Japan, 1600–1660

Toyotomi Hideyori, six years old, was the heir of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who had unified Japan and died in 1598. He lived in Osaka castle, and five great lords, the regents, were to govern until he came of age. He took no part in the fighting of 1600 and came through it with his castle and his rank.

Yodo-dono, born Chacha, had been Hideyoshi's consort and was the boy's mother and guardian in Osaka castle. Her two younger sisters had married into the Kyōgoku house and into the Tokugawa, as the wife of Ieyasu's heir.

Uesugi Kagekatsu, lord of Aizu in the north-east, was fortifying his domain. Summoned to Osaka to explain himself, he would not come, and Ieyasu called it rebellion.

Naoe Kanetsugu answered the summons with a defiant letter. The text that survives may have been reworked later, but a letter that enraged Ieyasu was sent. When Ieyasu turned back west, Kanetsugu struck at his ally Mogami and spent two weeks failing to take Hasedō castle. In 1601 the Uesugi were cut from 1.2 million koku to 300,000 at Yonezawa.

Ishida Mitsunari, once one of Hideyoshi's five commissioners and lord of Sawayama, raised the western lords against Ieyasu as soon as Ieyasu had marched north. With his allies he invited Mōri Terumoto to lead them.

Mōri Terumoto, master of eight western provinces and another of the regents, entered Osaka castle as commander-in-chief of the western army. He stayed there with the boy and never took the field; Mitsunari ran the campaign.

Ukita Hideie, lord of Okayama and the youngest regent, brought the coalition's largest army, some 17,000 men. He commanded the storming of Fushimi, and at Sekigahara his men fought Fukushima Masanori's until they broke. Hideie fled to the Shimazu in Satsuma, was handed over, and in 1606 was exiled to the island of Hachijō, where he lived another fifty years.

Ōtani Yoshitsugu, lord of Tsuruga, had set out to march with Ieyasu's side until his friend Mitsunari talked him round. At Sekigahara he held the high ground at the west end of the valley, facing Kobayakawa Hideaki's army on Mount Matsuo. When Kobayakawa Hideaki attacked him, his line collapsed and he killed himself.

Kikkawa Hiroie, Terumoto's cousin, led the vanguard of the Mōri army. Through Kuroda Nagamasa he had secretly promised Ieyasu Mōri neutrality in return for the house's lands. On the day he refused to advance and blocked the way, and the main Mōri army never fought. Ieyasu kept the bargain only in part: the Mōri lost three-quarters of their lands.

Sanada Masayuki, lord of Ueda, sent his elder son to Ieyasu's side and kept his younger son, Nobushige, with him for the west. Their castle held Hidetada's army for days. After the defeat father and son were to die; the elder son's pleas, backed by Ii Naomasa, saved them, and they were exiled to Kudoyama, below Mount Kōya.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, master of the Kantō and the strongest of the regents, was governing from Osaka castle in the boy's name. When Uesugi Kagekatsu would not come, Ieyasu led the lords north against Aizu that summer. At Oyama, hearing that the west had risen behind him, he and the lords marching with him turned back.

Torii Mototada, who had served Ieyasu since they were boys, was left with a small garrison in Fushimi castle. The western army besieged it for twelve days; Mototada refused to surrender and died when it fell. The siege held the coalition while Ieyasu turned his army round.

Ieyasu split his forces. His son and heir Hidetada led some 38,000 men west by the Nakasendō, the mountain road. He stopped to take Ueda castle, was held there for days, and reached his father only after the battle.

Kuroda Nagamasa, one of Hideyoshi's generals, worked for Ieyasu among the lords of the other side. He arranged the secret understandings with Kobayakawa Hideaki and with the Mōri commander Kikkawa Hiroie, and on the day his musketeers fought Mitsunari's own men. Ieyasu gave him Chikuzen, some 520,000 koku, where he built Fukuoka castle.

Kobayakawa Hideaki, a young lord raised in Hideyoshi's household, had joined the western side and posted his army on Mount Matsuo. Having promised Ieyasu to change sides, he sent it down against Ōtani Yoshitsugu, and the western line broke. His Chikuzen went to Nagamasa; his reward was Ukita Hideie's domain at Okayama. He died there in 1602.

Fukushima Masanori, one of Hideyoshi's own commanders, fought for Ieyasu, and at Sekigahara his troops fought Ukita Hideie's. He then helped take over Osaka castle from Terumoto. His reward was Aki and Bingo, 498,000 koku, with Terumoto's own castle at Hiroshima.

Ii Naomasa, one of Ieyasu's senior generals, was wounded by a bullet at Sekigahara as he chased the Shimazu off the field. Ieyasu gave him Mitsunari's castle and lands at Sawayama, 180,000 koku. He died in 1602.

Emperor Go-Yōzei, on the throne since 1586, named Ieyasu shōgun in March 1603, the highest office a warrior could hold. In 1605, when Ieyasu resigned it, he named Hidetada in his place. The court went on promoting Hideyori too: Inner Minister in 1603, Minister of the Right in 1605, a post above the new shōgun's.

Named shōgun, Ieyasu built his government at Edo. In 1605 he gave the title to Hidetada, to show the realm that it would stay in his house, and went on ruling as retired shōgun. He asked Hideyori to come and greet the new shōgun.

