Tokugawa Shogunate in AP World History: Modern

Every other year in Edo: how the shogun tamed the daimyo

Start with the policy the Tokugawa are best known for. Under alternate attendance (sankin-kotai, formalized in 1635), each daimyo, a regional lord with his own land and warriors, had to live in the shogun's capital of Edo (modern Tokyo) every other year. When he went home, his wife and heir stayed behind in Edo.

That one rule did several jobs. The families in Edo worked as hostages. The constant travel with large processions drained the daimyo's money, so they had less left over to raise armies. And the lords spent half their lives where the shogun could watch them.

This matters because Japan had just come out of more than a century of civil war among rival lords. Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and took the title of shogun in 1603. His successors' main problem was keeping the daimyo from fighting again, and alternate attendance was their answer.

Salaried samurai next to the Ottoman devshirme

The Tokugawa fit into Topic 3.2 (Empires: Administration), part of Unit 3's larger question about how rulers from 1450 to 1750 legitimized and consolidated power. The course lists "samurai who received salaries" as an illustrative example of elite administrators or career soldiers, the same category as the Ottoman devshirme.

In the long Tokugawa peace, samurai stopped being independent fighters with their own power base. Most were moved into castle towns and paid stipends, measured in rice, by the shogun or their daimyo. Many ended up working as bureaucrats. A warrior who depends on a salary is much less likely to rebel than one who controls land.

The devshirme also produced a dependent elite, but by a different route. The Ottomans took Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam, and trained them as Janissary soldiers or officials who served the Ottoman central government. Both systems supported governing elites, but their loyalty pointed in different directions. A Tokugawa samurai could serve either the shogun or a daimyo, so many samurai owed their loyalty to a regional lord. Devshirme recruits served the sultan's government directly.

The systems also differ in where the elite came from. Japan reshaped an existing hereditary warrior class, while the Ottomans recruited outsiders with no family ties to the existing nobility.

Why Japan isn't on the list of four land empires

A common slip is treating Tokugawa Japan as one of the empires named in Topics 3.1 and 3.4. The course names four: the Manchu (Qing), Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid. Japan isn't one of them, and it didn't expand on anything like their scale. The main exception came in 1609, when the Satsuma domain, ruled by a daimyo in southern Japan, conquered the Ryukyu Kingdom. Otherwise, Japan's rulers mostly worked to hold together territory they already controlled.

That makes the shogunate a comparison case. Firearms brought by the Portuguese in the 1540s helped decide Japan's wars of unification, so gunpowder still shows up in the Tokugawa story. But the Tokugawa used military power mainly to end internal war and keep order at home, while the Ottomans and Mughals used it to build large empires. If a multiple-choice question pairs Japan with one of the four, look for that shared method of consolidation, or that difference in purpose.

Sakoku, Nagasaki, and the threads into Units 4 and 6

The shogunate banned Christianity nationwide in 1614. In the 1630s it issued edicts that forbade Japanese people from traveling abroad, and in 1639 it expelled the Portuguese. Later historians called this policy sakoku ("closed country"). It wasn't total isolation. Dutch merchants kept a small trading post on Dejima, an island in Nagasaki harbor, and Chinese traders also kept access.

This links to Unit 4. While new ship designs and navigation tools from Topic 4.1 were connecting the world's oceans, Japan's rulers chose to filter that contact. They saw Christianity and foreign alliances as threats to the shogun's control.

The Unit 6 thread is the ending. In 1853 the American commodore Matthew Perry arrived with warships and pushed Japan to open its ports. That happened as industrial powers were pulling more of the world into trade during the period covered by Topic 6.4 (Global Economic Development, 1750 to 1900). The shogunate couldn't resist the outside pressure, and that weakness helped bring about its fall in 1868. The Meiji government that replaced it then led Japan's state-sponsored industrialization.

Turning Tokugawa policies into evidence for an SAQ or long essay

One useful way to prepare for a multiple-choice question about the shogunate is to practice comparisons. One example might ask what Tokugawa alternate attendance and Ottoman or Mughal use of local elites have in common, and the answer is that both are strategies for centralizing control. Another stem might describe the samurai's shift to salaried officials and ask what consolidation problem it solved, which is the threat that independent regional warriors posed to central authority.

On a short-answer question, especially one built around a source on state power, Tokugawa Japan gives you specific evidence. A strong answer names a policy, such as alternate attendance or salaried samurai, and explains how it reduced the daimyo's independence. Writing "Japan was centralized" with no mechanism won't earn the point.

On the long essay, a prompt on how rulers consolidated power from 1450 to 1750 lets you pair the Tokugawa with the Ottomans or Qing. Good evidence includes:

• Alternate attendance and hostages in Edo as control of regional elites
• Salaried samurai compared with the devshirme as dependent career elites, noting that many samurai served a daimyo while devshirme recruits served the Ottoman central government
• The 1630s edicts and the ban on Christianity as protection of the shogun's authority

One wording tip: use "Tokugawa Shogunate" for the government and its policies, and "Edo period" for the era of peace and city growth it produced. They cover the same years, but the government is the subject of the 3.2 objective.