Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868)

Core Idea

After more than a century of civil war, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603. His family ruled Japan from Edo (now Tokyo) for over 250 years, a period of internal peace often called the Edo period. The shogunate controlled the regional lords, or daimyo, through systems such as alternate attendance, banned Christianity, and from the 1630s tightly limited contact with Europeans. Under this peace, cities, commerce and popular culture grew strongly, until foreign pressure after 1853 helped bring the shogunate down in 1868.

How It's Best Learned

Diagram the political structure: emperor in Kyoto, shogun in Edo, and some 250 daimyo domains. Ask how the alternate attendance system shifted power and money toward the shogun. Then test the label "closed country" by listing the contacts Japan kept, such as the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, Korea and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Compare Tokugawa policy toward Europeans with Qing China's Canton system.

Common Misconceptions

• Tokugawa Japan was completely closed to the outside world. (The shogunate restricted contact but kept regulated trade with Dutch and Chinese merchants at Nagasaki and relations with Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Ainu.)
• The four-class order of samurai, peasants, artisans and merchants described how people actually lived. (It was an official Confucian ideal; in practice many merchants became richer than samurai, and many samurai fell into debt.)
• Japan did not change during the Tokugawa period. (Agriculture, cities, literacy and commerce grew greatly, and Edo became one of the largest cities in the world.)

Explainer

You have seen how medieval Japan split into warring domains under powerful lords. By the late 1500s three leaders, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, had reunified the country. Ieyasu won the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and in 1603 the emperor named him shogun. His family kept the title until 1868.

The Tokugawa did not abolish the daimyo. Instead they bound them tightly. Some 250 domains kept their own lands and armies, but the shogun controlled the major cities and mines and decided who held which domain. Under the system of alternate attendance, each daimyo had to live in Edo every other year, and his wife and heir stayed there all the time. Travel with large retinues and the upkeep of two households used up much of a daimyo's income. The emperor remained in Kyoto as a ceremonial and religious figure.

The shogunate also closed off what it saw as foreign dangers. Christian missionaries had made many converts in the 1500s. The Tokugawa banned Christianity and persecuted believers, and after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638 they expelled the Portuguese. The Dutch, who did not try to spread their faith, were allowed to keep a small trading post on Dejima, an artificial island at Nagasaki. Chinese merchants also traded at Nagasaki, from 1689 in their own walled quarter, and Japan kept ties with Korea and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Later writers called this policy sakoku, the "closed country," but regulated contact is a better description.

Peace brought growth. Farm output rose, roads linked the regions, and Edo grew to around a million people by the 1700s. Merchants grew rich in Osaka and Edo, even though official Confucian thinking ranked them below samurai, peasants and artisans. City people enjoyed kabuki theater, woodblock prints and new poetry such as Matsuo Bashō's haiku. Some scholars studied European science through Dutch books.

In 1853 US Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with warships and demanded that Japan open its ports. The shogunate signed treaties it could not refuse. Critics accused it of failing to defend Japan, and in 1868 an alliance of domains overthrew it in the name of the emperor.