I.

Introduction

Edo Period or Tokugawa Period, period of Japanese history that lasted from 1603 to 1867, when the Tokugawa dynasty of shoguns (military dictators) ruled Japan. It is named after the Tokugawa capital of Edo (modern Tokyo) and is also known as the Tokugawa period.

Tokugawa supremacy began with the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, in which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated several rivals for power, and was formalized in 1603 by the emperor of Japan. The period ended in 1867, when the last Tokugawa leader resigned, and was followed by the Meiji Restoration, which restored the emperor to power. Following centuries of civil war, the Edo period brought more than 250 years of peace, prosperity, and progress to Japan. Throughout the period, however, Japan remained closed to outside contact and constricted by a rigid class hierarchy.

II.

Foundation of the Edo Government

In the early 16th century Japan was divided among more than 250 warring daimyo (landholding military lords). Each daimyo maintained absolute control over a certain region, or domain, and thus Japan was administered locally rather than by central authority. One daimyo, Oda Nobunaga, began the process of unifying the country, gaining control of all of central Japan by 1580. Upon Nobunaga’s death in 1582, his former general Toyotomi Hideyoshi continued the process by expanding the unified realm westward and then eastward. Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had gained territory and power as an ally of Nobunaga, emerged as Hideyoshi’s most powerful vassal. Hideyoshi became wary of the potential rivalry and had Ieyasu relocated to the fishing village of Edo in 1590.

Before his death in 1598, Hideyoshi installed a regency comprising Ieyasu and four other daimyo to conduct affairs of state until his son Hideyori was old enough to rule. Ieyasu, the most powerful of the regents, began forming alliances and consolidating power. The others soon challenged his authority, but Ieyasu defeated them in the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. He secured appointment as shogun, a title meaning “military dictator,” from the imperial court in 1603. Although the shogun was in theory the delegate of the emperor, Ieyasu and his successors made every effort to limit the political influence of the imperial court. The court maintained its existence in Kyōto throughout the Edo period, but nearly all authority over national and foreign affairs resided with the shogun.

Ieyasu began fortifying the town of Edo as the headquarters of his bakufu (military government), often referred to in English as a shogunate. By confiscating territory from defeated daimyo throughout Japan and from Hideyoshi’s family, Ieyasu and his followers secured about one-quarter of Japan’s cultivable land. He left many existing daimyo in place, relocated others, and created many more from among his followers, giving them considerable power and autonomy. He appointed his son Tokugawa Hidetada shogun in 1605, establishing the precedent of transmitting the title of shogun through Tokugawa descendants. However, Ieyasu retained actual authority until his death in 1616.

During the early 17th century Ieyasu gradually strengthened Tokugawa rule. By 1612 all surviving daimyo were forced to swear loyalty to Ieyasu. Central authority evolved into the bakuhan system, a combination of the bakufu, which functioned as the central government, and the han, feudal domains under the control of the daimyo. The shogun had direct control over only about one-quarter of Japan’s productive land. The rest was dominated by the daimyo, who maintained their own governments, castle towns, warrior armies, tax and land systems, and courts. Some daimyo domains were holdovers from the period prior to military unification; others were newly created and granted by Ieyasu and his heirs. Imperial mandate gave the shogun the legal authority to dispossess daimyo from their land for rebellion, for misconduct, for failure to produce an heir, or simply to maintain Tokugawa supremacy—a power the shogunate used often in its first century of rule. Other laws issued in 1615 forbade daimyo from building fortifications, sheltering fugitives, or marrying without permission.

To further cement authority, Ieyasu established three categories of daimyo: shimpan (those related to the Tokugawa), fudai (“hereditary vassals”; those allied with the Tokugawa before 1600 or created after that time by the shogunate), and tozama (“outside lords”; those independent since before 1600). The shimpan enjoyed great prestige and held strategic territory near Edo but had no decision-making power in national affairs. The fudai, who had the least independent power, were given the most political authority. The tozama were seen as the worst threat, and many were destroyed or relocated to outer areas of Japan. Although they controlled vast realms and had considerable autonomy in their local affairs, the tozama were excluded from national affairs. In addition, the shogun often placed fudai in neighboring domains to keep the tozama in check and to prevent alliances among them.

