Tokugawa Shogunate
The military government that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868, sealing the country off from the world and falling behind it.
For 265 years Japan was ruled not by its emperor but by a hereditary military dictator, and the arrangement worked so well that the country fought no significant war for over two centuries. The Tokugawa shogunate, also called the Edo bakufu, was founded in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu after he destroyed his rivals at the battle of Sekigahara. It governed from Edo, the fishing town that grew under it into modern Tokyo. The emperor kept his court in Kyoto, along with his rituals, his prestige, and no power at all.
The machinery of control
Ieyasu faced the problem every Japanese strongman before him had failed to solve: roughly 260 regional lords, the daimyo, each with land, revenue, and armed retainers of his own. His answer was not to abolish them but to tie them down. Domains were reshuffled so that loyal families sat between Edo and anyone dangerous. Castle building required a license. Marriages between lordly houses required permission.
The masterstroke was sankin kotai, alternate attendance. Every daimyo had to maintain a mansion in Edo, live there in alternating years, and leave his wife and heir behind as permanent hostages when he returned to his domain. The endless ceremonial processions bankrupted the lords, which was the point, and the highways they wore smooth stitched a patchwork of domains into a single national economy. Society itself was frozen into a formal hierarchy of samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, ranked in that order of honor and, in time, almost exactly the reverse order of wealth.
The closed country
From the 1630s the shogunate shut the door on the outside world, a policy later called sakoku, the closed country. Christianity, which had won hundreds of thousands of Japanese converts, was banned and hunted; the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to 1638, a rising of Christian peasants, was put down with tens of thousands of deaths. The Portuguese were expelled in 1639. Japanese subjects were forbidden to leave the country or return on pain of death, and building ocean-going ships was outlawed.
What remained was a keyhole. Dutch traders were confined to Dejima, an artificial fan-shaped island in Nagasaki harbor, watched constantly and allowed a handful of ships a year. Chinese merchants traded at Nagasaki, Korea through the Tsushima domain, the Ryukyu islands through Satsuma. Through that keyhole seeped rangaku, Dutch learning, the trickle of Western medicine, astronomy, and gunnery studied by a small class of Japanese scholars who understood, long before their government did, how far behind the country was falling.
Peace and its price
The payoff was extraordinary. Two and a half centuries without civil war produced the world's largest city, an Edo of roughly a million people, and a commercial society with high literacy, a national road network, and a merchant class rich enough to fund kabuki theater and ukiyo-e prints. The cost was equally extraordinary. The samurai, a warrior caste with no wars, became salaried bureaucrats drawing rice stipends for hereditary jobs. And while Britain built steam engines and iron ships, Japan banned ships that could cross an ocean.
The bill came due in 1853, when four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay and the shogunate discovered it could not make them leave. The unequal treaties it signed under that pressure exposed it as the government that could not defend Japan. Samurai radicals from the outer domains of Satsuma and Choshu took up the slogan sonno joi, revere the emperor, expel the barbarians. The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, resigned in late 1867, and the brief Boshin War of 1868 to 1869 finished the regime off.
The shogunate's long peace shaped everything that came after it. It is why the reformers of 1868 inherited a literate, unified, commercially sophisticated country that could absorb Western technology in a single generation. It is also why they inherited a country with no navy capable of stopping four ships.