Tokugawa shogunate

A lot going on with Jadwiga's story on top of this, and again, episode 168 for all the details there.

Another great one from the archives is episode 232, which is all about a bloke named Tokugawa Ieyasu, who on the 21st of October in the year 1600, this week in history, won the Battle of Sekigahara, an extremely important battle in Japanese history.

We've had a lot of very important battles featured on this week in history recently.

And the Battle of Sekigahara right up there with the likes of the Battle of Hastings in terms of its historical importance.

There's no way I'm going to be able to condense the entire story of Tokugawa Ieyasu in this little synopsis here.

But essentially, after a long period of civil war and strife across Japan, famous figures like Oda Nobunaga were campaigning to unify the splintered realm.

But it was Tokugawa Ieyasu who clinched a decisive victory at Sekigahara to bring Japan together once and for all.

This was the date from which the Tokugawa shogunate is generally considered to have begun a military dictatorship that ruled Japan for the next two and a half centuries.

To understand modern Japan's approach to capital punishment, though, we first need to go back centuries.

Historically, capital punishment first appeared in Japan during the 5th century AD, but it became almost an art form during the Edo period, when the Tokugawa Shogunate ruled the country for more than 250 years from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

At the time, much of the world was entering an era of globalization, and Western powers increasingly pressured their more traditional Eastern counterparts to modernize alongside them.

Determined to keep foreign influence out, the Shogunate enacted the Sokoku Edict of 1635, making isolationism official national policy.

at these sites, the condemned could be boiled alive, crucified, forced to commit ritual disembowelment, beheaded, or put to death by several other methods.

Nearly all of these executions were carried out in public as a warning to anyone else who might consider breaking the law.

To put their scale in perspective, historians estimate that the two execution grounds in Edo alone claimed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 lives during the Tokugawa Shogunate's 264-year rule.

Ironically, the very isolationist policy that had defined the Tokugawa regime would ultimately become its undoing.

However, there are some who argue the war truly started eight years earlier, during September of 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Back in the mid-19th century, Japan remained in the iron grip of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The shogunate established a kind of medieval feudalism known as shinokosho, with samurai warriors occupying the highest social strata and its closed country policy of shokoku aiming to limit trade, foreign influence, and the spread of Christianity.

The policy led to a flourish of artistic and cultural advances, Yet as you can imagine, prohibition of free trade led to significant economic downturns.

I mean, if you look at the trajectory of humanity for the past, we take the past 5000 years, right? Because we always say gold exists for 5000 years.

In that timeframe, and you can look into any culture in the world, go talk about African civilizations, you talk about European civilizations, the Greeks, the Romans, you talk about the Shogunate system in Japan, or you look at India, South America, the Inca and Maya, ownership of land was always tied to political power.

and the ability to generate cash flow through agriculture to then also pay your soldiers.

So senators in Rome had to own land and a certain number of soldiers.

However, there are some who argue the war truly started eight years earlier, during September of 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Back in the mid-19th century, Japan remained in the iron grip of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The shogunate established a kind of medieval feudalism known as shinokosho, with samurai warriors occupying the highest social strata and its closed country policy of shokoku aiming to limit trade, foreign influence, and the spread of Christianity.

The policy led to a flourish of artistic and cultural advances, Yet, as you can imagine, prohibition of free trade led to significant economic downturns.

Let me see, Boshian War Japan, who fought who? Google it live, google it live! Oh, shit, no.

This was the Japanese Civil War in Japan fought from 1868 to 69 between the Tokugawa shogunate and a coalition seeking to seize political power.

And this dude, Jules Brunet, fought with the samurai against the emperor, against the imperial court.

So he really was the first emperor.