The Tokugawa (or Edo) period brings two…

The Tokugawa (or Edo) period brings two hundred years of stability to Japan.

The political system evolves into what historians call bakuhan, a combination of the terms bakufu and han (domains) to describe the government and society of the period.

In the bakuhan, the shogun has national authority and the daimyo have regional authority, a new unity in the feudal structure, which has an increasingly large bureaucracy to administer the mixture of centralized and decentralized authorities.

The Tokugawa becomes more powerful during their first century of rule: land redistribution gives them nearly seven million koku, control of the most important cities, and a land assessment system reaping great revenues.