The first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate (or Edo shogunate), Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), founded and initially ruled over the last period of traditional Japan. His time was one of internal peace, military control, financial growth and absolute political stability.
There were many ways how Tokugawa Ieyasu maintained dominion over his land but the main technique he used was to divide his people into social ranks and give each class a specifically chosen set of rules to make sure they all run smoothly, and that he would stay at the top of the hierarchy. This nobility division also inspired the values and virtues of the people of modern-day Japan.
How Tokugawa came to Power
The period from 1477 until 1568 was a time of disorder and disunity in Japan since the Ashikaga shogunate couldn’t …show more content…
From then on, Nobunaga cleared Kyoto of his enemies and gradually began to spread his control to other parts of the country until he was treacherously killed in 1582 by one of his leading generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, who in turn was killed by another of Nobunaga's generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi who by 1590 had made himself the undisputed master of the country after undertaking the task of unification of Japan that Nobunaga had begun.
After unifying the country, Hideyoshi arranged to have Ieyasu move his domain from the region of the Nagoya Plain to the eastern provinces of the Kanto. YourDictionary (2004) says that his intent was presumably to remove Ieyasu as far as possible from his own base in the central provinces. Yet in so doing he allowed Ieyasu to establish himself in the most agriculturally wealthy part of the country, from which the Tokugawa leader was able to assert his power on the national level after Hideyoshi's