Edo Castle

And the Oku was a closed off section of the castle where the women who served the Shogun resided.

Yes, this would be Edo Castle just because we're talking about the Shogunate and things like that.

But yeah, the Oku is real.

In the movies, they refer to the head as the emperor instead of the Shogun.

An article in Weekly Wunshin announced that the writer with whom Sakurai had an affair was unaware that Sakurai was married until just before the recording of the final episode of the show they worked on together because the voice actor had been very private about his status.

The newspaper added that the writer was so shocked after finding out that Sakurai was married that she had to be admitted to the emergency room and retired from writing afterward.

So the actor was removed from the production, and I actually really like the response that the studio gave, which is that the animated film Mononoke sets in Ooku, historically the women's quarters of Edo Castle, and tries to depict the suffering and remedy of women.

Judging from the standpoint of the story, we decided to change the cast of The Medicine Cellar.

which the shogunate's own advisers knew was militarily impossible, but which had considerable emotional appeal among those who had not examined it closely.

I Naosuke, the senior Tokugawa official who signed the Harris Treaty in 1858, and then attempted to suppress the resulting political opposition through a series of arrests and executions known as the Ansei Purge, was assassinated outside the shogunate's Edo castle in the third month of 1860 by a group of warriors from the Mito domain, acting in the name of the Sono-Joi cause.

The killing of the shogunate's most powerful official in front of his own headquarters demonstrated that the political order was under genuine physical threat and that the instruments of Tokugawa authority were no longer capable of protecting even their own leadership without restriction.

The domains of Choshu in western Honshu and Satsuma in southern Kyushu became the centres of anti-shogunate activity.

69.

Fought between imperial forces moving northward and the Tokugawa-aligned domains that had not accepted the restoration, the largest potential confrontation was avoided through negotiation.

Edo Castle, the administrative centre of the Tokugawa shogunate and the most formidable fortified position in Japan, was surrendered without a fight through the efforts of the former shogunate's naval commander, Katsu Kaishu.

and the imperial forces representative Saigo Takamori of Satsuma.

Let's lay out the inciting incident.

So we have Lord Asano, a, a daimyo, who is summoned to Edo Castle.

He is provoked and repeatedly insulted by a powerful, corrupt bakufu official named Kira Yoshinaka.

And in a moment of blind rage, Asano draws his short sword and attacks Kira within the Matsu no Ōrōka, the great corridor of pines inside the shogun's palace.

Now, to a modern reader, a brief scuffle in a hallway might seem like a minor offense, right?

Right, perhaps warranting a fine or a demotion.

But in the context of the Pax Tokugawa, drawing a blade inside Edo Castle was a system-breaking crime.

Why? Why is the punishment so absolute?

In practice, he ruled supreme and all bowed to him.

From his ancestral home at Edo Castle, the shogun governed with the aid of a vast aristocratic class, the samurai.

It was an ancient feudal system that had endured for centuries.

The shogunal system was created early in the 17th century, and the first shogun was deified.

So people thought that there must be coins in there.

Ōguri escaped just in time.

When the emperor's forces arrive in Edo Castle, they immediately go into the treasuries and find that there are no coins there at all.

The treasuries were empty.

We've seen court sorceresses at Versailles, secret rescue networks in Renaissance Rome, colonial autocrats in Chile, frontier death traps in Kansas, subterranean deliverers in Russia, gaslit figures in Barcelona, poison maidens in ancient India, imperial strategists in Ethiopia, guerrilla generals in the Philippines, pirate queens off Canton, trench defenders in New Zealand, and survival strategists in Tasmania.

But tonight, for the grand finale of our core roster, we travel to Edo period Japan, behind the heavy wooden gates and gilded sliding screens of Edo Castle.

To the outside world, the Tokugawa shogunate was absolute.

The shogun ruled Japan with a military iron fist, enforced by samurai, rigid class systems, and total isolation from the West.

When a shogun was weak, young, or incapacitated, figures like Tensho-in, Atsuhime, and Takayama wielded supreme influence over succession disputes, foreign policy decisions, and state appointments.

During the chaotic twilight of the shogunate in the 1850s and 60s, as Western gunboats arrived and civil war loomed, the matriarchs proved their ultimate strategic worth.

When imperial forces marched on Edo Castle in 1868, the Tensho-in used her extensive diplomatic connections and political leverage to negotiate the peaceful surrender of Edo Castle, saving the Tokugawa clan from total slaughter and preserving the city from burning to the ground.

What makes the matriarchs of the Oku so fascinating is how they weaponized total isolation.