Tokugawa peace locked Japan for two hundred fifty years
After Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the shogunal title in 1603 and built a bakuhan order of shogun plus some three hundred daimyo. The Edo period's roughly 250 years of stability stretched to 1868, turning warrior rule into what Edwin Reischauer called centralized feudalism.
Ieyasu reaped what Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi had sown. From his base at the castle town of Edo, the future Tokyo, he beat the western lords on 21 October 1600, handed the shogunate to his son Hidetada in 1605 while keeping real power, and destroyed the Toyotomi stronghold at Osaka in 1615, a year before he died. With war over, samurai became largely redundant and drifted into administrative jobs, codifying their bushido ethic along the way.
Lords were ranked by loyalty. Twenty-three related houses guarded the Tokugawa borders; 145 hereditary vassal houses staffed government posts; and 97 outside lords, former enemies on the fringes, held nearly ten million koku of rice land but were barred from office. A koku was about five bushels, and 10,000 of them were needed to count as a daimyo. Rules governed their marriages, weapons, troop numbers and castles, limited to one per domain, and banned ocean-going ships.
From 1635 lords had to live in Edo every other year, leaving their families there permanently. The processions built a network of roads and inns even though ordinary travel was restricted. There was no national treasury or tax code; historians describe parcellized sovereignty held together by mutual obligations and a bureaucracy of about 17,000 officials, from monthly rotating senior councillors to inspectors who spied for dissent. The emperor kept prestige, lavish palaces and a Tokugawa consort from 1619, but was confined to ritual and scholarship.
By 1639 nearly all foreigners had been expelled, leaving only Dutch traders on Dejima in Nagasaki. Merchants prospered, laying foundations for later conglomerates, and kabuki and woodblock prints flourished in Edo, Osaka and Kyoto. Commodore Perry forced Japan open in 1853, and the Meiji Restoration and Boshin War ended the era in 1868.
Source: Edo period
