The Polity of the Tokugawa Era

by J.S.A. Elisonas , March 27, 2008

Editor's Note: This article was originally written for Japan Society's previous site for
educators, "Journey through Japan," in 2003.

The polity of the Tokugawa era was a multifaceted but comprehensive governmental
organism. That organism is commonly called the bakuhan system, after its key
constituents—the bakufu, a military term meaning “general headquarters” but used
historically for a national government headed by a shogun (hence synonymous with the
word shogunate); and the multiple han, the domains of provincial lords known as daimyo,
“great names.” In this context, the word shogun signifies much more than its literal
meaning, “a general.” It refers to the government’s chief executive, the supreme power-
holder in the state. Another title held by the shogun, “pillar of the military,” reflected the
fact that the government he led was run by members of the military class, that is, by
samurai.

Under discussion in this essay is the bakufu or shogunate founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu
(1543-1616) in the year 1603. Ieyasu was the first of a long line of Tokugawa shoguns.
His hereditary successors, members of the Tokugawa family, exercised ultimate power
over Japan until 1868. Because the city of Edo (now Tokyo) was its capital, the
Tokugawa shogunate is frequently identified as the Edo bakufu, and the period of
Tokugawa rule is often labeled the Edo era. But the shoguns did not rule the country by
themselves. Rather, the bakufu and the daimyo domains or han controlled Japan together.

According to the definition current in the Tokugawa era, a lord was considered to be a
daimyo if his domains had an annual productivity equivalent to at least 10,000 koku of
rice (one koku equals 5.1 bushels). In other words, all daimyo were lords from the
samurai class, but not all samurai lords were daimyo. The daimyo were classified in three
categories according to their relationship with the main line of the Tokugawa family.
Highest in status were the shinpan (collateral) lords, the descendants of the founder
Ieyasu’s younger sons. The existence of these branch families safeguarded the continuity
of the Tokugawa lineage, but their members were not usually appointed to the
shogunate’s governing councils. The daimyo called fudai (hereditary vassals) came from
families that had owed allegiance to their Tokugawa overlord before Ieyasu’s decisive
victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and had risen to prominence in his service.
These were the bulwarks of the bakufu. They were placed in domains that surrounded
Edo or protected other strategic areas of Japan, and were entrusted with the highest posts
in the shogunate’s official authority structure. The tozama (outside lords) were the third
category of daimyo. They were from families that had achieved daimyo status prior to the
Battle of Sekigahara, independently of the Tokugawa, to whom they did not swear fealty
until after that crucial combat. Literally and figuratively, they were kept on the margins
of the shogun’s realm. In a word, the shinpan were of Tokugawa stock. The fudai owed
everything to the Tokugawa. And the tozama were outweighed by the rest of the daimyo
—at the start, in any event; for at the end (as seen in the essay on the Meiji Restoration) it
was the intrusion of a few prominent tozama domains into national politics that upset the
balance of the bakuhan system and led to its collapse.

The daimyo domains varied greatly in size. The largest han, estimated to yield 1,025,000
koku of rice a year, was the domain of the Maeda, a tozama family, with its capital at
Kanazawa in Kaga Province on the Sea of Japan. The rest ran the gamut from large,
province-sized dominions to minuscule enclaves in the territories of more powerful lords.
Their number fluctuated. The names of no less than 603 different han were recorded over
the long course of the Tokugawa period, but no more than 270 or so ever existed at the
same time; at the very end of the era, in 1865, there were 266. Each was in theory a realm
in itself, run by its daimyo from his castle, but all were in actuality overshadowed by the
bakufu. The shogun had the power to make and unmake daimyo. He could move them
from one part of the country to another. He could increase or reduce the size of their
domains. And he could confiscate those domains altogether for a real or perceived
infraction of his rules. As a contemporary simile put it, the daimyo were the shogun’s
“potted plants.”