Hidetada became the second shōgun at 26 and held court at Edo, while his father kept the great decisions. In 1607 Ieyasu settled at Sunpu, where he had been a hostage as a boy, and ruled from there.

Honda Masanobu had fought against Ieyasu in the Ikkō rising of 1563, fled, and been taken back. He now served Hidetada at Edo and from 1607 sat on the young shōgun's council, while his son Masazumi stayed at Ieyasu's side.

Gō, the youngest of three Azai sisters, was Hidetada's wife; her eldest sister was Yodo-dono, Hideyori's mother. She bore Hidetada his sons Iemitsu and Tadanaga and daughters who married into great houses and, in one case, into the imperial palace.

In 1603 Senhime, aged six, was sent to Osaka castle as Hideyori's bride: Ieyasu's granddaughter married to his rival's heir. The match joined the two families but settled nothing between them.

Hideyori married Senhime in 1603 and rose in the court ranks beside the Tokugawa. When Ieyasu asked, through Hideyoshi's widow, that Hideyori come and pay his respects to the new shōgun, Osaka refused. It would not bow.

Sō Yoshitoshi, lord of Tsushima, lived by the Korea trade. A Christian and son-in-law of Konishi Yukinaga, he had led Hideyoshi's vanguard into Korea and in 1600 sent men to fight against Ieyasu. Ieyasu spared him and his island, because he needed peace with Korea.

Yujeong, a monk who had raised Buddhist militia against the Japanese invaders, came by way of Tsushima in 1604 as Korea's envoy and in March 1605 met Ieyasu at Fushimi. He took home some thousands of Koreans carried off in the war. Korea then asked for a letter in Ieyasu's name; Sō's men forged one, and on the strength of it Korea's first embassy came to Edo in 1607. Sō's treaty of 1609 reopened the trade.

Honda Masazumi, Masanobu's son, became the chief aide of the retired Ieyasu at Sunpu, while his father served Hidetada at Edo; between them the Honda had the ear of both courts. In 1612 one of Masazumi's own retainers, Okamoto Daihachi, was exposed as a fraud.

Ōkubo Tadachika, lord of Odawara, had marched with Hidetada in 1600 and from 1610 sat on his council. His house and the Honda were political enemies, and Edo-period writers blamed the Honda for his fall.

Ōkubo Nagayasu, son of a Noh actor, had served the Takeda before Ieyasu, and Tadachika gave him the Ōkubo name. He ran the shogunate's mines, the silver of Iwami and the gold of Sado. When he died in 1613 his wealth was declared ill-gotten and his seven sons were executed. In January 1614 Tadachika, sent to Kyoto to pull down the churches, was stripped of his domain; he was never pardoned.

Ishin Sūden, a Zen abbot, had entered Ieyasu's service in 1608 and handled his letters to foreign rulers, the trading licences and the temples. Ordered to draft a ban on Christianity, he wrote it in one night; issued in January 1614, it began by calling Japan the land of the gods and expelled every missionary.

Fujiwara Seika, a Zen monk turned Confucian, had learned from a Korean scholar taken prisoner in the war and lectured to Ieyasu. Asked to enter his service, he declined and recommended his best pupil instead.

Hayashi Razan met Seika in 1604 and Ieyasu at Nijō castle in 1605. In 1607 Ieyasu had him shave his head like a monk, under the name Dōshun, and he served the shogunate as its scholar: reading texts, searching precedents, drafting documents.

William Adams, the English pilot of the Dutch ship Liefde, had been kept by Ieyasu since 1600. He built Ieyasu European-style ships, was made a retainer with an estate on the Miura peninsula, and became the go-between for the Dutch and English who followed him.

Jan Joosten van Lodensteyn, another survivor of the Liefde, also stayed in Ieyasu's service; Tokyo's Yaesu district keeps his name. He traded to Southeast Asia under the shogunate's licences and drowned in 1623 when his ship ran aground on the way back to Japan.

In 1609 two Dutch ships reached Hirado. With Adams's help their envoys won Ieyasu's leave to trade, and Jacques Specx became the first chief of the company's new factory there. He later governed the Dutch Indies from Batavia.

John Saris brought the Clove, the first English ship to reach Japan, into Hirado in 1613 with a letter from James I. Adams took him to Ieyasu at Sunpu and Hidetada at Edo; he left with a licence to trade, two suits of armour from the shōgun for his king, and Richard Cocks in charge of a new English factory at Hirado.

Date Masamune, lord of Sendai, had fought for Ieyasu in 1600. In 1613, with the shōgun's approval, he sent his own embassy across the Pacific to seek trade with Spanish Mexico.

Luis Sotelo, a Spanish Franciscan, had won Masamune's favour by healing one of his women in Edo. Arrested when Christianity was banned on the shogunate's lands, he was freed at Masamune's plea, and planned the embassy and sailed with it, seeking missionaries as well as trade.

Hasekura Tsunenaga, a Date retainer, sailed from Tsukinoura in October 1613 on a galleon built in Japan. He crossed Mexico, was baptised in Madrid before Philip III, and in November 1615 was received in Rome by Pope Paul V. Spain refused the trade he asked for.

