Person1604 – 1651
Tokugawa Iemitsu
Third Tokugawa shogun (r. 1623–1651), who institutionalised alternate attendance and completed the ban on Christianity and the closed-country system
Where they went
3 related events
- 1
The Edo shogunate built the bakuhan system, in which the shogun’s government (bakufu) and the daimyo domains (han) shared rule over land and people, and bound the daimyo with the Laws for Military Houses (1615) and alternate attendance (1635).
- 2
In 1637 the peasants and Christians of Shimabara and Amakusa in Kyushu rose against crushing taxes and persecution and held out in Hara Castle, but were crushed by the shogunate’s army in 1638.
- 3
To keep out Christianity the Edo shogunate forbade Japanese to go abroad, expelled Portuguese ships in 1639 and in 1641 moved the Dutch trading post to Dejima in Nagasaki, confining trade with the West to that island.
People who appear alongside
- Tokugawa Ieyasu1543 – 1616
Founder of the Edo shogunate, who won at Sekigahara in 1600, became shogun in 1603 and destroyed the Toyotomi house in 1615
- Amakusa Shirō1638
Christian youth hailed as leader of the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638), killed when Hara Castle fell
Themes this person appears in
- Ming, Qing and Edo Japan1500 – 1800
The age when the Ming, shaken by northern raiders, southern pirates and the silver economy, fell to Li Zicheng’s rebels, and the Manchu Qing reached its greatest extent and prosperity under Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — as Japan was unified out of the Warring States into the Edo shogunate’s bakuhan order and closed country, and Joseon, after two great wars, met its neighbours through embassies to Edo and the Northern Learning