The material foundations of the Tokugawa shogunate’s predominance within the polity
were military and economic. As noted in the preceding essay, “The Epoch of
Unification,” Tokugawa Ieyasu won the day at Sekigahara and domination over Japan by
mustering the bigger battalions, and the military establishment of his successors remained
numerically preponderant throughout the Edo era. The shogunal family’s direct vassals
(samurai not of daimyo rank) made up by far the largest and—on paper, at least—
strongest armed force in Japan. According to an official survey from the year 1722, some
5,200 hatamoto (bannermen), men who had the right to be received in audience by the
shogun, were on the bakufu’s rosters, and they were supplemented by more than 17,000
gokenin (shogunal housemen), who did not enjoy that privilege. When the numerous
retainers of these samurai, the shogun’s rear vassals, were added, the sum total, if only
according to the popular saying, was “eighty thousand bannermen.” Moreover, the
shogunate’s authority to mobilize the military contingents of all daimyo as it saw fit was
unquestioned; until the 1860s, none of the han dared to contravene that right and oppose
the bakufu overtly.

In large part, the shogunate was able to finance its extensive commitments because it was
the country’s greatest landowner. Immediately after his great victory at Sekigahara in
1600, Ieyasu augmented his direct holdings—at two and a half million koku already the
most extensive and productive in Japan—by confiscating the territories of his enemies.
At one fell swoop, his possessions increased to four million koku. His successors added
to the shogunal demesne (that is, the real property held by the shogun in his own right) by
various means, including large-scale reclamation schemes, over the years. Toward the
end of the Tokugawa bakufu’s first century, in 1697, the annual productive capacity of
the shogun’s granary lands was calculated at 4,346,500 koku, almost 17 percent of the
country’s total. In principle (though not in universal practice, as the principle was not
fully realizable), these lands were managed by daikan (intendants) drawn from the ranks
of the shogun’s own vassal samurai. Although shogunal holdings were concentrated in
the central and northern part of Honshu, they were found throughout the country, being
distributed over forty-seven of Japan’s sixty-six provinces. Additional lands with a
productivity of some three million koku were set apart for the sustenance of the shogun’s
bannermen.

Wealth also flowed into the shogunate’s coffers from the gold, silver, and copper mines
that it exploited directly. What is more, the bakufu directly administered and taxed
Japan’s most important cities. These were Edo, its capital, which grew into a metropolis
of a million people under the shogun’s rule; Kyoto, the ancient imperial city, which
retained its standing as Japan’s cultural capital into the eighteenth century and was also a
great manufacturing center, famous for its silks and other high-quality goods; and Osaka,
popularly known as “the realm’s pantry,” a harbor through which much of the nation’s
agricultural and commercial product was distributed—not to speak of Nagasaki, the
nation’s only international port city.

Just as important were the ritual and symbolic foundations of the shogunate’s authority.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was Japan’s most powerful general but nothing more until 1603, when
he obtained the title of shogun—more formally, seii taishôgun, Barbarian-Conquering
Generalissimo—which was the time-honored attribute of the military leader having
greatest authority. This supreme title was awarded to him by the emperor—more
properly, tennô, Heavenly Sovereign—whose sovereignty over Japan, while it existed in
name only, nevertheless was universally revered, because it was anchored deep in the
myth of the country’s divine genesis. In other words, the shogun obtained his identity as a
secular ruler from Japan’s sacred monarch. In order to demonstrate that the country’s
government would remain hereditarily in Tokugawa hands, Ieyasu resigned the shogunal
title after only two years, in 1605, to the benefit of his son Hidetada (1579-1632); and
Hidetada in turn passed it on to his son Iemitsu (1604-1651) in 1623. The premature
succession was duly ratified by imperial investiture.

