Tokugawa Ieyoshi
Tokugawa Ieyoshi held the shogunate through the sixteen years in which it became clear that the settlement of 1639 could not survive, and died three weeks after the proof arrived in his harbour. He succeeded in 1837, in the middle of a famine that had already lasted four years and killed people in numbers the government did not publish. The year he took office a former police official in Osaka, an administrator of unimpeachable respectability who had concluded that the authorities were letting the poor starve to protect the rice merchants, raised a rebellion and burned a fifth of the city. It was small and was put down in a day, but it was led by a man from inside the system, and it frightened the government more than a peasant rising would have. The response was a third round of reform in the manner of Yoshimune - sumptuary edicts, forced dissolution of the merchant guilds, an attempt to order landless people back to their villages, and a plan to confiscate and rearrange the domains around the two great cities. The last of these united the lords against the government, and the whole programme was abandoned in 1843 with its author dismissed. Meanwhile the news arrived that China had been defeated by a British squadron and had signed away Hong Kong, which was read in Japan as a demonstration of exactly what happened to a closed east Asian state that refused to negotiate. The order to fire on foreign ships was quietly softened to an order to give them water and send them away. In July 1853 four American warships entered the bay below the capital, refused to move to Nagasaki, and delivered a letter demanding a treaty, with the promise to return the following year for an answer. Ieyoshi was already dying and did not give one. His government did something no shogunate had done in two and a half centuries: it circulated the American demands to the provincial lords and to the imperial court and asked what it should do. Admitting that it did not know was the beginning of the end of its authority, and Ieyoshi died before the answers came in.
- Lived: 1793 CE – 1853 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
