Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 222, The Dog Shogun. This week, I want to take some time to do

a biography that I've been thinking about for a while. It is, in many ways, a rather unremarkable

one. The person under consideration lived during a time of peace and prosperity, and thus might seem

rather insignificant.

He had few crises to deal with, and in many ways, little to do.

And yet, he's interesting both as a man of his times and as a prefiguring of what was to

come for Japan, and I imagine he's someone not many people know much about, so today I want to take a look

at the fifth shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.

Tuna Yoshi was born just as the final remnants of the old warring state's era were being

swept away in the year 1646.

Only nine years before his birth, the Shima Baro Rebellion in Kyushu marked the last stand of Japan's

Christians, and their defeat had marked the last gasp of Japan's pre-Toguagawa political order.

By the time young Sunyoshi was born, Tokugawa supremacy was unquestioned, even as the enemies of the Tokugawa held on to their old grudges.

Another fascinating transition was taking place around the time Sunnioshi was born.

The old generation of samurai was dying off and the new one rising to prominence.

The final generation of Daimyo, who could remember a time before the rise of the Tokugawa regime,

had begun to die off around the 1620s. For example, Tokugawa ally Uesu Yesuji Kagakatsu had passed on in 1623, while the second Tokugawa Shogun,

who grew up while his father was still a middling daimyo, Tokugawa Hideata, died in 1632.

By the time Sunayoshi was born 20 years later, even the youngest warriors who could remember the old days were passing away,

leaving behind a new generation of samurai, the ones who had been born and raised in peacetime.

This began to raise an interesting question for the samurai class, one that we've talked about before.

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