Tokugawa supremacy was completed by Hidetada’s son and successor, Tokugawa Iemitsu, who became shogun when his father abdicated in 1623. Tokugawa vassals formed a permanent standing military force in Edo, and hundreds of thousands of client samurai (warriors retained by daimyo) increased the shogunate’s military strength. The shogunate assumed authority over justice, foreign contact, public highways, and religion.

Iemitsu introduced the system of sankin kōtai (alternate attendance) in 1635. This system forced the daimyo to spend half their time in Edo in attendance to the shogun and to leave their wives and children there all the time. Besides securing loyalty, the system drained the daimyo financially; each had to maintain at least two expensive mansions in Edo (one for his heir and one for himself during his stay) in addition to the one castle he was allowed in his domain. The daimyo also had to contribute to vast construction projects in Edo. The system spurred the city’s growth into a national capital and center of commerce.

Despite demands and restrictions from the shogun, the daimyo settled quickly into the centralized feudal system. Tokugawa rule kept daimyo from threatening one another’s holdings, thereby protecting them from one another. They remained virtually supreme within their domains and were not taxed directly. Most owed their status to Tokugawa favor: By the 1650s the majority of daimyo were Tokugawa creations. With no tradition of autonomous action, they had no incentive to challenge Tokugawa supremacy. Most followed shogunal precedents in administering their domains. Because of this, laws and institutions remained remarkably consistent across Japan, especially considering that about 75 percent of the country was effectively ruled by the largely autonomous daimyo.

The shogunate was never strong enough by itself to defeat any large daimyo alliance, but due to fudai daimyo support and mutual daimyo mistrust such an alliance never developed. The fudai, who acted as the shogunate’s senior counselors and other high officials, had every incentive to use the system for their own advantage against the tozama. By the time of Iemitsu’s death in 1651, the bakuhan system had stabilized; daimyo advisers who ruled for Iemitsu’s ten-year-old son, Tokugawa Ietsuna, never seriously threatened Tokugawa dominance.

III.

The Molding of Edo Society

Tokugawa lawmakers devoted equal attention to society below the daimyo level. Following practices begun by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and drawing on ideas of Confucianism (the major source of elite social and political ideas during the Tokugawa period), society was divided into four layers of descending status: samurai, peasants, craftsmen, and merchants. A fifth group, composed of leatherworkers, butchers, and others whose occupations were condemned by Buddhism (the state religion of Japan beginning in the 6th century), became outcasts.

The role of the samurai, who in medieval times had been a true military class throughout the villages of Japan, changed drastically in this age of peace. Although they retained the right to carry two swords (and initially to kill any member of the lower orders who displeased them), the samurai were segregated in wards of the castle towns (administrative headquarters of the daimyo domains) and were employed in bakuhan administration as civil servants and officials. The samurai continued to set themselves apart from the common classes by maintaining a different code of ethics, later known as Bushido, that emphasized loyalty, truthfulness, frugality, and courage.

The shogunate also outlined rules for the classes below the samurai. The peasants were denied weapons, forbidden to leave their lands, and ordered to live frugally and farm diligently to feed their superiors. However, their relative isolation from the other classes and the removal of the samurai from the villages allowed the peasants to organize village life to suit themselves. Because the artisans and merchants lived in the same administrative units, called chō, they were soon merged into a single class, the chōnin (townspeople). The chōnin supplied goods for the daimyo and samurai in Edo and the castle towns.

The Tokugawa leaders sought to regulate the religious lives of their subjects. They recognized the potential for foreign religions, especially Christianity, to threaten their absolute authority and leave the country vulnerable to European conquest. Christianity was therefore prohibited. All Japanese families were ordered to register at a Buddhist temple and to demonstrate that they were not Christian. The Shimabara Peninsula, with a heavy Christian population that included many ronin (masterless samurai) who had lost their place in Edo society, became the site of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 and 1638. Angered by religious persecution and economic restrictions, about 37,000 men, women, and children took refuge in Hara Castle. They held off a shogunal army for several months but were all killed when the castle fell. For the remainder of the Edo period, surviving Christians kept their faith secret due to constant danger of exposure and execution.

Christianity was a major factor in the shogunate’s decision to seclude Japan from the outside world beginning in the 1630s. The Tokugawa feared that foreign ideas and contacts endangered national stability and Tokugawa supremacy. Rules against building large oceangoing ships kept the daimyo from developing naval forces or trading abroad. In 1635 foreign travel was officially forbidden for all Japanese, and the Japanese merchant communities in the Philippines and elsewhere were cut off. In 1639 the Portuguese were banned from trading with Japan. The Dutch were the only Europeans allowed a trading presence, which was confined to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Trade with Korea and China continued, but only under close supervision.

