Edo period

The Tokugawa order rested on a balance between the shogunate (bakufu) and the domains (han), known as the bakuhan system. Daimyō were classified as Tokugawa relatives (shinpan), hereditary vassals (fudai) who staffed the shogunate's councils, and 'outside' lords (tozama) who had submitted only after Sekigahara – among them the great domains of Satsuma, Chōshū and Kaga. The Laws for the Military Houses (1615) regulated their conduct, marriages and castle building.

From 1635 the system of alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) required every daimyō to spend alternate years in Edo and leave his wife and heir there permanently. It bound the lords to the shogun, drained their finances through costly processions and dual households, and turned Edo and the highways into arteries of national life. The emperor and court remained in Kyoto with ceremonial functions under shogunal supervision. Periodic reform programmes – the Kyōhō (1716–1745), Kansei (1787–1793) and Tenpō (1841–1843) reforms – tried to restore finances and morals with mixed success.

Edo society was ordered by hereditary status. The familiar scheme of 'warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants' (shi-nō-kō-shō) is a Confucian ideal rather than a precise description; historians now emphasise the basic division between samurai, who made up perhaps six or seven per cent of the population, and commoners organised in village and town communities, with court nobles, clergy and outcaste groups outside this frame. Outcaste communities such as the kawata (then called eta) and hinin faced legal discrimination whose legacy persisted long after its abolition in 1871.

Samurai, removed from the land, became salaried administrators in castle towns. Villages were largely self-governing and collectively responsible for taxes. Cities grew rapidly: Edo passed a million inhabitants in the eighteenth century, and Osaka and Kyoto each had several hundred thousand. Temple schools (terakoya) spread basic literacy widely among commoners, and a lively publishing industry produced books, maps and guidebooks for a mass readership.

The economy was formally measured in rice: domains were ranked by their assessed yield in koku, and samurai stipends were paid in rice that had to be converted to money. This created a vast market centred on Osaka, 'the kitchen of the realm', where domains sold their rice and the Dōjima exchange traded rice contracts, one of the earliest organised futures markets. Merchant houses such as Mitsui, which opened the Echigoya dry-goods store in Edo in 1673, grew into major financial institutions.

The Five Highways (gokaidō), including the Tōkaidō between Edo and Kyoto and the inland Nakasendō, carried processions, pilgrims and goods through a network of post towns. Agriculture expanded through land reclamation and commercial crops such as cotton, silk, indigo and sugar. Yet the period also saw severe famines, notably in the 1730s, 1780s and 1830s, and thousands of peasant protests (hyakushō ikki).

Christianity was banned in 1614, and after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638 – a revolt of heavily taxed peasants and masterless samurai in Kyushu, many of them Christians – the shogunate required every household to register with a Buddhist temple as proof that it was not Christian. This temple registration system (terauke) made Buddhist temples part of local administration and fixed the family ties to temples that still shape funerals and memorial rites. Some Christian communities survived in secret for more than two centuries.

Neo-Confucianism, especially the school of Zhu Xi promoted by the Hayashi family, supplied the ideology of loyalty and hierarchy. Other currents challenged or enriched it: the Kokugaku (national learning) of Motoori Norinaga sought native values in the ancient classics, Dutch learning (rangaku) introduced Western medicine and science, and popular pilgrimages brought millions to Ise and other sacred sites.

Urban commoners created a culture of their own, focused on the pleasure quarters and theatres – the ukiyo, or 'floating world'. Around 1700, in the Genroku era, the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote for the puppet theatre (bunraku) and kabuki, Ihara Saikaku wrote novels of merchant life and love, and Matsuo Bashō raised the seventeen-syllable hokku, later called haiku, to high art. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints evolved from black-and-white sheets to full-colour 'brocade pictures' in 1765, with masters such as Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.

Samurai and aristocratic culture continued alongside: Noh remained the official theatre of the shogunate, the Rinpa school of Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Ogata Kōrin produced bold decorative paintings, and daimyō laid out stroll gardens such as Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Kōraku-en in Okayama. Porcelain from Arita was exported to Europe by the Dutch East India Company.

Between the 1630s and the 1850s the shogunate strictly controlled contact with the outside world, a policy later called sakoku ('closed country'). Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad, Portuguese ships were expelled in 1639, and from 1641 the Dutch were confined to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki, alongside a Chinese quarter. Relations with Korea ran through the Sō family of Tsushima, with the Ryukyu Kingdom through Satsuma, which had invaded it in 1609, and with the Ainu of Ezo (Hokkaido) through the Matsumae domain. Historians today stress these 'four gateways' and see the policy as controlled rather than total isolation.

In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy arrived in Edo Bay with steam-powered warships and demanded that Japan open its ports. The Treaty of Kanagawa (1854) and the commercial treaties of 1858 with the United States and European powers opened ports, fixed low tariffs and granted foreigners extraterritoriality – terms later known as the 'unequal treaties'. The shogunate's concessions, made without imperial approval, provoked a movement to 'revere the emperor, expel the barbarians' (sonnō jōi), political assassinations and conflict with the domains of Chōshū and Satsuma.

After Satsuma and Chōshū allied in 1866, the last shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returned governing authority to the emperor in November 1867. In January 1868 the court proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule, and the Boshin War of 1868–1869 defeated the remaining shogunal forces. Edo was renamed Tokyo and became the imperial capital.

The Edo period left modern Japan high literacy, an integrated national market, a network of cities and roads, and a large body of administrative and commercial experience that helped the rapid modernisation after 1868. Much of what is now regarded as traditional Japan – kabuki, ukiyo-e, sushi and soba as street food, the townscapes of merchant quarters and post towns – took shape in these centuries.

Its historical image has changed. Once portrayed as a feudal, isolated era that held Japan back, it is now also seen as a period of peace, sustainable resource use and early modern growth. Castles, merchant districts and preserved villages such as Shirakawa-go remain the most visible heritage of the era.