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Updated: June 8, 2025
The depraved state of affairs brought the administration of the Tokugawa into wide disrepute, and loyal vassals of the family sadly contrasted the evil time with the days of Ieyasu, seventy years previously. The great financial straits to which the Imperial Court was reduced during the time of the Muromachi shoguns have been already described.
However, the social organism did not develop to the limit of its type until the era of the Tokugawa shoguns, so that, in order to study it as a completed structure, we must turn to modern times.
This defeat was immediately followed by the death of the young shogun, who had been worn out by the intense anxiety of his period of rule. He was succeeded by the last of the shoguns, Keiki, appointed head of the Tokugawa family in October, 1866, and shogun in January, 1867. This position he had frequently declined. He was far too weak and fickle a man to hold it at such a time.
But from the days of the sixth and the seventh shoguns, Ienobu and Ietsugu, such provisions of criminal law as related to ordinary offences came to be written in the most intelligible style and placarded throughout the city of Yedo and provincial towns or villages.
It has always to be remembered, too, that Kyushu, the headquarters of Christianity in Japan, did not owe to the Tokugawa shoguns the same degree of allegiance that it had been forced to render to Hideyoshi.
The Guji then calls my attention to the quaint relics lying upon the long low bench between us, which is covered with white silk: a metal mirror, found in preparing the foundation of the temple when rebuilt many hundred years ago; magatama jewels of onyx and jasper; a Chinese flute made of jade; a few superb swords, the gifts of shoguns and emperors; helmets of splendid antique workmanship; and a bundle of enormous arrows with double-pointed heads of brass, fork-shaped and keenly edged.
The poorer classes of samurai being increasingly distressed, they, too, borrowed money at high rates of interest from merchants and wealthy farmers, which loans they were generally unable to repay. Ultimately, the Bakufu solved the situation partially by decreeing that no lawsuit for the recovery of borrowed money should be entertained a reversion to the tokusei system of the Ashikaga shoguns.
Thereafter, Buddhism became the national religion, which position it held until the days of the Tokugawa shoguns, when it was supplanted among educated Japanese by the moral philosophy of Confucius, as interpreted by Chutsz, Wang Yang-ming, and others.
Bred to arms, leading the armies of the empire in many a hard-fought war, making the camp their home, and loving best the trumpet-blast of battle, they became hardy and daring warriors, the military caste of Japan. While war continued, the shoguns were content to let the Fujiwara lord it at court, themselves preferring the active labors of the field.
We saw the university and the park where the tombs of the shoguns are, and those tombs are wonderful, just to look at from the car. About to-morrow we may be able to go to the museum. The rows of stone lanterns are impressive beyond anything I had imagined; hundreds of them which must have given to the nights they illuminated a wonderfully weird spectral look.
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