The Tokugawa Shogunate
Tokugawa Ieyasu was appointed shogun in 1603, and his family ruled Japan for 265 years. He had won the decisive battle at Sekigahara three years earlier, where defections mid-battle turned the western coalition into a rout in an afternoon. The settlement he built was designed around a single problem: how to stop the daimyo doing to him what he had done to the Toyotomi. The domains were reclassified by loyalty and physically redistributed, with reliable houses placed between the great western lords and the capital. The alternate attendance system required every daimyo to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his wife and heir there permanently as hostages, which also drained domain finances on the travelling and built the road system and the towns along it. Castle-building was licensed, marriages between houses required approval, and the emperor in Kyoto was maintained in ceremonial dignity and political irrelevance. Christianity was banned after the Shimabara rebellion of 1637, and foreign contact was reduced to a Dutch trading post on an artificial island at Nagasaki, Chinese ships, and the Korean and Ryukyuan embassies. Japanese subjects were forbidden to leave. The result was two and a half centuries without significant war, a population that roughly doubled and then stabilised, near-universal urban literacy, and a merchant culture the samurai code did not know how to classify. American warships arrived in 1853 and the shogunate ended in 1868. The system's own success is part of why it fell: an economy far more commercial than its legal categories admitted, and a warrior class living on fixed rice stipends in a money economy. The domains that overthrew it were the western ones the settlement had been built to contain.
- Year: 1603 CE
- Category: Political
