Tokugawa Shogunate Begins

The Tokugawa shogunate was the military government that ruled Japan from the early seventeenth century until 1868. Its founder, Tokugawa Ieyasu, won control of the country at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and his family held the office of shogun for about 250 years. The period, also called the Edo period after the city that served as its capital, brought long internal peace, rapid urbanization and a distinctive urban culture. It also saw tight restrictions on foreign contact, and its collapse led directly to modern Japan.

Japan had been fractured for much of the preceding century. After the Ōnin War of the 1460s, central authority weakened and regional warlords, the daimyo, fought for territory in what is called the Sengoku, or "warring states," era. Oda Nobunaga began to unify the country, and after his death in 1582 Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed much of the work. When Hideyoshi died in 1598, he left a young heir and a council of powerful regents, among them Ieyasu, who held vast lands in eastern Japan.

Rivalry among the regents split the daimyo into two coalitions. In late 1600 their armies met at Sekigahara, in central Japan. Ieyasu's eastern forces prevailed, helped by the defection of some commanders on the opposing side during the fighting. He redistributed land to reward allies and punish enemies, and in 1603 the emperor formally named him shogun. Ieyasu soon passed the title to his son Hidetada to secure the succession, and in 1615 the Tokugawa destroyed the Toyotomi at the siege of Osaka, removing the last serious rival.

The regime kept power through careful control. Daimyo were classed by their loyalty to the Tokugawa and were often placed to keep watch on one another. Under the system of alternate attendance, they had to spend regular periods in Edo and leave family members there as effective hostages. Society was divided into formal status groups, with samurai at the top. Christianity was banned after growing suspicion of missionaries and the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38. From the 1630s, Japanese were barred from foreign travel, and trade was limited mainly to Dutch and Chinese merchants at Nagasaki, with some contact through Korea and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Historians now prefer to speak of controlled foreign relations rather than total isolation.

Peace and a growing economy fostered merchant wealth, expanding cities, widespread literacy, and the arts of kabuki, woodblock prints and haiku. Yet financial strain on the samurai class, famines and rural unrest weakened the system over time. The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's American ships in 1853 exposed Japan's military weakness and set off a political crisis. In 1868 forces opposed to the shogunate restored imperial rule in the Meiji Restoration, ending Tokugawa power and opening an era of rapid modernization.