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.
Facts
Start YearThe source gives both 1600 (Tokugawa Ieyasu's victory at Sekigahara) and 1603 (his formal appointment as shogun by Emperor Go-Yozei) as starting conventions; the atlas follows 1603, the formal shogunal appointment. Geographic Scope Connections
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Edo Period
WikipediaOpening definition, period dates
The Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa period, is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional daimyo, or feudal lords.
Opening definition
The Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa period, is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional daimyo, or feudal lords.
In Group: Eras Beginning from 1501 to 1603 CE, Article text
The Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa period, is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional daimyo, or feudal lords.
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