Shimazu Iehisa, lord of Satsuma, won the shogunate's leave in 1609 to attack the kingdom of Ryūkyū, which had ignored Satsuma's demands. Earlier called Tadatsune, he had taken the Ie of his new name from Ieyasu.

Kabayama Hisataka, a senior Shimazu retainer, led about 3,000 men south through the islands in March 1609, with Hirata Masumune as his second, and took the capital, Shuri, in May.

King Shō Nei surrendered and was carried to Japan. In 1610 he was presented to Ieyasu at Sunpu and to Hidetada at Edo; in 1611 he went home, sworn to obey Satsuma. Ryūkyū kept its king and its tribute to China, but answered to Satsuma.

Arima Harunobu, a Christian lord on the Shimabara peninsula, attacked a Portuguese carrack in Nagasaki harbour in January 1610, with Ieyasu's leave, to avenge Arima sailors killed at Macau; the ship blew up. Wanting more reward, he looked for a friend at court.

Okamoto Daihachi, a Christian retainer of Honda Masazumi, promised Harunobu his family's lost lands, took his money and forged a shogunal grant. In 1612 the fraud came out. Daihachi was burned alive at Sunpu, and the same day the shogunate banned Christianity on its own lands; Harunobu was exiled and put to death.

Takayama Ukon had given up his domain in 1587 rather than his faith and lived under the Maeda lords of Kaga. Sūden's edict reached him too: in November 1614 he was shipped from Nagasaki to Manila, where he died in February.

Hideyori, now 21, rebuilt the great Buddha hall of Hōkōji in Kyoto, his father's temple, and cast a bell for it in 1614. Ieyasu objected to the inscription: one phrase split the two characters of his name. The real question was what Hideyori would accept of Tokugawa rule.

Katagiri Katsumoto went to Sunpu to settle the matter and came back proposing that Hideyori go to Edo, or send his mother there as a hostage, or leave Osaka. Yodo-dono took him for a traitor and he fled the castle, going over to the Tokugawa; the same day Ieyasu ordered the lords to march.

Ōno Harunaga, son of Yodo-dono's wet nurse, became the leading man in the castle. Osaka hired masterless samurai by the tens of thousands. In the winter he and Oda Urakusai negotiated the peace with Honda Masazumi, and Harunaga gave his own son as a hostage for it.

Sanada Nobushige, who had held Ueda against Hidetada in 1600, left his exile at Kudoyama for Osaka. That winter his earthwork fort outside the south wall, the Sanada-maru, threw back the attackers. On 3 June 1615, near Tennōji, he charged Ieyasu's headquarters and was killed.

Gotō Mototsugu had been one of Kuroda Nagamasa's commanders until he left in 1606; Nagamasa then barred other lords from hiring him, and he lived as a masterless samurai in Kyoto. Osaka gave him command. On 2 June 1615, at Dōmyōji, he led 2,800 men against the Tokugawa vanguard and was killed.

Chōsokabe Morichika had sat out Sekigahara behind the Mōri lines that Kikkawa Hiroie held back, and lost Tosa all the same. Promised his province back, he entered Osaka in 1614. After the fall he was caught hiding, paraded through Kyoto and beheaded at Rokujō-gawara.

Jōkō-in, born Hatsu, was Yodo-dono's younger sister and Gō's elder. In January 1615, with Tokugawa cannon hitting the keep, she carried Osaka's side of the peace: Hideyori would keep his lands and the castle's outer moat would be filled. The Tokugawa troops filled the inner moats too.

When Osaka hired soldiers again, Ieyasu ordered Hideyori out of the castle, and in the spring the armies came back. On 4 June 1615, with the castle burning, Hideyori and Yodo-dono killed themselves in a storehouse in its grounds, Ōno Harunaga with them. Senhime was brought out alive.

Ieyasu, now 71, made the bell a test of Osaka's loyalty. When Katagiri Katsumoto fled the castle he ordered the lords to march. That winter his siege could not break the walls, but his cannon hit Yodo-dono's quarters in the keep, and Osaka agreed to talk.

Acha-no-Tsubone, Ieyasu's trusted consort, met Jōkō-in and Ōno Harunaga's mother and brought the winter peace together. In 1620 she would escort Hidetada's daughter Masako into the imperial palace.

After the fall Ishin Sūden drafted the codes that followed. That summer every lord was ordered to pull down all but one castle in his domain, and at Fushimi the lords heard the Laws for the Military Houses: no new castles, repairs only on notice, no marriages between houses without leave. A second code bound the emperor and his court.

Nijō Akizane had been the emperor's regent in 1585 and given the office up to Hideyoshi. Thirty years later he signed the court code with Ieyasu and Hidetada, and days afterwards was made regent again, a second term after thirty years that had almost no precedent.

Hon'ami Kōetsu, of a family of sword appraisers and polishers, was a celebrated Kyoto calligrapher. In 1615 Ieyasu gave him land at Takagamine, north of the city, where he settled with his kinsmen, townsmen and craftsmen, all of the Lotus sect, in a village of artists.

Suminokura Sōan, son of the great Kyoto merchant Suminokura Ryōi, studied Confucianism under Seika and calligraphy under Kōetsu. He took part in publishing the Saga books, movable-type editions of the classics printed at Saga in the Kōetsu style, so that they are called both Kōetsu books and Suminokura books.

