The Tokugawa Shogunate

The last castle standing

formationDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Ieyasu's victory at Sekigahara in 1600 made him Japan's actual master without yet giving him the formal title to match. He waited three years, consolidating his own authority, before receiving investiture as Sei-i Tai Shogun in 1603 - the office Yoritomo had first created four centuries earlier, now passing to a house that would hold it longer than any before it.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kanō Tan'yū (attributed) · Public domain

An heir who would not simply fade away

Hideyoshi's son Hideyori remained alive at Osaka Castle throughout these years, a nominal rival whose mere existence gave any future opposition to Tokugawa rule a name to rally around. Ieyasu, increasingly suspicious of Jesuit priests Hideyori continued to entertain at his own court, eventually resolved the danger the only way that would settle it permanently.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A single day, a hundred thousand dead

In 1615 Ieyasu called out the combined levies of Kyushu and the Kantō and laid siege to Osaka Castle. The fighting on 9 June was ferocious even by the standards of a country accustomed to civil war: by the end of a single day the citadel burned, Hideyori and thousands of his followers were dead, and Jesuit accounts of the campaign put the total casualties, in a war that lasted barely longer than the siege itself, at a hundred thousand men. Catholicism in Japan, one historian later observed, received its death blow in the very same year Puritan pilgrims were landing at Plymouth to plant the seeds of a different religious settlement an ocean away.

Osaka Castle Museum · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A dynasty founded on the last rival's grave

With Osaka's fall, no remaining claimant carried enough prestige or following to challenge Tokugawa authority openly. The house Ieyasu had built through decades of patient alliance and calculated warfare now held the country without a serious rival left standing - a foundation his own successors would spend the following two and a half centuries defending less through conquest than through an increasingly rigid system of control over every domain that might otherwise have threatened it.

Hostages in everything but name

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Ieyasu's son Hidetada spent his own reign chiefly executing his father's plans and consolidating what had already been won. It was Ieyasu's grandson Iemitsu, invested with the shogunal title by the mikado's own hand in 1623, who brought the whole system to the form later generations would recognise as its finished shape - acknowledged, by this account, as the ablest of every Tokugawa ruler after the founder himself.

An honor that hardened into a leash

Iemitsu's signature innovation required every daimyo in the country to spend alternating periods of residence in Edo, initially presenting the arrangement as an honor - the shogun himself would come out to greet arriving lords in the suburbs, and they in turn swore allegiance in ceremonies sealed with their own blood. Over time the obligation tightened steadily, until what had begun as a mark of respect had become, in substance, plain vassalage: every lord's wife and children remained permanently in Edo as hostages against his own good behaviour, whatever province he actually governed.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Tsukioka Yoshitoshi · Public domain

A door closed one plank at a time

It was under Iemitsu's rule that the Shimabara rebellion of persecuted Christian peasants required a two-month siege to suppress, and it was under his rule that the response to that crisis and to decades of missionary activity reached its final form: Dutch traders confined to the artificial island of Deshima, all other foreign commerce excluded outright, and the country sealed against its own subjects leaving as much as against foreigners arriving. A coastline that had once competed to attract Portuguese ships and Jesuit missionaries closed itself, within a single lifetime, into the most isolated major state in the world.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kawahara Keiga · CC BY-SA 4.0

A capital built to be watched over as much as lived in

Beyond the political architecture of hostage-taking and enforced attendance, Iemitsu's Edo grew into a genuinely improved city - new aqueducts still serving it centuries later, watchtowers raised against the fires that threatened any city built largely of wood. The combination proved durable: a capital made safer and more splendid at the same time its system of control over the rest of the country grew harder for any single domain to escape.

What the city swallowed

peakDrafted from Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926)

Under the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi, the money the Tokugawa peace had accumulated finally found somewhere to go, and the years it went there, 1688 to 1704, gave the whole era its name: Genroku.

