5.2 Edo Period 1600 – 1867: The Tokugawa Shoguns Tighten Control
After Ieyasu died in 1616, Hidetada took control of the bakufu and strengthened the Tokugawa hold on power. As his father before him, Hidetada resigned his post as shogun in favor of his eldest son, Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651), in 1623 and became ogosho.
Iemitsu had two sisters, Senhime (Lady Sen) and Masako. Senhime married Toyotomi Hideyori, son of Hideyoshi. Masako or Kazu-ko (1607-1678) became an Empress Consort of Emperor Go-Mizunoo. Masako’s daughter succeeded Emperor Go-Mizunoo as Empress Meishō. Masako also raised two sons of Go-Mizunoo as if they were her own and they ascended the throne as Emperor Go-Kōmyō and Emperor Go-Sai.
Iemitsu is remembered for persecuting Christians, expelling Europeans, and closing Japan.
Persecuting Christians
The closing of Japan is linked to the introduction of Christianity. After Oda Nobunaga, subsequent shoguns began to suspect Christian missionaries of being foreign agents and Christian converts as having mixed loyalties. A general persecution of Christianity resulted in the destruction of churches and deaths of converts. The last Jesuit was killed by 1644, marking the end of the Christian movement. Courts of inquisition were established in all the villages of Japan charged with discovering and eliminating any vestiges of Christianity.
Closing Japan
In 1635 Iemitsu issued the Sakoku Edict (“chained country”) or Closed Country Edict which was strictly enforced. Japanese were to stay in Japan, anyone trying to leave or return from another country would be executed. Europeans who entered Japan illegally would be executed. In 1640, a Spanish ship from Macau brought a delegation of 61 people to Nagasaki to try to re-establish relations. They were arrested and decapitated and their heads were mounted on poles. Trade was limited to certain goods, ports, and merchants. Later all Westerners, except the Dutch, were prohibited from entering Japan. The isolationism of Japan would continue until 1858, when Commodore Perry USN arrived at Edo Bay.
Control of the Outside Lords, the Daimyō, and others
Neo-Confucianism with its principles of social order became state orthodoxy. For the samurai, loyalty to one’s lord was paramount even to family. Kinship was stressed and the shogunate bestowed the former family name of Matsudaira on important fudai and tozama daimyō. Senior councilors had duties that included participating in rites to ancestors, attending lectures on Chinese classics, and attending Noh performances. There was a large palace staff composed of women, a female bureaucracy to serve the shogun, his wife, and his mother.
The political system, bakuhan, a combination of the terms bakufu and han (domains or estates), was a stabilizing force. In the bakuhan, the shogun had national authority and the daimyō had regional authority. It featured an ever increasing bureaucracy.
The Tokugawa shogunate wanted to strictly control the daimyō. In 1615 Ieyasu had issued his ordinance for military houses, Buke-Sho-Hatto, forbidding outside lords to marry without shogunal approval, forbade repair or enlargement of castles without a permit, limited guns, and required the daimyō to denounce subversive activity, which included harboring criminals and colluding against the shogun. Iemitsu regulated the daimyō down to their private conduct, marriage, dress, types of weapons and numbers of troops allowed. The daimyō were levied for contributions for military and public works projects. Furthermore, the shogunate could relocate the men as he saw fit. Sankin-kōtai, the system of mandatory alternate residence, forced each daimyō to spend four and later six months a year attending the Shogun’s court and the remainder at their estates. When they returned to their estates, they left their wives and family, as “hostages for good behavior.” The sankin-kōtai system not only deprived daimyō of being in their home provinces to consolidate their power, but also weakened their finances through maintaining two households and travel expenses. The han, at one time military, became merely local administrative units. The daimyō did not even have control over their own territory or the complex systems of retainers, bureaucrats, and commoners.
Under Iemitsu a totalitarian police state was created. There were three levels at the top of government. The Tairo (Great Elders), the Roju (Council of Elders), and the Hyojosho (Judicial Council).
Loyalty was exacted from religious foundations. Each household was to register and be affiliated with a temple, which made Buddhist temples an arm of the government. Local Buddhist temples were also charged with eradicating Christianity.
The Tokugawa shogunate strengthened its ties with the emperor and the court. It gave financial aid to re-build palaces and granted new lands. Emperor Go-Mizunoo (1596-1680) reigned during the shogunate of Hidetada and Iemitsu. In 1620, Tokugawa Masako, the daughter of Shogun Hidetada and Ieyasu’s granddaughter, became a consort of the emperor. However, the relationship had its limits.
In the Purple Robe Incident or Shie Affair, the Emperor was accused of bestowing honorific purple garments to ten priests despite an edict banning them for two years. Go-Mizunoo abdicated in favor of his daughter, Okiko, the grand-daughter of Hidetada, who would be known as Empress Meishō. Relations were restored as the shogun was now the uncle of the sitting monarch, Meishō.
Another method of control that allowed the Tokugawa Shogunate to last 250 years was that the first shoguns, following the lead of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, created an ideology. Iemitsu developed the idea of a just social order ruled by the shogunate follows the way of heaven, which is natural, unchanging, eternal, and hierarchical. The ruler displays the benevolence of Buddha; the warrior preserves the peace; and the commoner obeys.