Tokugawa Japan and the crisis of the Bakumatsu era

From 1603 until 1868, Japan was governed by the Tokugawa shogunate, headquartered in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Its political system, known as bakuhan, fused a central military government, the bakufu, with a patchwork of semi-autonomous feudal domains, the han, each ruled by a regional lord or daimyo. Society was rigidly stratified according to the shi-no-ko-sho hierarchy of samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants, while the emperor lived apart from all of this in Kyoto, holding symbolic authority but no real political power. To prevent the daimyo from building independent power bases, the shogunate imposed the sankin-kotai system, which forced them to reside in Edo in alternating years, at enormous personal expense.