When Ieyasu died at Sunpu in June 1616, his advisers disagreed over how he should be worshipped. The Tendai abbot Tenkai won against Sūden: Ieyasu became Tōshō Daigongen, a Buddhist avatar, and in 1617 his remains were moved to a new shrine at Nikkō. Tenkai argued that Hideyoshi's god-name had not saved his house.

Hidetada, 37, now ruled alone. Over the next seven years he turned the codes his father had left on the lords who had won Sekigahara for the Tokugawa, and on the imperial court.

In 1619 Fukushima Masanori repaired his storm-damaged castle at Hiroshima. Though he said he had given notice, the shogunate called it a breach of the Laws for the Military Houses, and when he was slow to undo the work Hidetada took his 500,000-koku domain and sent him to 45,000 koku at Takaino in Shinano.

Asano Nagaakira, lord of Wakayama and Ieyasu's son-in-law, was moved to Hiroshima with 420,000 koku. His Wakayama went to Ieyasu's son Tokugawa Yorinobu, placed there to guard Osaka and the sea route between Edo and Kyoto.

Honda Masazumi, Ieyasu's aide, had outlived his patron. In 1619 he was given Utsunomiya, 155,000 koku; in 1622 Hidetada stripped him of it and sent him into exile in Dewa. The tale of a trap ceiling built to kill the shōgun came later; the fall itself is certain.

Doi Toshikatsu had been Hidetada's companion since Hidetada's birth and sat on his council from 1610. With Masazumi gone he was the strongest man in the government, and in 1623 he stayed on to serve Hidetada's son.

Go-Mizunoo had succeeded his father, Emperor Go-Yōzei, in 1611. Before Hidetada's daughter could enter his palace, a court lady bore him a son; in 1619 Hidetada punished six courtiers around the emperor and delayed the marriage, and the young emperor hardened against him.

Tokugawa Masako entered the palace in 1620 as Go-Mizunoo's consort, escorted by Ieyasu's consort Acha-no-Tsubone. She was made empress in 1624. A shōgun's grandchild could now become emperor.

Carlo Spinola, an Italian Jesuit in Japan since 1602, stayed in hiding after the expulsion of 1614. Caught in 1618, he was held four years in a cage-like prison, and on 10 September 1622 was burned at Nagasaki, one of 55 Christians, children among them, killed there that day.

Richard Cocks ran the English factory at Hirado from 1613, with Adams as his friend and guide; his diary is one of the fullest records of these years. The trade never paid. In 1623, after an audit found a huge deficit, the company closed the factory, and Cocks died at sea on the way home.

In 1623 Hidetada did as his father had done: he handed the title of shōgun to his son Iemitsu and kept the power as retired shōgun. Father and son governed together until Hidetada's death in 1632.

Tadanaga, Iemitsu's younger brother and their mother Gō's favourite, had once been talked of as heir. In 1624 he was given Suruga, with Kai and part of Tōtōmi, 550,000 koku in all, and Ieyasu's old castle at Sunpu.

Kasuga-no-Tsubone, born Saitō Fuku, had nursed Iemitsu since 1604; the husband she had left to take the post, Inaba Masanari, was the Kobayakawa retainer who had helped turn his lord at Sekigahara. Later accounts have her appealing to Ieyasu to secure Iemitsu's succession over Tadanaga. Her son Inaba Masakatsu joined the council in 1623, and she came to rule the women's quarters of Edo castle.

In the autumn of 1626 Go-Mizunoo went in procession to Nijō castle as the guest of Hidetada and Iemitsu, with some 9,000 courtiers, officials and attendants: a public display of the bond between the throne and the Tokugawa. Days later Hidetada's wife Gō died.

Masako had borne Go-Mizunoo a daughter, Princess Okiko, in 1624, and at the end of 1626 she bore him a son. The boy, who might have made a shōgun's grandson emperor, died in 1628.

Hasekura came home in September 1620 after seven years abroad, to find Christianity banned and his lord Masamune posting edicts against it in Sendai. The embassy had won nothing, and he died about 1622.

Sotelo, waiting in Manila, slipped into Japan at Nagasaki in 1622 and was caught. Masamune pleaded for him again, in vain: in August 1624 he was burned at Ōmura.

Itakura Shigemune had been the shōgun's deputy in Kyoto since 1620, the official who watched the court. In 1627 the shogunate voided the purple robes Go-Mizunoo had granted to senior monks without its consent; the protests of the great Zen temples came through Shigemune, who tried to settle them with Myōshinji.

Takuan Sōhō, a former abbot of Daitokuji, wrote the temples' protest. He was summoned to Edo, tried, and in 1629 exiled to Kaminoyama in the north, where the local lord treated him as an honoured guest.

In the autumn of 1629 Kasuga-no-Tsubone, Iemitsu's nurse, travelled to Kyoto and sought entry to the palace. Holding no court rank, she was first adopted into a noble family; then Go-Mizunoo and Masako received her and gave her the title by which she is known.

In December 1629 Go-Mizunoo abdicated without telling the shogunate. The robes, the shogunate's laws and its pressure on his court all lay behind it. He went on directing the court as retired emperor through four of his children's reigns, and lived until 1680.

