The Edo Period

The Edo Period, 1603 to 1868, also called the Tokugawa Period after the shogunate Tokugawa Ieyasu founded in the city of Edo (modern Tokyo), was an era of unusually long internal peace and stability enforced through a rigid social order, a fixed four-class hierarchy of samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants, and the sankin-kotai system that required regional daimyo to alternate residence between their home domains and Edo, keeping them financially strained and under close central watch. From the 1630s the shogunate pursued a policy of near-total national seclusion, sakoku, sharply restricting foreign trade and contact and expelling most Europeans, with only a small, tightly controlled Dutch trading post at Nagasaki remaining as a window to the outside world. Within this closed and peaceful society, a vibrant urban merchant culture flourished, producing ukiyo-e woodblock prints, kabuki theater and a thriving popular literature. The period ends with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's American fleet in 1853, which forced Japan open to foreign trade and precipitated the shogunate's collapse in the 1868 Meiji Restoration.