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The primary question was whether conflicts in Japan can be classified as ethnic. If you want a definition, here you are: coethnics recognize themselves as the same "kind" of people. An ethnic conflict is a struggle between mutually recognized "kinds," where the direct competition between the "kinds" is driving everything involved. The groups in conflict will directly reference the underlying cultural or genetic differences (especially material) in identifying the group they oppose. Think slurs here.
The modal ethnic conflict is Israel/Palestine: two self-identified groups competing over specific territory and resources. When one wins, they move the other off the territory entirely. When they win they enforce their cultural habits and obliterate the practices of the losers in any ways they care about.
I'd go so far as to say that NO internal Japanese conflict maps to that, except the conflicts with the barbarians, which the Japanese very explicitly labeled as a conflict between their "kind" and the barbarian "kinds." (Maybe the stuff with the Christians could be labeled as an abortive ethnogenesis.) Japanese conflicts are typically one of the following: jockeying for position under an accepted sovereign power; attempting to overthrow the sovereign power; attempting to create an independent hierarchy parallel to the sovereign power (this never worked outside of the Sengoku period; they all got cleaned up and subdued by the start of the Edo period). One group of elite warriors fights another, vassalage agreements are reordered, anyone who doesn't fit in gets killed, and the village headman starts paying taxes to someone new.
You know what doesn't happen? The people of Satsuma expelling farmers from the outskirts of Kumamoto and settling the territory, destroying the local art and buildings and replacing it with their own. The Japanese do that to the barbarians, sure, but not to each other. Therefore, not an ethnic conflict.
Only somewhat true. Let's start from prehistory and round dates aggressively:
So, adding that up, when was it divided? Maybe in prehistory, but if we start from the appearance of writing, we have around 600 years of general unity with a single period of civil war oriented around who gets to lead the government. Following the appearance of samurai, things get a lot more spotty, but there's a couple of unified governments, and even in the rough times nobody is arguing that one cultural subcategory of Japan should exterminate another. Still, from 1150-1600, you have about 150 years of unity and 300 years of disunity. Following that, you have one (1) more internal war (which I will overestimate as 25 years of serious internal instability) in the 400 years leading to the present and otherwise total unity.
Across this time period, although I have no idea what is sufficient in your eyes to be "meaningfully different" - perhaps it's the Edo-period complaint that the Kantou or Kansai eat their noodles like fucking animals, perhaps not - no people in Japan felt their "meaningful differences" were good reason to start a war. Directly competing ambitious elites certainly had a reason to start wars with one another, and did so frequently, but just as frequently took vassals and intermarried and felt no particular need to enforce one way of producing miso over another. That was the concern of peasants, after all.
The thing that irks me about your initial comment isn't that it implies Japan was ever violent. Certainly it was violent! Certainly there was great discord and strife! Coethnicity is no panacea against human conflict. The second story in Genesis is about someone killing his very brother. What irks me is that it seems to be based on a definition of "ethnic" that has no meaningful subject, or else is based on a representation of Japanese history which is not reflected in reality. The reality of Japanese history, and Japanese conflict, is something I've found deeply interesting, and it has its roots in petty court intrigues and the powerful and chaotic dynamics of feudal vassalage. But there is no ethnic side to these conflicts, and they do not need an ethnic side to be interesting. Trying to color them as ethnic loses the real hue of that history, which is what changes as conflicts cease to be feudal and begin to be ethnic - which, incidentally, is a good description of what happened over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
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