ABSTRACT
Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled from 1603 to 1868, was truly a world apart, one largely unto itself. From 1635 to the end of their era, the military rulers generally forbade their subjects from traveling abroad at all—on pain of death should they return—and from 1639 on, two years after the Christian-inspired Shimabara revolt, foreign trade was restricted to transactions with Dutch and Chinese merchants stationed in the port of Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu. Between around 1580 and 1630, Japan experienced a surge in urban construction without parallel in world history. In most castle towns, half the townspeople were commoners, and the rest members of the hereditary martial class; between them there developed a symbiosis well apparent in modern Japanese culture. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
