Abstract
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu climbed to the pinnacle of the political world as the first shogun of a new samurai government with its capital at Edo.Although the Tokugawa shogunate was the most powerful of all Japan's central administrations to date, it was really a federation of lords ruling domains large and small, about 260 in all.For the next century until the early 1700s, Japanese society continued on the path of growth and recovery from the wars.The population reached about thirty-one million by the early eighteenth century; land under cultivation and overall farming productivity expanded immensely.Commerce and industry increased in a rapidly urbanizing Japan that included the world's largest city, Edo.A laboring proletariat was employed through specialized agencies.Culture for the elite was Confucian, but most townspeople, including the sizable urbanized samurai class, enjoyed the pleasures of red-light districts aptly named "the floating world."Art and literature took its inspiration from stories of the denizens of this urban area.Ensconced in Nagasaki harbor, the Dutch continued to trade some goods and teach willing scholars in Europe about Japan, and vice versa.Beginning in the early 1700s, however, overall growth slowed and diversified in nature and geographical locale.Scholarly specialists seem divided as to what happened to the Japanese economy between 1710 and 1850, although all agree on many other points.The shogunate atrophied as it first tried old-fashioned reforms and then floated untethered.Overall population in Japan remained static, hovering around thirty million.Famine stalked the land, as of old.Ideologues railed against abortion and infanticide.By 1800, signs of political and social unrest were everywhere.Commoner riots multiplied and large cities shrank.Yet workers in both the agrarian and urban sectors applied greater inputs of labor, paying attention