ABSTRACT
In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals and the supporters of the Toyotomi family in the Battle of Sekigahara. In order to control the feudal lords, of whom there were 295 in the early seventeenth century and 276 at the end of the Tokugawa era, the Tokugawa rulers adopted the following measures. They classified the daimyo into three categories: members of the Tokugawa clan, lords who had been followers of the Tokugawa family before the Battle of Sekigahara, and those who submitted to or joined the Tokugawa family later. Beneath the four classes of Tokugawa society was another consisting of people treated as outcastes. The Bakufu classified people broadly into ryomin and semmin. At the end of the Tokugawa period, out of a population of 28 or 29 million people about 380,000 were classified as semmin—the antecedents of the people known today as burakumin.
