The Tokugawa peace and 'sakoku'
After victory at Sekigahara, the Tokugawa shoguns impose two and a half centuries of peace, strict social order and tightly controlled foreign contact.
- Tokugawa Ieyasu: Shogun — Conrad Totman, Heian International (1983)
- State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu — Ronald P. Toby, Princeton University Press (1984)
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2000)
Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603, ruling from Edo, today’s Tokyo. His heirs governed for 265 years through a balance of power with some 260 daimyō, who had to spend alternate years in Edo and leave their families there as virtual hostages.
- Tokugawa Ieyasu: Shogun — Conrad Totman, Heian International (1983)
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
Society was ordered into samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants, with outcast groups below. Samurai became salaried administrators. Fearing Christianity, which had won perhaps 300,000 converts, and the European powers behind it, the shogunate banned the religion, crushed the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–38) and, through edicts of the 1630s, forbade Japanese to travel abroad and confined European trade to the Dutch at Dejima in Nagasaki.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2000)
- State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu — Ronald P. Toby, Princeton University Press (1984)
Peace brought growth. Edo became one of the world’s largest cities, perhaps a million people by the eighteenth century, with a lively urban culture of kabuki theatre, woodblock prints and haiku. Literacy was high for its time. But by the 1800s the regime faced debt, famine and foreign ships appearing off the coast.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2000)
Japan "closed the country" (sakoku), banning Christianity and foreign travel, and lived in near-total isolation until Commodore Perry forced it open in 1853.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
Ronald Toby and others show Japan was never fully closed: it kept regulated relations with the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, Korea via Tsushima, the Ryukyu kingdom via Satsuma, and the Ainu via Matsumae. The term sakoku was only coined in 1801.
- State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu — Ronald P. Toby, Princeton University Press (1984)
- The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2000)
Why it matters today
Much of what the world sees as "traditional Japan", kabuki, ukiyo-e prints, sushi, haiku, castle towns, comes from the Edo period. So does a lingering sense, debated by historians, of Japan as an island nation that chooses carefully what to take from outside.