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Japan Past and Present
in 1598 gave them a welcome excuse for abandoning the whole venture, and their armies streamed home. Japan’s first organized attempt at overseas conquest had ended in complete failure.
The political vacuum created by the death of Hideyoshi was soon filled by one of his foremost vassals, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had been Hideyoshi’s chief deputy in eastern Japan, where he had built himself a castle headquarters at the small village of Edo, the future Tokyo. In 1600, Ieyasu decisively defeated a coalition of rivals, and fifteen years later he destroyed the remnants of Hideyoshi’s family when he captured the great Osaka castle by trickery and overwhelming might.
Ieyasu, impressed by the inability of the heirs of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi to keep the reins of government in their own hands, was obsessed with the idea of building up a political system strong enough to survive his death. Political stability became his primary goal, and it was equally sought and maintained by his successors. There is no doubt that the Tokugawa created political stability. During the first half of the seventeenth century they created a political system which was to endure almost unchanged for two and a half centuries, and which was to establish a state of domestic peace as complete as that enjoyed by any people at any time. Unfortunately, they secured peace and stability by a series of rigid controls over society, by ruthless suppression of many of the most creative tendencies in the Japan of that day, and by a return to many of the outmoded forms of feudalism—in short, by resorting to what was essentially a reactionary