Tokugawa Yoshimune
Tokugawa Yoshimune was brought in from a branch family to save a bankrupt government, and did it by making everyone poorer in an orderly way. He came from the Kii house and was never expected to rule; a run of deaths in the main line brought him to the succession in 1716, and he arrived with the habits of a provincial administrator rather than a courtier. The shogunate he inherited was spending far more than it collected, having debased the currency twice to cover the difference. His response, known by the era name as the Kyoho reforms, was austerity pursued for thirty years: sumptuary laws that prescribed what each class could wear and eat, a halt to castle and temple building, cuts to the stipends of his own retainers, and a personal frugality that he made conspicuous because the point was partly theatre. He was more interesting where he was not merely austere. He appointed officials on ability and paid a supplement to men whose hereditary income was too small for the post they deserved, which let talent into a system designed to exclude it. He put a complaints box outside the courthouse that any subject could use, read the contents himself, and founded a free hospital and a fire service out of what he read. He relaxed his predecessors' ban on foreign books provided they were not Christian, which opened the channel through which Dutch medicine, astronomy and gunnery reached Japan and produced the scholarly tradition that made the later opening less of a shock than it might have been. He also promoted new rice land and raised the land tax to a fixed proportion. The cost of that last measure fell where it usually falls. Fixing the tax in a good year made it crushing in a bad one, and in 1732 an infestation of planthoppers destroyed the harvest across the west and south. Perhaps twelve thousand people starved, the price of rice in the capital quadrupled, and the city had its first riot, in which crowds sacked the warehouses of the merchants they blamed for hoarding. He retired in 1745 and went on governing through his son until his death.
- Lived: 1684 CE – 1751 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
