ABSTRACT
Tokugawa Japan as a multi-state system There were two major waves of European penetration into Asia during the four century period 1500-1900. The first was mainly commercial although it planted the seeds of colonialism in Southeast Asia notably in India and the Indonesian archipelago. The second – initiated during the mid-nineteenth century – was more devastating. Bristling with freshly found military power – muskets (later rifles and breechloaders) and massive cannons that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution – Western steamships made their way into the South China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and even up China’s Grand Canal with the aim of breaking open the proud states of East Asia. That the major powers of East Asia had attempted to seclude themselves until the rising military powers of the nineteenth century – Great Britain, the United States, France, later Germany after unification – once and for all blasted them open was itself a partial reaction to the earlier penetration by the powers that dominated the first wave of Western penetration, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. There is no better illustration of this proposition than the ins and outs of the Tokugawa regime established in 1600 at the end of a long century of civil war in Japan.1 After a number of military overlords had attempted to establish hegemony over all of Japan – basically the three islands of Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū (the northern island of Hokkaidō was largely populated by Ainu at the time, a small Japanese enclave carved out in its southern tip) – hegemonic rule was finally established by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the closing decades of the bloody century.2 To pacify the country Hideyoshi set up a confederation style government. He divided up the land area that he had nominal control over into fiefs (known as han though the term utilized during the Tokugawa period which followed Hideyoshi’s rule was kuni that is most accurately translated as “country”), parceling out domains to powerful competing warlords known as daimyō. He ordered the daimyō to move their military retainers, their soldiers known as samurai, into castle towns that were designed to function as administrative centers of the fiefs, severing their direct connection to the land.
