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 ...

  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, suff...

  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....

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 ...

  Louis XIV’s successes would have been impossible without the brilliant workaholic he appointed to oversee the economy– Jean Baptiste Colbert . Exposing massive corruption under his predecessor, Colbert clawed back millions from bankers and arms manufacturers who had stolen from the government with complete impunity. The government was still too weak to collect taxes directly, however. Instead, “tax farmers”--private corporations that used violence to squeeze revenue from the common people–gave the government a fixed portion of what they could collect and kept the rest for themselves. Colbert made sure that tax farmers had to bid competitively to win the right to collect from a particular province, thus greatly increasing the government’s percentage of total revenue collected. In addition, the palace of Versailles (see Section 3) played a major role in the French economy. First of all, it consumed an average of 10% of the state budget during its construction (1661-1715), money tha...

When he became king in an elaborate church ceremony in 1661, Louis’s formal relationship with God was solidified in the eyes of his people. Many believed that the king of France had healing powers. Visiting the Abbey of Saint Remi, Louis was met by 2500 people afflicted with scrofula, tuberculosis of the neck. “Louis touched each one, tracing the sign of the cross over every ravaged face with the open palm of his right hand. As he did so, he spoke the words, ‘God heals you, the king touches you.’... To be king meant that his subjects, high and low, saw Louis as a living God… with the necessary qualities to enable him to represent divine law and order in nature.” Along with his power over the government and armies of France, Louis was responsible for “the spiritual welfare of his people” and the defense of Catholicism.   During the ceremony that made him formally king, the bishop who officiated publicly urged Louis to crack down on French Protestants, whose rights were protected by ...

The palace of Versailles personified Louis XIV’s vision of one absolute monarch dominating all of France. Nine miles outside of Paris, Versailles started as his father, Louis XIII ’s, hunting lodge. After his mother Queen Anne’s death, Louis XIV tired of Paris, with its sad memories of the Fronde (see Section 1) and of his beloved mother. He decided to expand Versailles into a semi-permanent court from which to rule France. Every detail of the palace was micromanaged by the king, who regularly visited the building site and demanded regular reports on progress. The palace featured a total of 1,840 rooms and some of the most famous architects, artists and gardeners in the world collaborated in its construction. Versailles was designed to be the most amazing place on Earth: “an art gallery; a year-round festival of music; a hunt and riding school… [being at Versailles] raised the status of musicians, writers and painters, and helped create new kinds of music, opera, ballets, and gardens...