Princess Okiko, five years old and Hidetada's granddaughter, took the throne as Empress Meishō, the first woman to reign in 859 years; she was enthroned in 1630.

Yoshida Mitsuyoshi, of the Suminokura merchant family, had learned arithmetic from Mōri Shigeyoshi and then studied a Chinese mathematics book, Cheng Dawei's Suanfa tongzong, with his kinsman Suminokura Sōan. In 1627 he published the Jinkōki, a picture-filled abacus manual that stayed in print, in hundreds of versions, until the 19th century.

In 1630 Iemitsu gave Hayashi Razan land at Shinobugaoka in Ueno. Two years later Razan built a private school there, with a library and a hall to Confucius: the seed of the shogunate's later academy.

Matsukura Shigemasa, who had fought Gotō Mototsugu at Dōmyōji, was given the Christian Arima's old domain on the Shimabara peninsula in 1616. He built a castle far beyond its 43,000 koku and squeezed his villages to pay for it. From 1627 he had Christians tortured in the boiling springs of Mount Unzen. He died in 1630, still urging an attack on Manila.

Takenaka Shigeyoshi, lord of Funai in Bungo, became Nagasaki magistrate in 1629, a post normally held by lesser men. At Matsukura Shigemasa's urging he sent Nagasaki's Christians to Unzen, and under him the pit torture came into use. Dismissed in 1633 for illicit trading, he was ordered to kill himself.

Suetsugu Heizō, the shogunate's deputy at Nagasaki and a licensed shipowner, sent his ships to Taiwan, where the Dutch had built a fort in 1624 and began taxing foreign trade at ten per cent. His captains refused to pay.

Pieter Nuyts, fresh from charting the south coast of Australia, came to Edo in 1627 as the company's envoy, with François Caron interpreting for the mission, and was sent away without an audience. As governor of Taiwan he then held Heizō's ships and took their weapons.

In 1628 Heizō's captain Hamada Yahyōe overpowered Nuyts and held him hostage until terms were agreed. Hostages were exchanged for the voyage to Nagasaki, where Heizō jailed the Dutch, and the Dutch factory at Hirado was shut.

Hidetada had kept control of appointments, the court and the family after 1623. In 1631 he had his son Tadanaga confined at Kōfu over reports of violent conduct. He died in March 1632.

Iemitsu, 27, now governed without his father, through people close to him since his youth: his nurse Kasuga-no-Tsubone, his boyhood page Matsudaira Nobutsuna and his favourite Hotta Masamori.

Iemitsu stripped Tadanaga of his 550,000 koku in 1632 and sent him into custody at Takasaki castle. The contemporaries who reported his violence are believed by some historians and doubted by others.

Hidetada's death brought an amnesty, and Takuan was pardoned in 1632 through the efforts of Tenkai and the sword-master Yagyū Munenori among others. Iemitsu took to him: from 1636 Takuan stayed at his side in Edo, and in 1639 became first abbot of Tōkaiji, a temple Iemitsu built.

To reopen the trade, the company dismissed Nuyts and in 1632 handed him over to the Japanese. The Hirado factory reopened that year; Nuyts was held in Japan until 1636.

François Caron had come to Japan in 1619 as a cook's mate, learned Japanese and lived with a Japanese woman, by whom he had six children. As the company's interpreter and then its second man in Japan he did its talking in Edo; in 1636 his gift of a copper lantern, still at Nikkō, won Nuyts's release.

Tadanaga killed himself at Takasaki on the shogunate's order in January 1634, aged 27. He had been held there since 1632, when his brother took his lands. Japanese lists date his death 1633, by the old calendar's year.

Doi Toshikatsu carried Hidetada's government over into Iemitsu's. Moved to Koga with 162,000 koku in 1633, he oversaw the revised Laws for the Military Houses of 1635, which made alternate attendance at Edo a written duty; Hayashi Razan drafted the text.

Sakai Tadakatsu sat on the council beside Doi and in 1634 was given all of Wakasa, with the castle of Obama. In 1638 both men were relieved of daily business and called only for great matters: the beginning of the office later called tairō, great elder.

Matsudaira Nobutsuna had been Iemitsu's page from the shōgun's infancy. In 1633 he became a senior councillor and lord of Oshi; he would stay at the centre of government for nearly thirty years.

Hotta Masamori was Kasuga-no-Tsubone's step-grandson and one of Iemitsu's favourites. He joined the council in 1635 and held Kawagoe, then Matsumoto, then Sakura. His rise came from nearness to the shōgun.

Edicts issued from 1633 to 1636 forbade any Japanese to sail abroad, or, having gone, to come home, on pain of death. In 1636 the Portuguese merchants were shut inside Dejima, an artificial island built in Nagasaki harbour.

Sō Yoshinari, Yoshitoshi's son, held Tsushima and with it Japan's dealings with Korea. Those dealings rested on the state letters his father's men had forged, and his chief retainer knew it.

Yanagawa Shigeoki, whose family had handled the Korea business for the Sō, quarrelled with his lord and revealed the forgeries, hoping to become the shōgun's own vassal. In 1635 Iemitsu heard the case himself before the assembled lords and found for Yoshinari. Shigeoki was exiled to Tsugaru; those who had done the forging were executed or banished.

