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Updated: June 8, 2025
Thus in the provinces of Omi, of Suruga, of Mutsu, of Iwashiro, of Iwaki, of Echigo, of Etchu, of Echizen, of Bizen, of Bitchu, of Bingo, of Harima, of Tamba, and elsewhere, there are found in later ages noble families all tracing their descent to one or another of the Shido shoguns despatched on the task of pacifying the country in the days of the Emperor Sujin.
Six Shoguns, members of the Tokugawa family, lie buried at Ueno. In general style the tombs here resemble those at Shiba Park. There are many objects of interest in Ueno Park other than its temples. One is the bronze image of Buddha, twenty-one and a half feet high, known as Dai-butsu, near which is a massive torii. We passed along an avenue of stately cryptomerias where stands an ancient pagoda.
Of the many fair scenes of Yedo, none is better worth visiting than the temple of Zôjôji, one of the two great burial-places of the Shoguns; indeed, if you wish to see the most beautiful spots of any Oriental city, ask for the cemeteries: the homes of the dead are ever the loveliest places.
The Mikados lost all real power, and the Shoguns or Tycoons had the actual government in their hands. In recent times a revolution occurred which restored to the Mikado the power which had belonged to him in the ancient times, before the changes just related took place.
The Hojo adopted towards the shoguns the same policy as that previously pursued by the Fujiwara towards the sovereigns appointment during the years of childhood and removal on reaching full manhood.* But the shoguns were not unavenged.
These chapels are mostly the tombs of the Shoguns who for many years were powerful nobles and who really ruled Japan in place of the Emperor, a mere figurehead in those days. The magnificent tombs they built for themselves are now the very pride of Tokyo. Within the great red gates of the main temple, upheld with scarlet columns, wheeled flights of pigeons quite tame.
When Prince Tokugawa Iyémochi, the last but one of the Shoguns, left Yedo for Kiôto, one Shimmon Tatsugorô, chief of the Otokodaté, undertook the management of his journey, and some three or four years ago was raised to the dignity of Hatamoto for many faithful services. After the battle of Fushimi, and the abolition of the Shogunate, he accompanied the last of the Shoguns in his retirement.
Probably before as well as after the introduction of the Chinese penal codes, the so-called Ming and Tsing codes, by which the country was ruled under the Shoguns, the bulk of the nation was literally under the rod. Common folk were punished by cruel whippings for the most trifling offences.
It might have been expected that the Tokugawa shoguns would at least have endeavoured to soften this administrative effacement by pecuniary generosity; but so little of that quality did they display that the Emperor and the ex-Emperor were perpetually in a state of financial embarrassment.
Before, 1867, Japan was a feudal federation of clans, in which the Central Government was in the hands of the Shogun, who was the head of his own clan, but had by no means undisputed sway over the more powerful of the other clans. There had been various dynasties of Shoguns at various times, but since the seventeenth century the Shogunate had been in the Tokugawa clan.
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