief of the House of Tokugawa. Each level of government administered its own system of taxation, the emperor, nominally a religious leader, held no real power, this was invested in the shogun. The shogunate had the power to discard, annex, and transform domains, the sankin kōtai system of alternative residence required each daimyō to reside in alternate years between the han and the court in Edo
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Gold mining
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Gold mining is the resource extraction of gold by mining. As of 2015, the worlds largest gold producer by far was China with 455 tonnes, the second-largest producer, Australia, mined 270 tonnes in the same year, followed by Russia with 250 tonnes. It is impossible to know the date that humans first began to mine gold. The graves of the necropolis were built between 4700 and 4200 BC, indicating that gold mining could be at least 7000 years old. A group of German and Georgian archaeologists claims the Sakdrisi site in southern Georgia, dating to the 3rd or 4th millennium BC, bronze age gold objects are plentiful, especially in Ireland and Spain, and there are several well known possible sources. Romans used hydraulic mining methods, such as hushing and ground sluicing on a scale to extract gold from extensive alluvial deposits. Mining was under the control of the state but the mines may have been leased to civilian contractors some time later, Gold was a prime motivation for the campaign in Dacia when the Romans invaded Transylvania in what is now modern Romania in the second century AD. The legions were led by the emperor Trajan, and their exploits are shown on Trajans Column in Rome, under the Eastern Roman Empire Emperor Justinians rule, gold was mined in the Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia, Egypt, and Nubia. In the area of the Kolar Gold Fields in Bangarpet Taluk, Kolar District of Karnataka state, India, gold was first mined prior to the 2nd and 3rd century AD by digging small pits. The Champion reef at the Kolar gold fields was mined to a depth of 50 metres during the Gupta period in the fifth century AD, during the Chola period in the 9th and 10th century AD, the scale of the operation grew. The metal continued to be mined by the eleventh century kings of South India, the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1560, and later by Tipu Sultan, the king of Mysore state and it is estimated that the total gold production in Karnataka to date is 1000 tons. The mining of the Slovak deposit primarily around Kremnica was the largest of the Medieval period in Europe, the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand led to the Second Boer War and ultimately the founding of South Africa. The Carlin Trend of Nevada, U. S. was discovered in 1961, as of 2015, the worlds largest gold producer by far was China with 455 tonnes/year. The second-largest producer, Australia, mined 270 tonnes in the same year, despite the decreasing gold content of ores, the production is increasing. This can be achieved with industrial installations, and new process, placer mining is the technique by which gold that has accumulated in a placer deposit is extracted. Placer deposits are composed of loose material that makes tunneling difficult. Gold panning is mostly a manual technique of separating gold from other materials, wide, shallow pans are filled with sand and gravel that may contain gold. The pan is submerged in water and shaken, sorting the gold from the gravel, as gold is much denser than rock, it quickly settles to the bottom of the pan
