Tokugawa Iemitsu
Tokugawa Iemitsu closed Japan to the outside world and invented the hostage system that kept it at peace for two hundred years. He was the grandson of the founder of the dynasty and the first shogun who had never known anything else; he is said to have told the assembled lords that his father and grandfather had won their position while he had been born to it, and that they were therefore his vassals rather than his colleagues. The claim mattered because it was still open in 1623 whether the shogunate was a permanent government or a temporary victory. He spent his reign settling the question by making rebellion structurally impractical rather than by fighting anyone. The central mechanism was alternate attendance, codified in 1635. Every provincial lord had to keep a residence in the shogun's capital, spend alternate years living in it, and leave his wife and heir there permanently when he returned to his domain. The effect was to give the government a standing hostage from every potentially dangerous house, to consume the lords' revenues in processions and double establishments, and to build, as a side effect, the road network and the commercial economy of the largest city in the world. Nobody had to be coerced; the system made the cost of disloyalty obvious and the cost of loyalty merely ruinous. The other half of his settlement was exclusion. A series of edicts between 1633 and 1639 forbade Japanese to leave the country or, having left, to return, expelled the Portuguese, and confined the remaining Dutch traders to an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour where they stayed for two centuries. The trigger was Christianity, which the government read as a foreign allegiance inside its own population, and the proof arrived in 1637 when a rebellion of Christian peasants held out for months and was ended with the killing of some thirty-seven thousand people. Suspects were thereafter required to tread on an image of Christ to demonstrate that they were not believers. Japan was not sealed - trade with China, Korea and the Dutch continued under licence - but it was controlled, and the control held until an American squadron arrived two centuries later.
- Lived: 1604 CE – 1651 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
