Sekigahara to Edo
Tokugawa Ieyasu — the patient third of Japan’s three unifiers, after Nobunaga’s demolition and Hideyoshi’s consolidation — won the decisive battle at Sekigahara in 1600 and took the title of shogun in 1603, ruling from his eastern castle town of Edo. The emperor remained in Kyoto as sacred figurehead; power lived with the Tokugawa for the next 265 years.
The system was control engineered in depth. Domain lords (daimyo) were graded by their loyalty’s vintage and watched through sankin-kotai, “alternate attendance”: compulsory residence in Edo every other year, wives and heirs left behind as permanent hostages. The processions this required bankrupted ambition, built the highway network, and swelled Edo into a city of perhaps a million — plausibly the world’s largest — with a merchant culture (kabuki, sumo, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the pleasure quarters) that flourished in cheerful defiance of the official Confucian ranking that placed merchants at society’s bottom.
The closed country
Fearing Christianity as a solvent of loyalty — the Shimabara rising of 1637-38, Christian-tinged, confirmed it — the shogunate expelled missionaries and traders, exterminated the faith above ground, and settled into sakoku: Japanese forbidden to leave, foreign contact channelled through licensed slivers, chief among them the Dutch East India Company’s post on Deshima island at Nagasaki — Europe’s single window on Japan, and Japan’s on Europe, through which “Dutch learning” (anatomy, astronomy, ballistics) seeped for two centuries. The Pax Tokugawa held: no war on Japanese soil for over two hundred years, the samurai ossifying into stipended bureaucrats whose sword-carrying honour culture produced, in the 47 Ronin affair of 1701-03, its defining moral crisis.
Black ships and collapse
In July 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry’s steam squadron — the “black ships” — anchored in Edo Bay with demands the shogunate could not refuse and treaties (1854, then the unequal commercial treaties of 1858) it could not survive signing. Legitimacy bled out through inflation, humiliation, and the rallying cry sonno joi — “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians” — until the southwestern domains of Satsuma and Choshu forced the issue: the last shogun resigned in 1867, brief civil war followed, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 moved the teenage emperor to Edo — renamed Tokyo — to preside over the crash modernisation the long peace had both delayed and, through its literacy, cities, and administration, quietly prepared.