Especially these first three Tokugawa shoguns made sure they cultivated the roots of their
institutional legitimacy, embracing but at the same time exploiting the imperial court.
Hidetada and Iemitsu, in particular, are known for their spectacular state journeys from
Edo to Kyoto, where they traveled with a supporting cast of thousands, ostensibly to pay
their respects to the tennô. Ceremony and splendid display surrounded their every step in
the imperial city. No doubt the most elaborate of their extravaganzas took place in 1626
at Nijô Castle, the lavishly refurbished headquarters of the bakufu in Kyoto, where the
retired shogun Hidetada and the ruling shogun Iemitsu were both on hand to host an
extraordinary visit by Emperor Go-Mizunoo (1596-1680; reigned 1611-1629). No
expense was spared on the production. Save for those who had been left on guard in the
Kantô region, the shogunate’s heartland in eastern Japan, practically all the daimyo were
in attendance, having been ordered by the bakufu to present themselves; so this was in
effect a show of allegiance to the Tokugawa staged before the backdrop of an act of
obeisance to the emperor.

Reveling in the aura of majesty generated by the court of Kyoto, the Tokugawa shoguns
showered its denizens with gold, silver, rare perfumes, deeds to property, and other
tangible signs of esteem. But their generosity had a price: They imposed controls on the
imperial establishment. As early as 1615, the shogunate promulgated a seventeen-article
set of “Regulations for the Imperial Palace and Aristocracy,” famously defining the
sovereign’s prime occupation as learning and the arts, and prescribing even such trivial
matters as the seating order at court. Then, in 1627, the bakufu made an issue of the
court’s having failed to follow the “Regulations” in awarding certain Buddhist clerics the
right to wear the purple robes that designated high ecclesiastical rank. Two years later, it
nullified all such awards made since 1615, thereby asserting the primacy of shogunal law
over imperial prerogative. The most intrusive demonstration of the Tokugawa family’s
ascendancy, however, was no doubt the marriage of Shogun Hidetada’s daughter,
Tokugawa Masako (1607-1678), to Emperor Go-Mizunoo. Their child, Princess Okiko
(1624-1696), acceded to the throne in 1629, upon her father’s sudden abdication in the
wake of the “Purple Robe Incident,” and reigned until 1643 as Meishô Tennô, the first
regnant empress in Japan since the eighth century. In short, when Shogun Iemitsu made
his grand progress to the Heavenly Sovereign’s palace in Kyoto in 1634, he came to visit
his niece. Clearly, the Tokugawa rulers had achieved more than mere legitimacy.

Indeed, the shogunate’s founding father, Tokugawa Ieyasu, had been proclaimed a god.
On his deathbed in 1616, Ieyasu allegedly declared that he would manifest himself as a
deity in order to continue extending his protection over the land he had pacified,
commanding: “Let a year pass, and build a small chapel in the Nikkô Mountains as an
oratory where I shall be venerated.” In 1617 the imperial court officially decreed the late
shogun’s elevation to divine status under the name Tôshô Daigongen, “Great Manifest
Incarnation Shining in the East.” His earthly remains were transported to Nikkô, a holy
mountain site about 75 miles north of Edo, where a shrine was consecrated to him on the
first anniversary of his death.

The designation chosen for Ieyasu reflected the syncretic strain in Japanese religion. His
title of divinity embedded him in both the Buddhist and the Shinto traditions, as the term
gongen means an avatar, defined in the Japanese context as a Buddha’s manifestation on
earth in bodily form as a Shinto deity. Ieyasu was identified as the avatar of the Buddha
Yakushi, the Great Physician who cures all the world’s ills. At the same time, he was
venerated as Tôshô Daishinkun, “Great Divine Lord Shining in the East,” a Shintoist
name juxtaposing him with Tenshô Daijin, “Great Deity Shining in the Sky”—that is, the
Sun Goddess Amaterasu, ancestress of the imperial lineage. In time, the scholar Arai
Hakuseki (1657-1725) was to equate the veneration of Ieyasu with that of Heaven, the
ultimate source of ethics and validation of politics, thereby adding a Confucian
dimension and sanction to his cult.