A merchant who lived more splendidly than a daimyo

Neither the shogun nor his court nor the great feudal houses were hoarding anything. They spent lavishly, on presents, on ceremony, on the constant search for rarities to give each other, and the money landed, in the end, in the hands of the artists, craftsmen and merchants who supplied it. Lacquerware, sword-furniture, painting and every branch of decorative craft reached a level of refinement the era is still named for. Some merchants grew richer than the nobility they served: Kii-no-Kuniya's establishment at the entrance to Ueno covered a whole city block, its private quarters said to outshine any daimyo's residence in Edo, until his own extravagance drew the authorities' attention and his fortune was confiscated outright. Yodoya of Osaka met the same end in 1707 - stripped of a fortune that included two hundred acres of rice land merchants were legally forbidden to own, gold and silver objects, tea equipage, and cash and bullion worth something over two hundred thousand pounds sterling by contemporary reckoning. The great commercial houses that still mattered two centuries later - Mitsui, Sumitomo, Konoike - were all established and already prospering in these same years.

Where the money did not go

It did not go to the people who grew the rice everyone else's wealth ultimately rested on. The cultivator's position, already poor, grew worse through Tsunayoshi's reign: new taxes on produce that had once gone untaxed, corvée labour that had once carried partial payment now demanded for nothing, and land that had once been reclaimed for cultivation now falling out of use rather than being extended. Roughly eighty percent of the population lived on a bare subsistence while the shogun, his favourites, the daimyo and the whole hangers-on population of Edo's mansion quarters spent freely on a prosperity built on that subsistence - and accumulated nothing themselves, since what they spent went straight into the same merchant houses growing rich on the other end of the transaction.

A currency debased to cover the gap

The government's own extravagance eventually emptied its reserves too. A generation earlier the koban, the gold coin struck under Ieyasu, had carried nearly eighty-six percent gold. In 1695 the ratio was cut to just over fifty-six percent, the difference pocketed as seigniorage to cover a treasury the court's own spending had drained. Several further debasements followed over the next two decades, of both the gold coin and the smaller silver denominations, managed by officials who had long since stopped asking hard questions of the men above them.

Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926) · As6022014 · Public domain

Genroku is remembered as the high summer of Edo culture, and by every measure of what money could buy and what craftsmen could make, it was. It was also the moment the gap between the city that was spending and the countryside that was paying for it became permanent rather than incidental - a debt the shogunate's finances would spend the rest of its existence trying, and mostly failing, to close.

How many turrets

peakDrafted from Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926)

Yoshimune, the eighth shogun, came to office in 1716 with a preparation none of his six predecessors had matched: as a young lord in his native Kishū he had spent his days hunting and fishing among farmers and fishermen rather than in the classroom, and as a young man in Edo he had wandered its merchant quarters, often with a single attendant or none, until he understood ordinary city life better than the scholars training at the shogunate's own university ever would.

Three questions and no lecture

On taking office he summoned the Great Councillors and asked how much money was in the treasury. None of them could say. He asked how much rice sat in the Bakufu granaries. Nobody knew that either. He asked how many turrets the castle had. Again, silence. Yoshimune said nothing further and let the point make itself: men who did not know the basic facts of what they governed were not fit to govern it, and from that day the Council took the details of administration a great deal more seriously than it had under his two immediate, largely absent predecessors.

A city rebuilt against its own fires

The most visible of Yoshimune's reforms addressed the hazard that had already burned Edo down more than once: its wooden construction and thatch or shingle roofing, which turned any outbreak into a citywide catastrophe once sparks caught the wind. His minister Ōoka Tadasuke ordered thatch and shingle replaced with tile, a change landlords resisted for years on grounds of cost until a run of major fires forced the issue, and organised, in 1718, Edo's first citizen fire brigades - every street required to supply its own night watch and thirty firemen on call. The first recruits, drawn from shopkeepers and apprentices, proved unequal to the physical demands of the work and were replaced within a year by building labourers, whose companies, known by their assigned characters as the i-ro-ha brigades, became a fixture of the city for the rest of the shogunate's existence.

Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926) · Utagawa Yoshifuji · Public domain

A country farmed twice over

The reform with the largest material consequence was land reclamation, pursued with a vigour the previous half-century's neglect had made urgently necessary. By 1750 more than twice as much land was under cultivation in Japan as in the year of Sekigahara a century and a half earlier - something like eleven million acres against five million - and in some years the rice yield under Yoshimune's administration reportedly touched sixty million koku, a figure large enough to strain belief until one remembers that newly reclaimed marshland is far more fertile than land cropped continuously for a century. After Yoshimune, no comparable expansion of cultivated land was ever achieved again; what few later reclamation projects existed in the northern fiefs were offset by arable land going out of use elsewhere.

