Hello, and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 9, Pax Tokugawa.

The rise of Tokugawa Iayasu to the position of Shogun marked a huge change for the average Japanese.

After his ascension in 1603, he imposed an order on Japan that proved remarkably stable,

coming to close only with the Civil

War of 1868.

In fact, barring me attack on Osaka Castle and a short-lived Christian rebellion in 1638, there

were no major battles in Japan until 1863.

This 230-year piece is called the Pax Tokugawa by some scholars.

In an attempt to draw parallels with the Pax Romanar, or the Pax Britannica,

the periods of peace and stability imposed at gun or sword point by the Roman and British

empires.

This week we're going to look at the social and political structure of the Tokugawa state,

and how Tokugawa Ieyasu was able to build a system that proved so remarkably stable.

Next week, we'll discuss life a bit closer to home during the Tokugawa period as we move into the realms of culture and economics.

Ieyasu carried a lot of the social reforms of Toyotomi Hideyoshi forward.

Chief among these were a legally established class system and laws disarming the population.

The class structure of Tokugawa Japan was based on the Chinese philosophy of Neo-Confucianism,

which originated in the

1200s in China, and was essentially an attempt to reinterpret classical Confucian ideas to

revitalize and revive them, much as, for example, the Renaissance in Europe involved reinterpreting

and revitalizing ideas from classical European civilization.

The Neo-Confucian social order revolved around a four-part class system,

...