Tokugawa Yoshinobu

Over the following centuries the power of the emperor and the imperial court gradually declined and passed to the military clans and their armies of samurai warriors. The Minamoto clan under Minamoto no Yoritomo emerged victorious from the Genpei War of 1180–85. After seizing power, Yoritomo set up his capital in Kamakura and took the title of shogun. In 1274 and 1281, the Kamakura shogunate withstood two Mongol invasions, but in 1333 it was toppled by a rival claimant to the shogunate, ushering…

The last unifier Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in 1543 to a minor warlord in Okazaki. He grew up in a time of great chaos and disorder in Japan (the Sengoku period, he was forced to spend most of his childhood as a hostage of the Imagawa clan. Ieyasu received military and political training from the Imagawa family and became a military leader. He allied himself with two senior leaders firstly with Oda Nobunaga and later on with Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In 1600 Ieyasu became known as the most powerful…

classes consisting of Samurai, Farmer, Artisan and Merchant. There was the ideal version of social organization that we preferred by the Tokugawa Government however this format did not really match the reality of Edo period life. In the article, Tokugawa Period/Edo Period: Economy and Society, it says that, “the merchant class, officially at the bottom of the Tokugawa social structure, benefited greatly from the period’s economic growth and… the merchant class created a new style of life and…

By the end of the twelfth century, as rivalries among the noble families led to almost constant civil war, centralizing forces again asserted themselves. A powerful noble from a warrior clan named Minamoto Yoritomo defeated several rivals and set up his power base on the Kamakura. To strengthen the state, he created a more centralized government under a powerful military leader known as the shogun. The shogun attempted to increase the powers of the central government while reducing rival…

Zoughari, Kacem. The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan (The Secret History of Ninjutsu). 1 ed., Vermont, Tuttle Publishing, 2013, pp. 28-88. The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan (The Secret History of Ninjutsu), is a book about the art of ninjitsu, including its various forms, how it is practiced and the history of ninjitsu. However, for doing research on historical ninja, its second and third chapters, “The Public Record of Ninjitsu”, and “The Private History of Ninjitsu,” proved…

The Yakuzas, a criminal underground organization that lurks within the shadows of Japan, featured a various amounts of innovative tactics, unlawful activities and strategic formation. These gruesome barbaric acts that highly benefited the organizations, was insured by the “Oyabun”. The term, Oyabun, means boss. (It’s the highest role and figure in the organization.) Every “head honcho” had their differing ideologies than the previous leader of which helped the progression of the gang move…

This time period was marked by “the powerful southwestern tozama domains of Chōshū and Satsuma exerted the greatest pressure on the Tokugawa government and brought about the overthrow of the last shogun.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica) A shogun was a military ruler. The government structure was “required the domainal lords, or Daimyo, to maintain households in the Tokugawa administrative capital of Edo.”(Encyclopedia Brittanica) The story of Momotaro is a folktale, which is a characteristically…