In early 1635, the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, began the construction project that
would within a year and a half transform the oratory enshrining his grandfather’s spirit
into a grandiose mausoleum complex—the Nikkô Tôshôgû—which inspires admiration if
not awe even today as one of Japan’s most stupendous edifices. The pilgrimages
undertaken by successive shoguns who traveled from Edo to Nikkô with great retinues of
daimyo and bannermen were among the bakufu’s most splendid and costly public rituals.
The shogunal and collateral families of the Tokugawa built other shrines named Tôshôgû
in Edo and elsewhere. Following their lead, various daimyo consecrated shrines to Tôshô
Daigongen in their castle towns. It is estimated that no fewer than five hundred shrines,
large and small, in which Ieyasu was worshipped as a deity existed in the Tokugawa era.

Fostering the cult of Ieyasu was not the only area of activity where the daimyo followed
the shogunate’s lead. Far from it, they did so in general. To be sure, their domains were
autonomous in the sense that they possessed the right of internal self-government. Each
han was administered according to its own laws. Each had its own armed force, made up
of samurai who were the daimyo’s liegemen. Each collected its own taxes. Each
regimented its own population. For all that, they did not enjoy political freedom of action.
They operated within a framework defined by the shogunate.

That the han mimicked the bakufu was no accident. The Tokugawa prescribed its model
to the daimyo. The final article of the “Regulations for Military Houses” as revised under
Shogun Iemitsu in 1635 put it in black and white: “In the various provinces and localities,
observance shall abide by the laws of Edo in everything.” First issued in 1615, in
Ieyasu’s lifetime, these “Regulations” told the daimyo that they could not undertake
repairs on their castles or plan to be married without its prior approval; cautioned them
that addiction to sex and indulgence in gambling were the foundations of ruin;
determined what kind of clothing was proper and who was or was not permitted to ride in
sedan chairs; and put the lords under various other constraints and obligations. The
revised version of 1635 additionally instructed them to keep their roads, post stations,
ferries, and bridges in good repair so that there would be no tie-ups anywhere; moreover,
they were prohibited from instituting toll stations or imposing new embargoes.
Conducive to the free flow of trade throughout the country though these regulations may
have been, they were clear intrusions into the autonomous sphere of the daimyo domains.

The most significant of the new regulations of 1635, however, was the one requiring the
daimyo to take turns in attending on the shogun in Edo, which institutionalized the sankin
kôtai (alternate attendance) system. Eventually, this requirement came to mean that most
daimyo spent every other year not in their domains but in the shogun’s capital. Their
wives and children lived in Edo all the time, being in effect hostages of the shogunate. A
daimyo was therefore obliged to lead a double life or, rather, to keep up two
establishments, maintaining both a provincial castle and a metropolitan residence, not to
mention detached villas and other dependencies. As though being required to flaunt his
lordly status in two separate domiciles—his han and Edo— were not wasteful enough, a
daimyo could not do without a large entourage and an ostentatious display on his yearly
journeys back and forth between them. In the case of the more distant domains, this
meant a continuous road show for many hundreds of miles, and was ruinously expensive.

The shogunate did not tax the provincial lords directly. But it certainly found other ways
to bleed them economically. The daimyo were compelled to provide funds, labor, and
materials for the grand construction projects of the bakufu. This was the case from 1603,
the very first year of the shogunate’s existence, when the “great names” were made to
take a hand in transforming Edo from a small town into a city worthy of being called the
shogun’s capital. The ambitious design required reshaping Edo’s topographical contours
to provide space for the townspeople’s residential quarters and simultaneously to clear
ground for the enlargement of Edo Castle, the center of the shogun’s Japan. What was
involved was nothing less than leveling a line of hills and filling in an inlet of Edo Bay.
When work on the castle’s expansion got under way in 1604, the greatest names of
western Japan had the construction of the massive stonework embankments apportioned
to them. The vast citadel was built in stages and not finished until 1638; at one point, no
fewer than 68 daimyo were actively engaged in this project. Edo Castle was but one
example. The bakufu also charged the “great names” with building its Osaka fortress and
a good half dozen other castles, not to speak of such great engineering schemes as the
diversion of the course of the Tone River. At the shogun’s behest the daimyo moved
mountains.

