From 1603 to 1867 the Tokugawa shoguns gave Japan more than two and a half centuries without a major war, a record few large societies anywhere can match. The price was a tightly ordered society watched closely from above.
Holding the daimyo in check
The Tokugawa ruled from Edo, today's Tokyo, directly controlling about a quarter of the land and the main cities and mines. The rest was divided among some 260 daimyo, who governed their own domains but answered to the shogun. The most effective control was the system of alternate attendance, made fully regular in 1635. Daimyo had to spend alternate years in Edo, traveling with large retinues, and when they returned home they left their wives and heirs behind in Edo, in effect as hostages. Maintaining two households and staging grand processions drained daimyo treasuries, which kept them too poor to rebel. The system had side effects nobody planned: it built roads and inns, spread fashions and dialects, and made Edo one of the largest cities in the world, with perhaps a million people by the eighteenth century.
A society of fixed ranks
Official thought, drawn from Neo-Confucian teaching, ranked society as samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. Samurai, about six percent of the population, lost their link to the land and became salaried officials and guards living in castle towns. Below and outside the four ranks were outcaste groups, who did work considered polluting, such as handling dead animals or executions, and lived under legal discrimination. Their descendants, now called burakumin, still faced prejudice in marriage and employment long after the status system was abolished. In practice, rich merchants often lived better than poor samurai, and the official ranks described an ideal more than a reality.
Closing the doors to Christianity
The early Tokugawa feared that Christian converts might owe loyalty to foreign powers. Christianity was banned in 1614, missionaries were expelled and believers who refused to renounce their faith were tortured and executed. In 1637 to 1638 the Shimabara Rebellion, an uprising in which many peasants were Christians, broke out in Kyushu against crushing taxes and persecution; the shogunate crushed it, killing tens of thousands. Afterward, every household had to register at a Buddhist temple, which certified that its members were not Christian. Some Christians survived in secret for over two centuries.
Four gates to the world
In the 1630s the shogunate forbade Japanese to travel abroad and expelled the Portuguese. From 1641 the Dutch were confined to Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki harbor, while Chinese merchants traded from their own walled quarter of the city. This policy is often called sakoku, "closed country," but the word was first used in 1801, by a translator rendering a passage from a German doctor's book about Japan. Many historians now prefer to describe four managed gateways rather than a closed door. Besides Nagasaki, Japan dealt with Korea through the Tsushima domain, which hosted trade and arranged the grand Korean embassies to Edo. The Satsuma domain, which had conquered the Ryukyu kingdom in 1609, handled trade through Okinawa, and the Matsumae domain traded with the Ainu of Hokkaido, often on harsh terms that provoked Ainu revolts.
City culture and new learning
Peace and commerce fed a lively urban culture: kabuki theater, puppet plays, comic fiction and woodblock prints aimed at townspeople with money to spend. Osaka's rice exchange developed trading in future deliveries by the early eighteenth century. Schooling spread through thousands of small private schools, and by the 1860s literacy in Japan was high by world standards, though estimates vary widely. Scholars of "national learning," such as Motoori Norinaga, studied the Kojiki to recover what they saw as a pure Japanese spirit before Chinese influence. Others pursued "Dutch learning," studying Western medicine, astronomy and geography through books imported at Nagasaki. Prosperity was uneven. Famines in the 1780s and 1830s killed hundreds of thousands, and peasant protests grew more frequent.
Worked example: Sugita Genpaku and the Dutch anatomy book
In 1771 a physician named Sugita Genpaku and several colleagues obtained a Dutch translation of a German anatomy text. On a spring day in Edo, they watched the dissection of an executed criminal's body. Sugita compared the Dutch anatomy book's drawings with the body and found that they matched, while the Chinese medical charts he had trained on did not. He and his colleagues decided to translate the book, though they barely knew Dutch, puzzling over single sentences for days. Their translation, published in 1774, helped launch serious Western studies in Japan. The episode challenges the idea of a sealed country. Japan's rulers controlled contact, but curious people still reached for outside knowledge through the narrow channels available. It also shows the method behind science: test the authority of a text against what can be seen. Years later, Sugita wrote a memoir recalling the struggle, and the scholars trained in Dutch learning became an important resource when Western warships arrived.