Kihaku Genpō, the monk who drafted Tsushima's letters at the Iteian temple and had twice gone to Korea as envoy, was exiled to Morioka. From 1635 the shogunate sent learned monks of Kyoto's Five Mountains to Tsushima in turn, to write the Korea letters under its eye.

Inoue Masashige became the shogunate's chief inspector in 1632 and the centre of its hunt for Christians; in 1640 he was made the first head of its religious inquiry.

Cristóvão Ferreira, acting head of the Jesuits in Japan, was caught at Nagasaki in 1633 and hung head-down in the pit. The priests with him died; he renounced his faith. As Sawano Chūan he married a Japanese wife and helped the authorities against his former brothers. News of his fall moved more Jesuits to try to reach Japan.

Matsukura Katsuie succeeded his father at Shimabara and went on taxing his villages through years of failed harvests and torturing those who kept their faith. In December 1637 the peninsula rose.

Terazawa Katataka, lord of Karatsu, also held the Amakusa islands across the water, where he too had pressed the Christians hard. Amakusa rose with Shimabara.

The rebels, villagers and Christians joined by masterless retainers of the old Arima and Konishi houses, took as their leader a youth of about sixteen, Amakusa Shirō, and shut themselves inside the ruined castle of Hara with their families.

Itakura Shigemasa, Itakura Shigemune's younger brother, was sent as the shōgun's commissioner, with Ishigai Sadakiyo as his deputy, but could not make the Kyushu lords attack together. Hearing he was to be replaced, he stormed Hara on the old calendar's New Year's Day, 14 February 1638, and was killed.

Nobutsuna took command, ringed the castle with more than 100,000 men and waited for hunger; the Dutch were asked to bombard it. In April 1638 the starving castle was stormed. Shirō and nearly everyone inside, some 37,000 people, were killed.

Toda Ujikane, lord of Ōgaki, went with Nobutsuna as the second commissioner and argued for keeping up the blockade until hunger did its work, rather than storming the walls.

Hosokawa Tadatoshi, lord of Kumamoto, and his son Mitsunao led one of the great Kyushu contingents in the siege and fought with distinction. Two years later his household took in the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

Iemitsu had Katsuie beheaded at Edo, the only lord of the age so punished, and took Amakusa from Terazawa Katataka, who killed himself in 1647. Kōriki Tadafusa was moved from Hamamatsu to the wrecked Shimabara domain and spent his years there drawing in settlers to farm it again.

Nicolaes Couckebacker, chief of the Dutch factory at Hirado, answered the shogunate's request by bombarding Hara from the ship De Rijp for about two weeks, to little effect. The Dutch had shown they would fire on Christians.

The rising had been fought under Christian banners, and the shogunate suspected the Portuguese of stirring it. In 1639 Portuguese ships were banned from Japan for good, and only the Dutch, among Europeans, still came.

François Caron became chief of the Hirado factory in 1639. In 1640 the inspector Inoue Masashige ordered him to pull down the company's new stone warehouse, because it bore a Christian date; he obeyed, and kept the trade alive.

Maximiliaan le Maire took over from Caron in February 1641 and that year moved the factory to Dejima, the island built for the Portuguese, where the Dutch traded under guard for the next two centuries.

In 1649 a Dutch embassy came to mend relations, bringing the surgeon Caspar Schamberger of Leipzig. While its audience was delayed in Edo he treated high officials, caught the eye of the inspector Inoue Masashige, and was kept on into 1650 and called back in 1651 to teach his surgery.

Inomata Denbei, Schamberger's interpreter, was ordered by the governor of Nagasaki to set down his surgery in writing. Japanese doctors taught it afterwards as Caspar-style surgery.

Amakusa, taken from the Terazawa, came under direct shogunal rule in 1641, and Suzuki Shigenari, a shōgun's retainer who had fought at Hara, became its first administrator. He brought in settlers and doubted the assessment of 42,000 koku the Terazawa had laid on the ruined islands.

Suzuki Shōsan, Shigenari's elder brother, had fought at Sekigahara and Osaka as a shōgun's retainer before becoming a Zen monk. At his brother's request he came to Amakusa, restored temples and in 1642 wrote Ha-Kirishitan, an attack on Christian teaching. He taught that farming, trade or any honest work, done wholeheartedly, was Buddhist practice.

Giuseppe Chiara, one of the Jesuits Ferreira's fall had stirred, landed in Chikuzen in 1643 and was caught at once. In Edo he was questioned at Inoue Masashige's house, with Ferreira assisting, and under the pit torture he renounced his faith. As Okamoto San'emon he spent the rest of his life, 43 years, confined in the Christian prison at Koishikawa.

Kasuga-no-Tsubone, mistress of the women's quarters, had since Gō's death in 1626 brought in one young woman after another in the hope of an heir for Iemitsu.

O-Raku-no-Kata, the daughter of a farmer who had become a minor samurai, was one of them. In September 1641 she bore Iemitsu a son, Ietsuna.

Hoshina Masayuki was Hidetada's son by a maid, kept from Gō's knowledge and raised by the Hoshina lords of Takatō; even Iemitsu did not know of him at first. He became the half-brother Iemitsu trusted, and in 1643 was given Aizu.

Empress Meishō reigned for fourteen years while her father directed her court. In 1643, aged 19, she gave up the throne to a half-brother. She lived on as a retired empress until 1696.

