And one of the key factors that allows it to get reunified is that in the middle of the 16th century, Portuguese traders show up, and they introduce guns to Japan. And one daimyo in particular is able to take significant advantage of those guns, and that is Oda Nobunaga. Oda Nobunaga, as I mentioned, was a powerful daimyo, one of these lords who controlled what you can kind of consider to be a county of Japan, and using these guns, he's able to put most of the other daimyos, most of the other lords into submission, and he begins to significantly unify Japan. Now, he is eventually assassinated, and his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, continues to unify Japan even further. When he dies, Tokugawa Ayasu takes power, and he's able to consolidate even further and definitively becomes the ruling shogun of Japan. Now, even though this period that we're entering, the Edo period, and it's named for the castle Edo, from which the Tokugawa shogunate ruled, even though this continues to be a shogunate with a shogun in power at the top, the bakafu system, the reason why this is considered the beginning of the modern period or the early modern period is that Japan was finally unified again. Now, one thing that we will see as we get into the 19th century, as we get into the end of the Edo period, and then you have the Meiji Restoration, where you have imperial rule again, is that Japan is very good at borrowing technology and ideas from other cultures, and then making it their own.