And yet the shogun was not an unmitigated despot. The bakufu was not an autocratic but
a bureaucratic organization. On the whole, it was a prudent master of the realm—
although the best word for its attitude might be “paternalistic.” The shogunate was well
aware of two basic rules of Confucianism, the dominant East Asian political philosophy.
One of those principles insisted that “nourishing the people” was the essential business of
government—that the populace must be guaranteed a secure livelihood. The other
affirmed that natural disasters were portents from Heaven, signaling that society was in
disorder—that they indicated government’s failure to live up to its obligations. When
calamities did strike and its public performance was called to account by that very fact,
the shogunate had to demonstrate that it was indeed the true, legitimate, and fully
sanctioned ruler of the entire realm—earthquakes, typhoons, and the 1732 plague of
locusts notwithstanding. Taking its national responsibilities seriously, the bakufu
mounted relief efforts not only in its own territories but also in those of the daimyo. It
distributed rice in famine-afflicted areas, subsidized flood control projects, and made
loans available to financially troubled domains. On balance, it surely gave as much as it
took. Moreover, it was more than willing to share the task of governing the country with
the han.

To be sure, in that regard it was moved not by benevolence but by necessity. The pool of
competent administrators at the bakufu’s direct disposal, drawn from the shogun’s own
vassal samurai, was large but not limitless. The shogunate could not do without the active
assistance of the daimyo, whose domains after all covered the greater part of the country.
Nothing illustrates this fact better than the bakufu’s practice of entrusting the
administration of the more remote portions of the shogun’s lands to daimyo that were
located in their proximity. At any given time in the eighteenth century, about 15 percent
of all shogunal granary lands were apt to be in the hands of such trustees. In northern
Honshu—rich rice-producing regions such as Echigo Province (now Niigata Prefecture)
— where almost a third of the demesne was located, the proportion of delegated trust
territories was close to 30 percent. Certainly, in the early stages of its existence, the
bakufu aggrandized itself at the expense of the daimyo. But it could never contemplate
doing away with them altogether. It knew that creating a unitary system of national
administration staffed by its own men was an impossibility—there were not enough of
them to go around.
The bakufu conducted its operations through an elaborate bureaucratic machinery. At its
highest level in Edo, two policy-making boards assisted the shogun. The first was the so-
called Senior Council, a group of four or five rôjû (elders) selected from among the
greatest of the fudai, the hereditary vassal daimyo. Such a council had existed informally
under various names from the foundation of the shogunate, but it was not institutionalized
until its duties were defined at the end of the year 1635. This group was charged with
national affairs. Among its major tasks was overseeing the imperial court and the daimyo.
Such important departments as the offices of the kanjô bugyô (commissioners of
finance), which supervised the administration of shogunal domains and storehouses, and
of the several ongoku bugyô (commissioners of distant territories), including the
township magistrates of Kyoto and Osaka, were under the Senior Council’s jurisdiction.
The other key group was the Junior Council, composed of three to five wakadoshiyori
(junior elders), who were hereditary vassals of somewhat lesser stature than the rôjû. This
board, formally instituted in 1662, was in charge of the vast corps of bannermen and
shogunal housemen who staffed the bakufu’s headquarters and manned the guard units at
Edo Castle. The shogun’s physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists, astrologers, Confucian
professors, and the like also came under the purview of the Junior Council. Both councils
may be regarded as the sounding boards of fudai interests.