IV.

The Edo Golden Age

Although Tokugawa rule undoubtedly restricted personal and political freedom, by the mid-17th century it had brought Japan more peace and stability than the country had known for centuries. The results were population growth and economic prosperity. Between 1600 and 1720 Japan’s population grew from 12 million to 31 million. The population of Edo grew even more dramatically, from less than 200 to more than 1 million. The economy grew just as fast. Construction of castle towns and Tokugawa official projects created new employment. The growth of cities and the alternate attendance of daimyo at their lavish households in Edo created new consumption habits and more demand for goods and services. Improved highways aided commerce by encouraging trade between different regions of Japan; the most heavily traveled highway was the Tokaido, which connected Edo with the Kyōto and Ōsaka region. The shogunate also issued improved currency, taking control of Japan’s bullion mines to supply gold and silver for coins. New standardized weights and measures made commercial transactions easier.

The new wealth and the leisure of peacetime also brought a cultural flowering in the early years of the Edo period. In the early 1600s artist Hon’Ami Koetsu founded the Rimpa school, which was characterized by its decorative naturalist style and exemplified by artists such as Sōtatsu and Kōrin; the Rimpa school remained influential for more than 250 years. In literature, poet Bashō perfected the short poetry form of haiku, while Ihara Saikaku wrote novels and Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote kabuki plays (theatrical performances known for their brightly colored sets, exaggerated acting, and lively music and dance) for an urban audience. The tea ceremony—the formal artistic service of tea to guests—was systematized by various tea schools, and superb ceramics such as raku ware were made for it. Traditional architecture displayed refined simplicity and was exemplified in the Katsura Detached Palace of Kyōto, completed in 1662. Meanwhile, a new urban culture developed in the cities, centering on theaters and pleasure quarters, or entertainment districts. The last years of the 17th century and the first years of the 18th century were a golden age of culture known as the Genroku period. Artists illustrated and immortalized Genroku culture by using the woodblock print technique to create prints in the ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” style, which portrayed the lives of actors, courtesans, and other inhabitants of the pleasure quarters. See Japanese Art and Architecture: Art of the Edo Period; Japanese Literature: Edo Period.

By the late 17th century the prosperity and growth of Edo Japan were producing unforeseen changes in the Tokugawa social order. The chōnin, or townspeople, who were theoretically at the bottom of the Edo hierarchy, flourished socially and economically at the expense of the daimyo and samurai, who were eager to trade rice (the principal source of domainal income) for cash and consumer goods. Mass-market innovations further challenged social hierarchies. For example, vast Edo department stores had cash-only policies, which favored the chōnin with their ready cash supply.

The rise of the chōnin affected all other levels of society. To increase their incomes and pay off debts, daimyo opened new lands for cultivation and explored new farming techniques, but they also pushed peasants in their domains into growing cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. In the peasant communities, some more prominent farmers became wealthy from the new economic opportunities; however, the less prominent peasants often became migrant laborers or fled to the towns in search of employment. Many samurai, caught between the high prices of merchant goods and the low wages paid by their daimyo, resigned their status to become tradesmen or to pursue more financially rewarding professions.

V.

Instability and Reaction

Tokugawa power grew weaker after the death of Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1651. Later shoguns reacted to changes rather than instigating them, usually attempting to return Japan to early Edo conditions. Iemitsu’s son Ietsuna remained dependent on daimyo advisers, who chose to relax many of the previous restrictions on their fellow daimyo. For example, after 1651 childless daimyo were allowed to nominate heirs without the shogun’s approval. The exercise of this approval had previously been one important means of Tokugawa control. Daimyo also began ignoring shogunal edicts that did not suit them.

Social instability increased during the 18th century. Japan’s limited farmland could not produce enough rice to feed the population, which had grown rapidly in the prosperous early Edo years. Particularly in northern Japan, farmers began growing rice in cooler regions and higher elevations, areas that were not suited to rice cultivation and were prone to delivering poor yields. From 1700 onward the population remained virtually static, as peasants and some samurai practiced birth control and infanticide (the killing of newborn children) to avoid having children they could not feed. Famines took a major toll, especially the famine of 1783 and 1784, which followed the eruption of Mount Asama in central Japan. Volcanic ash choked fields and rivers, ruining nearly all of the crops in many areas. The political impact of these disasters was increased by official Tokugawa Neo-Confucian ideology, which viewed natural catastrophes as warnings sent from the heavens to unjust rulers that their mandate to govern would soon be withdrawn.

