The measures the early Tokugawa took to insure the continuance of their regime were indeed drastic. They stifled the normal social and economic development of the land, laid a heavy hand upon the initiative of the people, and so isolated Japan from the rest of the world that she dropped far behind Europe in scientific and industrial achievements. Even Japan’s population stopped growing after about 1700 and remained relatively static at about 30,000,000 during the remaining century and a half of Tokugawa rule. And yet, it must be admitted that the Tokugawa were supremely successful in establishing the political stability they sought. Between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, no revolution, disturbance, or incident in any way threatened the rule of the Tokugawa. The peace of the land was broken only by occasional and sporadic outbursts of man and nature—a great fire at Edo, a destructive earthquake, the last great eruption of the now extinct volcano of Fuji, an occasional rice riot by impoverished city-dwellers, scattered riots by still more impoverished peasants demanding a greater share of their own produce—but nothing on a national scale and nothing which could shake the existing political or social order.
Perhaps the best idea of the carefully guarded political tranquillity of this time can be gained from the story of the only political incident that at least emotionally shook the nation during these two hundred years. It has become the favorite literary and dramatic theme in modern Japan. This was the incident of the “Forty-Seven Ronin,” which took place between 1701 and 1703.