One official stood above all bakufu councils—the tairô or Great Elder, who was
responsible to the shogun alone. This was a position filled only under special
circumstances, not a permanent fixture in the bakufu’s table of organization. In theory,
the Great Elder was a chief magistrate with extraordinary powers, one who exercised
general jurisdiction and control over the shogunate’s policy, but most of the thirteen men
who occupied it between 1638 and 1866 acted in an advisory capacity. Only one can be
said to have wielded real power—Ii Naosuke (1815-1860), the lord of the great fudai
domain of Hikone on the shore of Lake Biwa, who was appointed Great Elder in 1858 as
the storm clouds of foreign intervention in Japanese affairs were brewing over the
bakufu. Ii Tairô used his dictatorial powers to sign treaties of commerce and friendship
with the United States and four other imperialist countries in spite of the shogunate’s
failure to secure approval from the “heavenly sovereign” in Kyoto; forced the question of
the shogunal succession in favor of his own candidate; conducted a bloody purge of his
political opponents; and for his trouble was killed by a band of super-patriotic rogue
samurai.

The post of soba yônin (literally, “attendant factotum,” usually rendered as Grand
Chamberlain), an office inaugurated in 1681 and held by two or more persons
concomitantly until 1730, was meant to act as a link to assist communication between the
shogun and the Senior Council. Because of their proximity to the shogun, however, some
of the chamberlains acquired more influence than the rôjû. The most notorious case was
Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-1788), the factotum of the tenth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshiharu
(1737-1786; ruled from 1760). Not content with using his favorite to bypass the rôjû,
Yoshiharu introduced him into their midst, appointing Tanuma to the Senior Council
despite his lowly family background. For almost two decades, until he was dismissed and
put under house arrest upon his patron’s death, Tanuma seemed all-powerful. His name
became a byword for corruption, and his bold economic policies were widely blamed for
the crop failures, farmers’ uprisings, and other calamities that plagued Japan in the 1770s
and 1780s. Modern scholars tend to view his bad reputation as a reflection of the ill will
borne toward him by the daimyo—most notably the fudai lords—who resented the
strongman’s pursuit of the shogunate’s interests at the expense of their own.

This is merely a rough outline of the shogunate’s huge administrative apparatus and a
short list of the most important of its thousands of officials. The smaller machineries of
the han in the aggregate occupied additional tens of thousands. These legions of
functionaries were all of the samurai class, men whose hereditary profession, nominally,
was arms. Obviously—as one old warhorse remarked grumpily as early as the 1620s—in
an age of peace the abacus counted more than the sword, the taxman brought home more
than the warrior, and one got promoted for smooth talk rather than rough deeds. In the
course of the Tokugawa era the samurai were domesticated. They retained their
monopoly on the right to inflict violence, but they lost their medieval ferocity.
Bureaucracy, not arms, became their profession.

The daimyo ruled their han by virtue of their investiture by the shogun, the overlord to
whom they were obliged to pledge allegiance before assuming their position as domanial
lords. In exchange for the oath of fealty, and on condition of good behavior, they received
the inestimable benefit of a privileged place in a stable world; for it was under Ieyasu, we
must remember, that the process of Japan’s unification after a century of violence was
completed, and under his Tokugawa successors that the country enjoyed two and a
quarter centuries of peace. Between 1638, when the Shimabara Rebellion was put down
bloodily, and 1863, when two tozama domains, Chôshû (situated on the strategic Strait of
Shimonoseki) and Satsuma (in southernmost Kyushu), were involved in armed hostilities
with foreign powers, there was no military conflict worth noting in Japan. In other words,
the daimyo gave up their freedom of action for something arguably of greater value —
security. They were no longer living in a world of perpetual conflict, as they had been in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period historians call sengoku, “country at war.”

Those lords whose ancestors had crossed the great divide of the year 1600 successfully,
establishing themselves as daimyo in the realm of the Tokugawa, had inherited corps of
samurai assembled by their forefathers in an age of incessant combat that faded into ever
more distant memory as the Edo period progressed. These retainers and their descendants
remained on the duty rosters of the han long after there was anything left for them to do
militarily. They all had to be given at least the semblance of employment. Ostensibly,
they earned their stipends as functionaries in the domain’s administration. For all too
many of these samurai, however, there was little to do administratively, either.