Peasant revolts, which had been rare in early Edo times, occurred more often in the 18th century. The peasants did not attempt wide-scale revolution but instead used the threat of rebellion to pressure their daimyo to reduce taxes. The daimyo gave in to this pressure because they feared that they would be dispossessed by the shogunate if their domains showed signs of poor governance or rebellion. Peasant unrest affected the shogunate more directly in 1764, when protests forced the Tokugawa to cancel a pilgrimage to the ancestral shrines at Nikkō.

Some shogunal responses to social change and economic crisis were successful, but others caused further problems. In 1695 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the fifth shogun, issued additional currency that temporarily enriched the shogunate but caused widespread inflation. Tokugawa Yoshimune, who became the eighth shogun in 1716, initiated the Kyōhō Reforms, a strict program of bureaucratic and financial reforms that included control of the commercial economy and protection for indebted samurai from prosecution by merchants in shogunal courts. Yoshimune also tried to reduce the effects of economic turmoil on rural life by controlling interest rates on loans to peasants, preventing the splitting of family landholdings, and even putting a suggestion box for complaints and proposals outside of Edo Castle.

In the 1780s and 1790s shogunal counselors initiated a second conservative reform program, the Kansei Reforms, in response to famines, government corruption, and severe financial distress throughout Japan. Matsudaira Sadanobu, the chief architect of the reforms, incorporated policies similar to Yoshimune’s. These policies reformed shogunal finance and administration, built up food reserves in the countryside, and attempted to return to their villages peasants who had fled to the cities. The Kansei Reforms provided partial and temporary remedies for the worst problems of the era. By the end of the 18th century the Tokugawa regime was on the whole secure and solvent, although it still had not recovered its former preeminence.

VI.

Cultural Developments and New Ideologies of the 18th Century

Despite periodic crises and a general sense that the great days of the Genroku era had passed, Edo culture continued to develop during the 18th century. Harunobu pioneered multicolored woodblock printing techniques in the 1760s, sparking the great era of ukiyo-e printmaking. His successors, especially Utamaro and Tōshūsai Sharaku, perfected his innovations in the 1790s. Beginning in the 1760s poet and painter Buson led a movement to return to the purity of Bashō’s style of haiku. After him, Issa brought haiku closer to everyday life through the use of unadorned language.

During this period, the shogunate was unable to control the proliferation of new ideas and ideologies. Scholars from all classes, and especially idle samurai, turned to historical, scientific, philosophical, and literary research. The shogunate had initially enlisted Confucian scholars such as Hayashi Razan to draft the policies for the founding of the bakuhan system, and Razan’s school became Tokugawa state orthodoxy. However, as the shogunal grasp over national affairs loosened, Confucian study broadened, and new schools emerged among daimyo and samurai that challenged the state ideology.

Western ideas and scholarship made inroads into Edo society after 1720, when Tokugawa Yoshimune lifted the ban on importation of foreign books. The Rangaku (Dutch Learning) school studied Western texts and artifacts from the Dutch trading station at Nagasaki, introducing Western medicine and other foreign ideas to Japan. Meanwhile, the Kokugaku (National Learning) school concentrated on Japan’s pre-Tokugawa literary and religious traditions. Kokugaku scholars began a revival of Shinto, a native Japanese religion that originated in ancient times. Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga brilliantly analyzed the 11th-century national masterpiece The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, and contributed to many other fields of scholarship.

Norinaga was moved by his love of Japanese tradition to exalt Japan above ancient China, praising Japan’s uninterrupted line of emperors believed to be direct descendants of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu. Scholar Hirata Atsutane made this growing ideology even more nationalistic and exclusivist, attacking Confucianism and Buddhism and developing a new Shinto cosmology that made Japan, through a divine gift, superior to any other nation. The Mito school, originally a Confucian historical research group, promoted similar patriotic, pro-imperial ideas. Japan’s imperial house, controlled by the Ashikaga from the 14th through the 16th century and by the Tokugawa in the 17th century, was by the end of the 18th century the focus for a national unity capable of challenging the shogunate’s right to govern.

