Azuchi-Momoyama and Edo: unification and the baku-han order
The early modern domain tests the unification process, the institutional design of Tokugawa rule, and the reform cycles that measured its strain.
Unification
- 1568 Nobunaga enters Kyoto; 1573 he deposes Ashikaga Yoshiaki, ending the Muromachi bakufu; 1575 Nagashino; 1582 Honnōji.
- Hideyoshi: 1583 Shizugatake, 1585 kanpaku, 1590 Odawara, and the invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597.
- Kenchi (land survey assessing yield as kokudaka), katanagari (1588 sword hunt) and the freezing of status separated warrior from peasant.
Edo institutions
- Sekigahara 1600; Ieyasu shogun 1603; Osaka castle destroyed 1614–15.
- Baku-han system; Buke shohatto (1615); sankin kōtai systematised in 1635; maritime restriction edicts 1633–39; Shimabara rebellion 1637–38.
Reform cycles
Kyōhō (1716–36, Yoshimune), Kansei (1787–93, Matsudaira Sadanobu), Tenpō (1841–43, Mizuno Tadakuni) - each answers a fiscal crisis with austerity plus moral rhetoric.
Worked example
Question: why did the survey record kokudaka rather than field area? Reasoning: assessed rice yield converted directly into tax and into status obligations, since daimyō military service was computed from rank and yield. Kokudaka made taxation and hierarchy commensurable, which area alone could not.
Traps
Crediting sankin kōtai as an invention of 1635 (it was systematised then, not created); confusing Hideyoshi's kenchi with earlier cadastral surveys; dating the end of the shogunate to 1867 rather than to the 1868 collapse of its authority.