What the reforms could not fix

None of it solved the structural problem Genroku had left behind. Officials and vassals paid partly or wholly in rice found their fixed stipends worth less as the reclaimed harvests pushed rice prices down, even as merchants who dealt in cash prospered from the same abundance

• an increase in the country's total wealth that impoverished exactly the class the whole system depended on to administer it. Yoshimune's own reign is remembered, correctly, as the moment competent government returned to the shogunate after decades of drift. It is remembered less often as the reign that first showed, in concrete numbers, that a richer harvest and a poorer samurai class could arrive in the same decade, from the same cause.

The famine of Temmei

contractionDrafted from Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926)

Between 1783 and 1787 famine killed something between a million and a million and a quarter people in Japan - more than half again the combatant losses of the Seven Years' War, fought across three continents by most of the great powers of contemporary Europe. It happened inside a country that had spent a century and a half sealed off from exactly the kind of outside grain trade that might have eased it.

An eruption on top of a famine

The disaster had two causes arriving together. Mount Asama erupted in 1783, burying farmland in Kōzuke, Kai and Suruga under feet of ash and ruining that year's entire crop across a wide belt of central Japan; contemporary accounts put the immediate death toll at twenty to thirty-five thousand. At the same time, harvests were failing independently across the north, in Ōshū and Dewa, where government granaries stocked decades earlier under an eighth-shogun-era policy had long since been emptied and never replenished. Only one fief in the whole north, Uesugi's domain of Yonezawa, had kept a reserve of grain against exactly this kind of emergency.

Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926) · Unknown · Public domain

What the regent recorded

The Regent's own account of what followed in the north, preserved and quoted in later chronicles, is the source itself calls it - almost beyond belief:

A trustworthy man, who had travelled in this district, told me that in a village which had previously contained 800 houses there were only 30 left, the inhabitants of the rest all having died... in all the houses he saw bones and skulls scattered about the floor... The price paid for a dog was 500 mon, sometimes even as high as 800 mon, a rat 50 mon. A rare work of art found no purchasers and could not be exchanged for a go of rice. If a person died he was of course eaten by the survivors. Those who died of starvation, however, could not be eaten, because their flesh decayed so soon. Some people, therefore, killed those who were certain to starve and put the flesh into brine so as to keep it for a long time.

The same account records a father who asked a neighbour to kill his own dying son so the flesh could still be eaten, and then killed the neighbour in turn to keep the whole of it for himself. "In these times," the chronicler adds, "stealing and incendiarism were not considered wrong and went unpunished."

Rice riots in three cities at once

By 1786 flooding along the Tone river had ruined the Kantō's own harvest, while drought withered crops in the north with no rain at all. The following year rice prices climbed to three or four times their normal level as dealers, anticipating the shortage, bought up stock from the samurai class itself and held it rather than sell - some of it left to rot, worm-eaten, in storehouses while people ate seaweed in the streets. When petitions asking the city magistrates to force dealers to sell went nowhere, mobs began destroying rice merchants' houses and godowns in Edo on the night of 20 June, and by the 24th every rice dealer's premises in the city had been wrecked. The rioting spread within days to Kyoto and Osaka without any coordination between the cities - the same grievance producing the same response independently, three times over. The government's own officers proved unable to arrest a single rioter; only the autumn harvest and emergency rice imports from other provinces finally broke the crisis, by which point the price of rice had settled at roughly double its pre-famine level and stayed there for years.

What the census recorded

The non-samurai population of Japan stood at 26,010,000 in 1780. By 1786 it had fallen to 25,086,466; by 1792, allowing for a slight recovery, it stood at 24,891,441 - the lowest figure any Tokugawa-era census would ever record. Seven lean years, as contemporaries called them, had erased more than a million people from the country's own count of itself, in a state that had spent a century and a half keeping foreign famine relief, foreign grain and foreign ships alike outside its own sealed coastline.