VII.

Foreign Encroachment and Domestic Crisis

By the early 19th century Western colonial imperialism was gaining momentum, and Japan’s traditional isolation was increasingly threatened. Russia in particular was expanding into eastern Siberia and the northwest Pacific Ocean. In 1806 Russian adventurers destroyed a Japanese settlement on the far northern island of Sakhalin. Many Japanese people saw this as an omen of things to come.

In the early 19th century Edo Japan experienced renewed stability and growth, with favorable weather and intensive agricultural methods producing plentiful harvests. Edo was by this time the world’s largest city, supported by the country’s flourishing commercial economy. However, in 1833 more crop failures and the Tempō Famine began, ending this prosperous period. When the government failed to provide adequate relief, renegade shogunal officer Ōshio Heiachirō led an uprising in Ōsaka in 1837. About one-fourth of the city was destroyed by fire in two days before the uprising was crushed. Meanwhile, breaches of Japan’s seclusion policy occurred. British, French, and other foreign ships began to appear in Japanese harbors with increasing frequency. In 1837 an American merchant ship attempting to land in Japan was fired upon. In 1841 the government launched the Tempō Reforms, a vigorous effort to restore the traditional society of the early Tokugawa period by improving central administration, taxation, coastal defenses, samurai military training, and morals (in part through censorship of literature). However, many increasingly independent daimyo resented the shogunate’s attempt to reassert control and opposed the reforms, and they were abandoned in 1843.

Although Edo culture continued to develop with the literature of Jippensha Ikku and Ryokan and the art of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the relatively secure society depicted in these works was under increasing strain from foreign threat. Beginning in the 1820s ideologists of the Mito school developed the principle of sonnō jōi (“Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”). These ideologists called for the protection of the pure Japanese spirit embodied by the emperor from defilement by Christian missionaries, imperialist adventurers, and other Western threats.

Foreign affairs reached a crisis point in 1853, when American naval officer Matthew Calbraith Perry led an expedition into Edo Bay. Perry used the implied threat of his warships to pressure the shogunate into signing a treaty that opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to the United States. The shogunate reluctantly agreed to sign the treaty in 1854. In 1858 the United States successfully negotiated a second treaty that opened more Japanese ports to trade, fixed tariffs (government taxes on trade), and guaranteed Americans extraterritorial rights (which extended U.S. laws and jurisdiction to U.S. citizens in Japan). Other Western powers soon followed suit by demanding similar treaties, which came to be called unequal treaties because they placed Japan in a subordinate diplomatic position. By the end of the 1850s Japan had been coerced into full diplomatic and commercial relations with the West.

Outraged pro-imperial nationalists rebelled against the shogunate over the signing of the 1858 treaty, which the emperor at Kyōto had opposed. Shogunal counselor Ii Naosuke fiercely repressed these activists through the Ansei Purge (1858-1860), in which all who opposed Ii were exiled, demoted, or executed. Ii attempted to unite the Tokugawa and imperial families by marrying the reigning shogun to the emperor’s sister, but the plan was never finalized. He was assassinated in Edo in 1860.

Political violence increased as competing factions or lone activists attacked shogunal officials, domain rivals, prominent nationalists, scholars of Western learning, and one another. Violence against the foreigners residing in Japan also occurred. In 1862 British merchant Charles Richardson was murdered when he rode across the path of the daimyo of the Satsuma domain, an action that was taken as a sign of disrespect. In retaliation, British warships shelled the Satsuma capital of Kagoshima, causing extensive damage and convincing all but the most extreme nationalists that Japan must first reform its government and strengthen itself before taking on the Western powers.

Both the shogunate and the daimyo began importing foreign arms and expertise in an effort to build up their military strength. The shogunate established a naval academy in 1855, employing Dutch sailors to train Japanese officers for a new fleet. In a reversal of the traditional ban on travel abroad, the shogunate dispatched missions to the West, first to negotiate terms of the unequal treaties, then in 1865 and 1867 to acquire military knowledge.

