Tokugawa shogunate

30 years later, another suggested the word might come from Sanskrit, where matangi is a term referring to those who slaughter animals for meat.

I've seen in a few different places a folk etymology about a hunter being stopped at a border checkpoint during the Tokugawa period, who when asked about his profession would say he was a bark gatherer, mada hagi in Japanese, which eventually drifted into matagi, a reference to the fact that many of these hunter communities were by the late feudal era engaged in many pastimes other than just hunting.

Compelling, but not exactly conclusive, probably it's a sort of retrospective reverse etymology.

On the rare occasions you see the name written in kanji, Chinese characters, it's usually glossed as mata, once more or more than, and gi, a variant reading of the kanji for oni, the demons of Japanese folklore.

Bare bile in particular was a huge part of that, it's very important in traditional Chinese medicine, and like a lot of Chinese medicine actually does have an active ingredient, ursodeoxycholic acid, as of course we all know, that does have some genuine uses in treating things like your liver issues or gallbladder problems.

That meant there was a lot of demand for it, and matagi communities could sustain themselves very well financially through hunting bears, selling their gall, and of course pelts, meat, and other byproducts all got a pretty good price too.

This tidy arrangement also kept the matagi somewhat isolated from the national economy, because under the system of the Tokugawa shoguns, remember, all trade was under the authority of the local feudal lord.

Therefore, domains like Hirosaki and Nanbu could make use of their local matagi by buying what they hunted and then selling it along with a tidy markup.

So for centuries they tried to copy the Ch- Chinese.

It didn't really work, and it eventually devolved into what became like Meiji and Tokugawa.

But they were always sort of peripheral.

They still tried to create their own tributary systems historically, right? And one of the, one of the things Koreans and Japanese are always arguing, "No, no, you're..." [laughs] You know, who's, who's like this.

But all Chushingura stem from one historical event.

In the early 18th century, during the days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a daimyo, or lord, named Asano Naganori committed ritual suicide as punishment for attacking another daimyo named Kira Yoshinaka, although there is some historical debate about Kira's first name.

Retellings of the story tend to frame Asano's attack on Kira as a justified retaliation to insults or general unpleasantness, or Kira demanding bribes.

But during this historical period, drawing any weapon within the walls of Edo Castle was forbidden.

In the middle of the 19th century, Japan was not a modern industrial state.

It was governed by the Tokugawa shogunate, divided into feudal domains, and protected by a policy that sharply limited contact with the outside world.

Then, in the 1850s, American warships commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japanese waters.

Their guns demonstrated a painful reality.

The Dutch East India Company, not the government of Holland at all.

Very interestingly, the Dutch East India Company as a whole was adopted as an honorary branch of the Tokugawa family.

And that was the basis on which those merchants were able to enter Japan at that time.

Fun fact.

For this period, which again is 15th century to 16th centuries, and everything is kind of really cleaned up by 1615 with the Battle of Osaka, when the heirs of Toyotomi Hideyoshi are either driven away and survive secretly, according to some conspiracy theories, which were current at the time.

Maybe his heir might have fled to Taiwan, as one rumor went.

But no, then things are firmly in Tokugawa hands.

And under the Tokugawa, the main kind of state ceremonial really does become the no theater.

How can you ignore it? That is the famous shiit to the riigash.

Which is the psalm of the Shogunate.

It says, These are all taken from the Rumi Gash.

It was his Eintal.

はいはい。六郷の渡し。歴史の授業で聞いたことがあります。

ここで面白いのが、江戸幕府はここを非常に重要視しながらも、戦略的な理由から意図的に橋を架けなかったんです。

えっと、橋を架けない。それってつまり。

はい。