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7 results

  • Foreign faith and rising state: An examination of state-building dynamics in late 16th-century Japan

  • Minzhao Wang, Austin Michael Mitchell, Weiwen Yin
  • Journal:
    Political Science Research and Methods , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 July 2025, pp. 1-20
    • Article
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  • How does a ruler implement state-building at the local level? This paper examines state-building in late 16th-century Japan by focusing on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land surveys, which were crucial for establishing a centralized regime. We argue that Hideyoshi strengthened control over the locality via land surveys as a strategic response to the perceived threats emanating from Catholic missionaries. Using various empirical strategies including spatial econometrics, sensitivity analysis, and an instrumental variable approach, we find that the presence of Catholic churches significantly increased the likelihood of a locality being surveyed. These results highlight the importance of information-gathering beyond fiscal purposes for security objectives and emphasize the role of threats from foreign religious institutions in state formation processes.

  • 1 - Founding the Shogun’s Capital

  • Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Williams College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Tokyo
    Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025, pp 1-22

  • Summary

    From a scattering of fishing villages on the Kanto plain far from the bustling capital of Kyoto and the centers of samurai power, medieval Edo transformed first into a castle town and military headquarters for the ambitious warrior Tokugawa Ieyasu and then into the early modern capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early 1600s, driven by the logics of military defense and the societal supremacy of samurai, the warrior government built mechanisms and symbols of its power into the city. Edo Castle rose at its center and the rest of the city spun outward in a spiral pattern that shaped where people lived and how neighborhoods developed. As its physical footprint, economic pull, and political importance grew, early modern Edo catapulted over Kyoto and Osaka to become the largest city of the realm in mere decades.

  • 7 - Ming Grand Strategy during the Great East Asian War, 1592–1598

  • from Part II - The East Asian System over Time
  • Edited by Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego, David C. Kang, University of Southern California
  • Book:
    East Asia in the World
    Published online:
    08 October 2020
    Print publication:
    29 October 2020, pp 108-128

  • Summary

    This chapter looks at the grand strategic implications of the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s, which was successfully thwarted by a Sino-Korean alliance that emerged out of China’s obligations to Korea as part of the so-called tributary system of foreign relations. The Great East Asian War of 1592–1598, known to Koreans as the Imjin War, was the largest conflict on the globe in the sixteenth century yet it is still barely known outside of East Asia. The chapter will offer an overview of how the war fit into the ongoing grand strategy of Ming-dynasty China as it sought to preserve its hegemonic position in East Asia. It will also examine the motivations and strategic calculations of the Japanese hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), who sought to overturn the longstanding Ming order and create a new international system that could have fundamentally altered the course of Asian, if not world, history had it succeeded. In the end, the defeat of Hideyoshi’s ambitions preserved the East Asian world order and China’s hegemonic position therein for another 250 years. In addition to examining the motivations and ramifications of the war through primary research, this chapter touches upon some of the recent historical and political science literature concerning the war and its broader implications for the study of international relations and power politics in the early modern East Asian context.

  • 4 - The bakuhan system

  • Edited by John Whitney Hall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Assisted by James L. McClain
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991, pp 128-182

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the formation and the evolution of the bakuhan structure of government from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. The political and social institutions that underlay the bakuhan polity had their origins in the unification movement of the last half of the sixteenth century, especially in the great feats of military consolidation and social engineering achieved by Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the last two decades of the century. The story of the rise of the Tokugawa family to become the foremost military house of Japan follows a pattern common among a whole class of active regional military families who competed for local dominion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The structure of power over which the Tokugawa shogun ultimately presided was conceived as a balance among several classes of daimyo and the interests of the shogun.

  • 11 - Commercial change and urban growth in early modern Japan

  • Edited by John Whitney Hall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Assisted by James L. McClain
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991, pp 519-595

  • Summary

    The meteoric urban growth that occurred in Japan at the beginning of the early modern period had profound and diverse consequences for Japanese history. Historians have identified seventeen temple towns, all founded in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. In some cases, the daimyo actually converted the temple towns into their own castle headquarters. It has become a historical truism to say that Oda Nobunaga initiated the political and economic programs that resulted in the early modern state; that Toyotomi Hideyoshi amplified them; and that Tokugawa Ieyasu supplied the final institutional refinements. The policies of the shogunate toward currency and the minting of coins also encouraged an expansion in the volume of commercial transactions and contributed to the emergence of castle towns as nodes of economic exchange. The expansion of urban markets was closely linked to the emergence of local towns, such as Johana, where businessmen could produce competitively priced goods.

  • 3 - The social and economic consequences of unification

  • Edited by John Whitney Hall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Assisted by James L. McClain
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991, pp 96-127

  • Summary

    Japan underwent a major transformation in its social organization and economic capacity during the latter half of the sixteenth century. The three hegemonic leaders, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who forged the military unification of Japan during the latter half of the sixteenth century. This chapter focuses on the events of the late sixteenth century, the pivotal transitional years that separated the chūsei from the kinsei epoch. The expansion of the productive capacity of agriculture was the keystone supporting the economic foundations of Japan's early modern society. Commerce and urban centers grew together during the sixteenth century. At this time Kyoto was still Japan's most important political city, as well as a center of a superlative tradition of craft and artisan production. The specific characteristics of the early modern social system were also closely associated with the requirements of the commercial economy.

  • 2 - The sixteenth-century unification

  • Edited by John Whitney Hall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Assisted by James L. McClain
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991, pp 40-95

  • Summary

    The unification of Japan in the sixteenth century had given risen to kõgi authority. In the ninth month of 1568, Oda Nobunaga entered Kyoto at the head of some fifty thousand troops drawn from Mino, Owari, and neighboring provinces, thus raising the curtain on a new scene in Japan's history. The kind of institutional structure that Nobunaga envisaged as a replacement for the old Muromachi bakufu is lost to historians, as Nobunaga was killed before he could achieve a national military hegemony, a precondition to more sweeping and permanent institutional change. At the time of Nobunaga's death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the general who was to succeed Nobunaga, was engaged at the front in Bitchū Province. The state created by Oda Nobunaga and Hideyoshi was basically a military hegemony imposed on the heads of all warrior bands of daimyo who had staked out their own local territorial claims.