Emperor Go-Kōmyō, Go-Mizunoo's son by a court lady, came to the throne in 1643 aged ten. Masako was made his adoptive mother, so the Tokugawa stayed the emperor's kin in form. He loved Confucian learning, practised martial arts and made little secret of his dislike of the shogunate.

In 1641 Iemitsu ordered a record of the lineage of every lord and every senior retainer. Hayashi Razan was its chief editor; the families sent in their trees and documents, and in 1643 the Kan'ei genealogies, 186 volumes on some 1,400 houses, were presented.

Hayashi Gahō, Razan's third son, born in 1618, had been presented to Iemitsu in 1634 and worked with his father on the genealogies and on the shogunate's chronicle of Japan.

Nakae Tōju left his post in Ōzu domain in 1634, without leave, to look after his mother in Ōmi. At his village school he taught a Confucianism of the heart, drawing more and more on Wang Yangming, and his pupils called him the Sage of Ōmi. He died in 1648.

Kumazawa Banzan studied with Tōju from 1642, and in 1645 entered the service of Ikeda Mitsumasa, lord of Okayama, who shared his taste for Wang Yangming's teaching. He rose to 3,000 koku.

Ikeda Mitsumasa, lord of Okayama from 1632, used Banzan to found a study society for his retainers, whose covenant Banzan drafted in 1651, and in 1654, when flood and famine struck Bizen, to help run the relief.

Miyamoto Musashi had been at Hara too, and was hurt by the rebels' stones. In 1640 Hosokawa Tadatoshi took him in at Kumamoto. Tadatoshi died the next year, and from 1643 Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings in a cave west of the town. He died in 1645.

Matsunaga Teitoku, poet and nephew of the Confucian Fujiwara Seika, taught haikai, comic linked verse, as a craft with rules. His school, the Teimon, spread it through the towns.

Matsue Shigeyori, a Kyoto merchant in silk thread, began an anthology under Teitoku with a fellow pupil; they quarrelled over it, and in 1633 Shigeyori published the Enokoshū alone, the first haikai anthology of the age, and left Teitoku's circle. His Kefukigusa of 1645 became a standard handbook of the school.

Kitamura Kigin, a doctor's son who learned haikai from Teishitsu and then from Teitoku, published Yamanoi in 1648, the first full dictionary of seasonal words, written in part to take his teacher Teishitsu's side against Shigeyori. Bashō would later be his pupil.

Iemitsu died in June 1651, aged 46, after 28 years as shōgun, 19 of them alone. On his deathbed he charged his half-brother Hoshina Masayuki with guarding his heir.

Hotta Masamori, the favourite Kasuga had brought on, killed himself to follow Iemitsu in death, as did other former councillors. Nobutsuna, who did not, was mocked for it in an anonymous verse.

Ietsuna was made shōgun that autumn, aged ten, the first of his line to inherit the title as a child. A council of his father's men governed in his name.

Hoshina Masayuki, guardian of the boy, led the council with Nobutsuna and Abe Tadaaki. After the plot of 1651 they eased the rule that took a lord's domain when he died without an heir, the rule that had made so many samurai masterless.

Abe Tadaaki, a councillor since 1633, had risen from captain of Iemitsu's pages. After the plot he led the council in rethinking its harshness: fewer confiscations, and lords urged to take masterless samurai into service.

Ishigai Sadakiyo, who had been Itakura Shigemasa's deputy at Hara and was wounded in the failed assault, became Edo's north magistrate in 1651. He arrested Marubashi Chūya, and is said to have later found places for a thousand masterless samurai.

Tokugawa Yorinobu, Ieyasu's son and lord of Kii since 1619, was now the senior man of the family. Letters in his name turned up among Yui's papers; they were judged forgeries, but he was kept in Edo until 1659.

Sakai Tadakiyo, grandson of one of Hidetada's elders, joined the council in 1653, still in his twenties, as its senior member. As the old men retired he rose; Sakai Tadakatsu left office in 1656.

Yui Shōsetsu, a teacher of military science in Edo, drew in masterless samurai who blamed the shogunate for their ruin. After Iemitsu's death they planned to fire Edo, kill the councillors and seize the boy shōgun, while Yui himself took the emperor in Kyoto.

Marubashi Chūya, a spear teacher with a school at Ochanomizu, was to lead the attack in Edo. An informer betrayed the plot; Marubashi was taken before it began and crucified at Suzugamori with his mother. At Sunpu Yui killed himself as officers surrounded his inn.

Go-Kōmyō, the emperor whom Yui Shōsetsu's plotters had meant to seize in 1651, died in October 1654, aged 21. His adopted heir, his brother Satohito, was a newborn.

Go-Sai, another son of Go-Mizunoo, was put on the throne in January 1655 to hold it until the infant prince grew up. Through his mother he was first cousin to Date Tsunamune, the future lord of Sendai.

Itsunen Shōyū, a Chinese merchant from Hangzhou who had become abbot of Kōfukuji, the Chinese temple in Nagasaki, invited the Fujian Chan master Yinyuan, Ingen in Japanese, four times.