The typical daimyo domain’s table of organization had a complexity akin to the bakufu’s
in form, even if the scope of operations was incomparably smaller and simpler. For
instance, from 1632 on the shogunate employed four to five ômetsuke (inspectors
general) charged with ensuring that daimyo, bannermen, and other shogunal officials
obeyed its regulations. According to official records from the 1660s, the Hirado han—a
small to middling tozama domain located at the northwestern tip of Kyushu—also
employed five inspectors general to make sure that its internal regulations were observed.
As was the case in the bakufu, one of this domain’s inspectors general concurrently
served as its shûmon-aratame yaku (religious inquisitor), an office instituted in the
shogunate in 1640 and replicated in domains from Mutsu Province in the Far North to
Satsuma in the Deep South. Its mission was the complete eradication of Christianity in
Japan. To assist him in the pursuit of that task in the domain’s villages, the inquisitor of
Hirado could count on nine samurai officials called zaizai oshi, “local enforcers.” This
looks like a fine example of an overblown bureaucratic structure.

Surely there was no need to eradicate Christianity where it had never taken root, and that
was the case in most han. But, in fact, if the existence of an anti-Christian inquisition
could be justified anywhere, it was in the Hirado domain. An old pirate harbor, Hirado
had been one of the first places visited by the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier on the mid-
sixteenth-century journey that made him famous as the “Apostle of Japan.” He and the
European missionaries who followed him there had, in spite of suffering many
discouragements, gained a modicum of success in their work of conversion. Even in the
1660s, after half a century of persecution, the domain’s authorities could not be sure that
all traces of the foreign religion had been wiped out. So they stayed vigilant and, indeed,
in this matter they had little choice. The shogunate required them to keep careful watch
for subversive, un-Japanese activities and their alien fomenters.

The persecution of Christianity was initiated by a “Statement on the Expulsion of the

Padres” issued in early 1614 over Shogun Hidetada’s seal but drafted on the orders of
Ieyasu himself. This document defined Japan as the “Land of the Gods and the Land of
the Buddhas.” It stressed, moreover, that the whole realm followed the Confucian “Way
of Humanity and Righteousness.” In other words, Shinto, the spiritual core of the native
tradition, was amalgamated with the sublime elements of the Indian and Chinese
traditions to form the national polity of Japan. This unique polity was under attack, the
shogunate’s decree asserted, by the Christian missionaries—“that notorious band of
evildoers, the padres”—who not only defied governmental regulations but ridiculed
Shinto, slandered Buddhism, and violated Confucian morality. The conclusion was that
under a virtuous ruler—“a recipient of the Mandate of Heaven”—the disseminators of the
“pernicious” Christian doctrine must be expelled or executed.
The daimyo and the regional agents of the bakufu correctly interpreted this decree as an
order not only to rid Japan of the missionaries but also to stamp out the adherents of their
faith. At the time, there were approximately 300,000 Christians in the country. The
priests were harried from the land or tracked down and martyred. Although most of the
Japanese Christians abandoned their religion and were registered as parishioners in
Buddhist temples, those who refused to recant and died for their faith in the ensuing two
and a half centuries of persecution numbered in the thousands. The Christian religion
never died out in Japan, as small communities of farmers and fishermen kept its fading
tradition alive in remote locations, such as the islands offshore from Hirado. Having been
inspired by the regime’s founding father, the deified Ieyasu, the decrees prohibiting
Christianity acquired the character of the Tokugawa shogunate’s ancestral law. Their
inertia was evidently difficult to counteract. They survived the fall of the bakufu by five
years, remaining on the books of the new Meiji government until 1873.
Missionaries were not the only foreigners to suffer under the Tokugawa; so did their
fellow Catholics, the Portuguese traders. These merchants, whose ships had first called at
Kyushu ports in the early 1540s, enriched themselves through their monopoly on the
carrying trade from China, importing Chinese silk to Japan through the harbor of
Nagasaki. Sanctioned by the Tokugawa bakufu, which itself profited from the silk trade
through monopolistic arrangements made with a select group of Japanese merchants as
early as 1604, the Portuguese pursued their profitable activities well into the fourth
decade of the seventeenth century.