The shogunate began searching for alternatives to the failing bakuhan system and sought the favor of the increasingly influential imperial court in an effort to preserve shogunal dominance. But radicals across Japan, predominantly young samurai from poor and rural regions, demanded a full restoration of the emperor’s supremacy. Prominent tozama domains of western Japan, such as Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa, became centers of activism. As “outside lords,” these daimyo had always resented Tokugawa rule. In 1862 Kido Takayoshi, along with other pro-imperial Chōshū samurai and sympathetic nobles at the imperial court in Kyōto, persuaded the emperor to order the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan by the middle of 1863. All domains ignored the order except Chōshū, which fired on foreign ships. Moderates from Satsuma and other domains chased the revolutionaries out of Kyōto.

After the Chōshū radicals made an unsuccessful attempt to reenter Kyōto in 1864, a shogunal force backed by imperial mandate was dispatched to Chōshū to subdue them. Chōshū moderates negotiated a settlement for peace, and the shogunate withdrew. By 1865 Chōshū extremists had revolted, negating the settlement and retaking the domain. The shogun ordered another expedition against them in 1866. Chōshū had meanwhile made a secret pact with Satsuma against the Tokugawa, and several other domains refused to assist the shogunate against the extremists. Tokugawa Iemochi’s fatal illness in the fall of 1866 provided a pretext for the outmatched shogunal forces to withdraw. The incident made it clear that the Tokugawa shogunate no longer held military supremacy over daimyo forces. Because the shogunate’s political supremacy over the daimyo had been based from the start on its military superiority, this humiliation fatally weakened the legitimacy of Tokugawa rule.

Although good harvests in 1867 brought some tranquility to the countryside, pro-imperial samurai continued to pressure the shogunate for the restoration of imperial rule. The new shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, and his officials struggled to reform the shogunate, promoting a moderate settlement that would retain some elements of the bakuhan system. As part of the plan, Yoshinobu formally resigned in favor of the emperor in November 1867; this ended the Tokugawa shogunate but preserved Tokugawa landholdings and perpetuated Tokugawa power at the head of a new council of daimyo. Satsuma and Chōshū forces were not satisfied with this arrangement, however, and continued to demand a complete emperor-centered state. Led by Saigō Takamori, Kido Takayoshi, and Okubo Toshimichi, these forces seized the imperial palace in January 1868 and proclaimed a full restoration of imperial rule.

The coup brought to power the young emperor Meiji, who abolished the office of shogun, ordered the Tokugawa family to surrender its ancestral lands, and announced the creation of a new imperial government. The following month, the new imperial army defeated Tokugawa loyalists in a brief battle outside of Kyōto. Sporadic fighting continued in some areas of Japan. Known as the Boshin Civil War, the conflict ended with the surrender of pro-Tokugawa forces in 1869. Edo was surrendered peacefully to its new masters, who renamed the city Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.” The Meiji Restoration began an era of modernization and Western contact that lasted until 1912.

VIII.

Evaluation and Legacy

Although the Meiji authorities persecuted few defenders of the old Edo system, they discredited the Edo period itself as a time of feudal darkness. The Meiji regime claimed to bring the awakening of civilization, enlightenment, and rightful government. In fact, however, the new regime largely kept the feudal order in place: Peasants remained at the bottom of society, shouldering the majority of the tax burden for modernization and military programs, while industrialists enjoyed generous concessions. Despite the pro-imperial energies unleashed in the “restoration,” the imperial house remained a figurehead under the control of a new set of leaders. Meanwhile, advocates of democracy and socialism soon learned that the Meiji rulers were scarcely more tolerant of new and foreign political ideas than the Tokugawa shoguns had been.

Meiji Japan’s remarkably rapid and successful military and industrial modernization, which enabled it to win the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, owed more to the Edo period than Meiji leaders likely would have admitted. The Tokugawa shogunate and daimyo had introduced Japan to Western-style weaponry and military tactics, and the country’s rapid commercial expansion following its opening to the world was based on the advanced and integrated economy nurtured during the Tokugawa peace. Also, Edo intellectual developments produced the nationalist scholars who revived interest in the tradition of direct imperial rule and foresaw the need to fortify Japan against Western colonialism.

Yet Edo heritage also had some negative consequences. The Mito school of the Edo period laid the foundations for the Meiji nationalist ideology that propelled Japan’s own imperialism from its domination of Korea beginning in the 1870s to the end of World War II in 1945. Elements of this fierce nationalism still inform extremist Japanese conservatism. Moreover, the Edo social order created traditions of hierarchy, subordination, and intolerance for deviants or outsiders, issues that Japan continues to struggle with today.