Frosty Stuff

The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) Guiding Questions: What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face?  How did they centralize power?     Section 4: Invasion of Korea, Sakoku and Christianity Although the period you are reading about this week was defined by Japan’s strict isolation from the outside world, it began with not one, but two disastrous invasions of Korea. Hideyoshi , Japan’s second Unifier, invaded Korea in 1592 and 1598 as a stepping stone towards his ultimate goal of conquering China.  Hideyoshi once claimed that when he was born, a great light flooded the room and a divine voice told his mother, “When he reaches the prime of life, his virtue will illuminate the four seas, his authority will emanate to the myriad peoples.” The “four seas” is a reference to the Japanese belief at the time that there were only three great nations in the world–China, Japan and India. Therefore, this quote is interpreted by most historians as a desire for world do

  The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) Guiding Questions: What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face?  How did they centralize power?   Section 3: Buddhism In Japan today, 46% of the population identifies as Buddhists, while a slightly larger number follow the native religion of Shinto. In practice, most Japanese believers combine and/or switch between both faiths, depending on the occasion, the religious culture of a particular place, or just their personal preference. For the purposes of this reading, we are going to focus on Buddhist monks, since they played a key role in the stories of the 3 Unifiers– Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. A key belief of Buddhism is that life is suffering. You suffer when bad things happen to you, obviously, but you also suffer as a result of good things, because you realize on some level that happiness is fleeting and that all the people you love (including yourself) will one day grow old, suffer painful ill

  The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) Guiding Questions: What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face?  How did they centralize power?   Section 2: Hierarchy in Japan The shogun (the actual rulers of Japan) and daimyo (domain lords who ruled over individual provinces) had the most power in Japan. Section 1 explains the shogun’s power and how he tamed the daimyo; this section will describe how everyone else fit into the Tokugawa period’s rigid social hierarchy.   There were 45 daimyo in Hideyoshi’s time and each one had enormous power over the people who lived in his domain. They could prevent people from marrying, leaving their villages, wearing certain kinds of clothes, eating certain foods, and they even banned forms of entertainment at weddings and festivals they considered disruptive.  Hideyoshi forbade any daimyo from having more than one castle, systematically destroying all other fortifications in their former domain. As he stated in 1582, “I sha

The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) Guiding Questions: What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face?  How did they centralize power?   Section 1: Taming the Daimyo Oda Nobunaga’s palace, Azuchi, is unfortunately just a set of ruins today, having been destroyed in the fighting that took place after his assassination. The lower levels of the palace featured art depicting lesser gods and heroes; the higher you went, the more important became the people and gods depicted. Oda’s personal room was at the very top and the only decoration in it was a huge mirror. This highly decorative mirror is one of the three Sacred Treasures of Japan (along with a sword and jewel), brought to Earth by the first emperor, a grandson of the Sun Goddess Amateratsu. The Sacred Treasures have not been available for public viewing for almost 1,000 years, but the Imperial Court still claims to possess them. Oda’s placement of this sacred mirror at the top of his hierarchy of gods, dem