Punishment from Heaven

contractionDrafted from Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926)

A second great famine struck in the 1830s - six lean years this time, caused by cold, drought, insects and flood in different regions in different seasons, with the same result as before: tens of thousands dead while merchants who held rice stocks refused to sell below famine prices. What made this famine different was who finally answered it.

A police inspector who sold everything he owned

Ōshio Heihachirō had been a police inspector in Osaka, a post he inherited from his father and held with enough integrity to earn the regard of the city magistrate he served under. When that magistrate was recalled to Edo and replaced by a man Ōshio found corrupt and indifferent, he resigned and turned to teaching, drawing students to a philosophy that prized conscience and generous impulse over the rigid, officially sanctioned orthodoxy he had been raised in and had come to despise.

Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926) · Kikuchi Yōsai · Public domain

As the famine worsened through 1836 and into 1837, Ōshio petitioned the city magistrate to act. He was ignored. He sold everything he owned and spent the proceeds on relief himself - a gesture he knew was no more than a drop in an ocean, and one that found no imitators among Osaka's wealthy. In March 1837 he distributed a manifesto titled "Punishment from Heaven" to the city's temples and shrines, accusing the officials of having "no respect for the will of the Emperor" and acting "in utter violation of the laws established by the Tokugawa Shogunate," and organised a rising meant to kill the city's magistrates, seize the castle, and force the merchant houses to distribute their hoarded wealth to the starving.

Betrayed the day before by one of his own men, Ōshio went ahead anyway. He and his followers set fire to their own houses and to grand mansions across the city, inviting the destitute to take what they wanted, before government troops overwhelmed them by weight of numbers. Eighteen thousand houses, eleven hundred storehouses and five bridges burned in the two days of fighting. Ōshio escaped, was tracked down weeks later, and burned the house he was hiding in rather than be taken alive. It was, Murdoch notes, the first time since the siege of Shimabara two centuries earlier that samurai had made common cause with a popular rising against the shogunate - and within a year, similar risings had broken out in Echigo and Mikawa in open imitation.

Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (1926) · Unknown · Public domain

The reformer who imitated the wrong parts of the reform

Ōshio's rising forced the shogunate's ablest minister of the day, Mizuno Tadakuni, to act on what a small circle had recognised for years: that the whole system needed reform on the model of Yoshimune's own Kyōhō measures a century earlier. Mizuno took office in the Great Council in 1834 and spent the following decade rebuilding his own standing through careful, patient management - financing the retired shogun's new palace through voluntary daimyo contributions rather than forced taxes after an earlier attempt provoked bitter resistance, and surviving a bribery scandal within the palace bureaucracy that nearly ended his career before it began in earnest.

When he finally launched his own reform program in 1841, he announced it explicitly as a return to the spirit of Kyōhō. What he actually delivered was something narrower. Where Yoshimune had led by personal example and pressed reform on daimyo and samurai alike, Mizuno was careful never to offend anyone above his own rank, and aimed the reform's full severity at Edo's own commoners instead. Guilds - kumiai, wholesalers, the whole apparatus of merchant monopoly that had controlled Osaka and Edo trade for generations - were abolished outright by edict in 1841-2: no more guild dues, no more wholesale-only trading, prices cut twenty percent by decree and posted outside every shop for inspection. Alongside it came a sweeping sumptuary crackdown, enforced by the city magistrate Torii - nicknamed "the Viper" for his zeal - who closed theatres, story-telling halls and teahouses, forbade women to take samisen lessons, restricted merchants to plain cotton, hemp or spun silk, and had people caught dressed above their station stripped in the street.

What both reforms actually did

The guild abolition, meant to break monopoly pricing, instead collapsed the credit and trust the whole trading system had run on; commercial volume shrank, producers and prices both suffered, and within a decade the merchants of Edo were petitioning for the guilds' own restoration - granted in 1851, though on more open terms than before. The sumptuary crackdown provoked open resentment rather than the moral improvement Mizuno intended, and gave corrupt constables a fresh source of bribes to extort from the very citizens the reform was meant to discipline. Mizuno's own colleagues began warning him the measures were too severe; by late 1843 his allies had resigned or been dismissed, and within a month Mizuno himself followed them out of office.