Two circumstances doomed the Portuguese. One was the arrival of the Dutch, their
deadly competitors in Asian waters. When the Dutch United East India Company
established a trading factory in Hirado in 1609, a clear alternative to the traditional
relationship with the Portuguese became apparent to the Japanese rulers. The second fatal
factor was that unlike the Dutch, who were guided strictly by the Protestant spirit and did
not proselytize, the Portuguese traders were Catholics who continued to aid the Christian
mission even after it was banned by the bakufu, smuggling priests into Japan and
supplying them with funds and provisions. Intent on putting the foreigners under close
control, the shogunal authorities in 1636 had an artificial island, called Deshima, built in
Nagasaki harbor as a place for isolating Portuguese traders who called at that port.

In the late autumn of the following year, a massive peasant uprising broke out in
Amakusa and Shimabara, an area of Kyushu that had been heavily Christianized in the
sixteenth century. The shogunate blamed the revolt on the pernicious nature of the
Christian ideology. Actually, the mass of the population of that area had fallen away from
the faith years previously as a result of the persecution unleashed among them by a
daimyo who renounced the faith in 1612. The leaders of the uprising used the symbols of
a residual Christianity, availing themselves of the powerful motivating force of
messianism. But it was extortionate local taxation, not a perverse foreign religion, that
drove the farmers to despair and rebellion.

The bakufu mobilized more than 120,000 men, most of them provided by the various
daimyo of Kyushu, to crush the Shimabara Rebellion. The bulk of the rebels entrenched
themselves with their women and children in a castle on Ariake Bay, where they were put
under siege. The Dutch assisted the shogunate’s effort by bombarding the fortress from
the sea. When at length the defense crumbled in April 1638, the survivors were not
spared. The number of the “Christians” put to death in the course of the uprising is said to
have totaled 37,000. But the bakufu’s sense of just retribution cut both ways. The
affected area’s two daimyo were convicted of misgovernment. One of them was
decapitated. The other was deprived of his lands. Mindful of his honor as a samurai, he
committed suicide.

It is clear that the Christian peril was a propagandistic image used by the bakufu to
rationalize its general hostility to foreign—European, Russian, and eventually also
American—influences. Attendant on the Tokugawa peace was the policy of national
seclusion. In the 1630s, beginning in the year 1633, the shogunate issued a series of
edicts that practically eliminated its own nationals’ travel beyond Japan’s borders and
rigorously controlled foreigners’ entry within. No doubt the Shimabara Rebellion
provoked the fifth and final decree in that series, which was promulgated in August 1639.
Denouncing those who continued to abet the Christian cause in Japan in full knowledge
of the illegality of their actions, and pointing to the insurrection of the “sectarian rabble
who plotted evil and were accordingly executed,” the bakufu told the Portuguese never
again to cross the sea in their ships, terminating their traffic with Japan.

The Dutch were permitted to stay in the country. In 1641, however, they were transferred
from their factory in Hirado to Deshima, the place of confinement originally built for
their Catholic rivals. Their presence there, constricted as it was, guaranteed that a tenuous
link with Europe was maintained by Japan even if the Tokugawa shogunate had turned
the realm it ruled into sakoku, a “closed country.” The national seclusion continued until
1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of the U.S. Navy broke down
the walls of Japan’s isolation once and for all, exposing the inability of the “Barbarian-
Conquering Generalissimo” to perform the duty specified by his title. The shogunate took
the unprecedented and, as it proved, fatal step of consulting the daimyo on how to meet
the crisis. Disapproving comments and demands for reform were among the responses
even of the “collateral” lords. Thus Perry opened and the bakufu itself widened the
breach for the pro-imperial zealots and the anti-Tokugawa “outside” lords who were to
bring down the shogunate and the bakuhan system in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.