Ingen Ryūki came at the fourth invitation, sailing in 1654 on a ship fitted out by Zheng Chenggong, with more than twenty disciples. He brought the Buddhism, chanting and manners of late-Ming China. The shogunate, wary of his following, kept him inside his temple near Osaka and capped his monks at 200.

Ryūkei Shōsen, a former abbot of Myōshinji, became Ingen's disciple, installed him at Fumonji and worked to keep him in Japan when his promised three years were up.

Mukai Genshō, a Confucian physician of Nagasaki, was ordered by the shogunate in 1654 to question the Dutch surgeons through interpreters, and wrote up their surgery. He also wrote a rebuttal to Ferreira's translation of a European book on the heavens, seized from the Jesuits caught in 1643.

In March 1657 fire burned most of Edo and the castle's great keep and killed somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people, the worst fire of the age.

Hoshina Masayuki opened the rice stores, controlled prices and gave money to rebuild to samurai and townsmen alike. He left the keep unbuilt: the treasury, he argued, should go to the city.

Nobutsuna, as senior councillor, sent lords home early to empty the city. The branch houses of the Tokugawa moved their mansions outside the castle, the Sumida river was bridged, firebreaks were cut, and in 1658 the shogunate set up standing fire brigades.

Hōjō Ujinaga, a military scholar and chief inspector who had studied Dutch siege gunnery, was ordered to survey the burned city and redraw its blocks. In 1658 he took over the religious inquiry from the retiring Inoue Masashige.

Date Tadamune, Masamune's son, had ruled Sendai since 1636. He died in 1658, several of his retainers following him in death, and his son Tsunamune succeeded.

Date Tsunamune soon alarmed his kinsmen. In 1660 they and his uncle Date Munekatsu took the matter to Sakai Tadakiyo, and on 18 July the shogunate ordered Tsunamune into confinement for unseemly conduct; the shogunate's chronicle blamed drink and pleasure.

Kamechiyo, Tsunamune's son and Masamune's great-grandson, later Date Tsunamura, succeeded at little more than a year old, with two kinsmen appointed his guardians under the shogunate's eye.

Date Munekatsu, Masamune's tenth son, whose heir had married Sakai Tadakiyo's adopted daughter, received 30,000 koku of his own at Ichinoseki and the first guardianship. The day after the order he had four of Tsunamune's close attendants killed. The guardians' rule would end in the Date disturbance of 1671.

Tamura Muneyoshi, a son of Tadamune and Tsunamune's elder half-brother, who had revived his grandmother's family name of Tamura, received 30,000 koku at Iwanuma and the second guardianship.

Hotta Masanobu had inherited Sakura when his father followed Iemitsu in death. In October 1660 he sent Hoshina and Abe a memorial accusing the government of impoverishing the people and the shōgun's retainers, offered to give up his domain, and rode home without leave. Nobutsuna called it madness, which spared his family; his domain was confiscated.

Suzuki Shigenari pressed the shogunate again and again to cut Amakusa's assessment. He died at his Edo house in 1653; the islands' tradition is that he killed himself as a last appeal, leaving a petition behind.

Suzuki Shigetoki, Shōsan's son and Shigenari's adopted heir, succeeded him at Amakusa and kept up the appeal. In 1659 the islands' assessment was halved, from 42,000 koku to 21,000; the Suzuki are still honoured there at a shrine.

The fire burned Hayashi Razan's house and library, and with them the chronicle of Japan he had presented in 1644. He died four days later.

Gahō succeeded him as head of the house in 1657. In the 1660s he would rewrite the lost chronicle; the Honchō tsugan was finished in 1670.

In 1658 Ingen met Ietsuna in Edo. In 1660 the shogunate gave him land at Uji, on the old estate of Go-Mizunoo's mother, and in 1661 he opened Manpukuji, head temple of a new Ōbaku school; Go-Mizunoo was among his patrons.

Yoshida Mitsuyoshi's 1641 edition of the Jinkōki had ended with twelve problems left unanswered, a challenge to anyone who thought himself able to solve them.

In 1653 Enami Tomosumi, an Osaka mathematician, published Sanryōroku: he solved some of the problems, called them too easy, and set eight harder ones of his own.

Yamada Masashige of Kōriyama, in Yamato, published Kaisanki, whose earliest known edition is of 1659, correcting the Jinkōki, the Sanryōroku and other books, solving Mitsuyoshi's problems and leaving eleven new ones. Passing problems on in print became the way Japanese mathematics advanced.

Andō Seian, a Confucian of Yanagawa domain who had been wounded at Hara, went to Nagasaki in 1660 to meet Zhu Shunshui, took him as his teacher, persuaded the authorities to let him stay, and gave him half his own small stipend for six years.

Zheng Zhilong, a Fujian trader and sea lord, had lived at Hirado and married a Japanese woman, Tagawa Matsu; their son was born there in 1624. Made a lord by the Ming loyalists, he went over to the Qing in 1646.

Zheng Chenggong, Koxinga, raised in Hirado until he was seven, refused to submit and fought on for the Ming from the Fujian coast, sending envoys to Japan to ask for troops. In 1659 his attack on Nanjing failed.

Zhu Shunshui, a Ming scholar, had called at Nagasaki four times as Zheng Chenggong's envoy seeking Japanese help, and fought in the Nanjing campaign. After its failure he gave up and settled at Nagasaki in 1659.