Ōshio's rising and Mizuno's reform were, on their surface, opposite responses to the same crisis - one an act of despair against a government that would not act, the other the government's own belated attempt to act. What they shared was a diagnosis nobody in power was willing to follow to its conclusion: that a system built on extracting a fixed rice surplus from an increasingly exhausted peasantry, to support a samurai class it could no longer afford and a merchant class it would not tax, had run out of room to patch itself with edicts. The bakufu that faced Perry a decade later was already, by its own ablest reformer's own failure, out of ideas that had not already been tried and had not already failed.

A fickle man at a fixed moment

contractionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Two centuries of enforced seclusion left the shogunate looking, on the surface, at the height of its own power when Commodore Perry's American squadron arrived to force open ports the bakufu had kept closed since Iemitsu's own reign. Beneath that appearance the balance had already shifted: the reigning shogun was ineffective, and the mikado in Kyoto, Emperor Kōmei, made no secret of his own contempt for a shogunate he regarded as a nest of usurpers and for the foreigners it was now being forced to accommodate.

British Museum, London · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Hibata Ōsuke and others · Public domain

A talented domain grooming its own alternative

Provincial domains excluded from real power under the Tokugawa system had spent decades quietly building exactly the kind of administrative and military capacity the bakufu itself was losing. Satsuma in particular, under an energetic prince whose own students went on to lead the coming upheaval, became a centre of manufacturing and intellectual energy whose graduates - men like Saigō and Ōkubo - would shape the revolution more decisively than any single battle did.

A shogun chosen because no one better was available

Successive shoguns after Perry's arrival struggled visibly with the crisis. When the young shogun who had negotiated the initial treaties died in 1866, the office passed to Keiki - a man who had repeatedly declined the position and who, by the account of his own former associates, possessed private virtues but a fickleness that made his actual course of action impossible for anyone to predict from one week to the next. His chief popular appeal rested on nothing more than his opposition to opening additional ports to foreign trade.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A resignation offered under pressure that would not relent

By October 1867 a powerful coalition of samurai and former daimyo - drawn from Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and allied domains - openly urged Keiki to resign and restore government to the form it had held before the shogunate's own founding, seven centuries earlier. The pressure proved irresistible. On 9 November 1867 Keiki tendered his resignation as Sei-i Tai Shogun, a decision that satisfied almost no one for long, least of all the man who made it.

A resignation he could not take back

endDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Keiki's resignation left an uncertain question genuinely unsettled: whether real power would now rest with the Tokugawa house itself, with a council of the great domains, or with the imperial court where it formally belonged. The Aizu clan, the Tokugawa's own most loyal supporters, still guarded the gates of the imperial palace, and the samurai coalition pressing for full restoration had no intention of letting the question hang unresolved for long.

A palace taken by force in the emperor's own name

On 3 January 1868, troops from Satsuma, Tosa, Echizen, Aki and Owari seized the palace gates outright. The court nobles who had surrounded the boy emperor were dismissed and replaced with men loyal to the coalition's own cause, and the purged court issued an edict, in the mikado's name, declaring government restored solely to the imperial throne. The bakufu and the office of shogun were abolished by that single decree.

A second thought that came too late

Keiki's own retainers reacted with fury, and Keiki himself soon regretted a resignation he had already given, wishing himself back in the power he had voluntarily surrendered. He left Kyoto with the clans still loyal to him under the stated aim of calming his followers' anger, but with the real intention of seizing Osaka and cutting the coalition's own communications instead. When the court sent princes to invite him to accept a still higher position within the new government, he agreed - then abandoned the agreement almost immediately, yielding to counsel that urged him to reoccupy Kyoto by force and settle the matter with the sword.

An office that would not be revived

The court refused to let him approach the capital under arms, and the coalition's own forces, positioned behind fortified barriers on the roads leading into Kyoto, made the attempt to reverse the resignation by force a doomed one from the outset. What had begun, in November 1867, as a single reluctant man's decision to step down became, within two months, an irreversible political fact: the office Yoritomo had created in 1192, held by three successive houses across six hundred and seventy-six years, ended with the Tokugawa's own last holder trying and failing to take back the one decision that had already cost him everything.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Tsukioka Yoshitoshi · Public domain