Japanese History · Chronicle VIII of XI
江戸 · The Tokugawa Peace
The Tokugawa shogunate, a closed and peaceful Japan, ukiyo-e culture and Perry's black ships.
The Tokugawa ShogunatePolitical
Tokugawa Ieyasu becomes shogun and rules from Edo, founding a dynasty that will hold Japan for 265 years.
From his stronghold at Edo — the future Tokyo — Ieyasu built a system to make war impossible. The great lords were bound by oaths, marriages and hostages, and required to spend alternate years attending the shogun's court. The emperor remained a revered recluse in Kyoto while the Tokugawa governed all.
The Tokugawa OrderPolitical
Ieyasu destroys the Toyotomi heirs at Osaka Castle and issues laws binding the warrior houses to the shogun.
The last threat to Tokugawa rule fell with the great siege of Osaka, where Hideyoshi's son and his supporters perished. That same year the Buke Shohatto set strict rules for the daimyō, and a code for the imperial court reduced it to ceremony. The order that would keep Japan at peace for centuries was now complete.
The Closed CountryPolitical
After crushing the Christian Shimabara revolt, the shogunate seals the country, banning Christianity and foreign trade.
Fearing that Christianity and European ambition threatened its rule, the shogunate expelled the Portuguese, forbade Japanese to leave, and drove the faith underground with savage persecution. Only a tiny Dutch outpost on the island of Dejima kept a window open to the West. For over two centuries, Japan lived apart from the world.
The Genroku EraCultural
In the Genroku years a brilliant merchant culture blooms — kabuki, the poet Bashō, and the pleasures of the "floating world."
Peace made the townsfolk of Edo and Osaka rich, and they built a culture of their own. Kabuki and puppet theatre packed the playhouses, Matsuo Bashō raised the haiku to art, Chikamatsu wrote tragedies of love and duty, and the ukiyo-e print captured the actors and beauties of the pleasure quarters — the exuberant "floating world."
The Way of the SamuraiCultural
Forty-seven masterless samurai avenge their lord and then die by their own hands, becoming a legend of loyalty.
After their lord was forced to take his life, his retainers waited two years, then struck down the official they blamed, and surrendered to face ritual suicide. Their story, retold endlessly as Chūshingura, crystallized the samurai ideal of loyalty unto death, even as such warriors were becoming peaceful bureaucrats in a country long at rest.
The Late EdoCultural
Katsushika Hokusai prints The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the crowning image of the woodblock art of Japan.
Part of his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai's towering wave became the most famous work of Japanese art in the world. When such prints later reached Europe, they helped spark the craze of Japonisme and shaped the Impressionists — a first sign of the cultural power the closed islands would one day project abroad.
The Black ShipsPolitical
American warships under Commodore Perry steam into Edo Bay and force Japan to open to the outside world.
Perry's smoke-belching steamers, beyond anything the shogunate could resist, demanded trade and coaling rights. The treaties that followed ended two centuries of seclusion on humiliating terms. The shock exposed the weakness of the Tokugawa and set off a bitter debate over how Japan could survive in a world of predatory Western powers.
The Fall of the ShogunPolitical
Rebel domains overthrow the Tokugawa in the name of the emperor, ending seven centuries of warrior rule.
The southern domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, rallying to the slogan "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians," forced the last shogun to resign and defeated his loyalists in the Boshin War. Power returned, in name, to the young Emperor Meiji — and Japan stood on the threshold of its headlong rush into the modern age.
