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Hindsight has a way of glamorizing warfare. With no battles to wage, the samurai were given bureaucratic and administrative roles. By then, the feudal wars that defined the Sengoku Period had long passed. In effect, they laid the groundwork for a rigid, hereditary caste-like system that put samurai above artisans, peasants and merchants. Hideyoshi's reforms carried over into the Tokugawa Period. "In a lot of cases, it was self-reported and people basically got to choose." "Basically, people who were known to have fought in battles recently were considered samurai and were forbidden to go back to farming, and people who were known to be currently farming land had to surrender their weapons," says historian Nick Kapur of Rutgers University in an email. Under the new rules, only samurai - and samurai alone - could bear arms. This prohibited farmers from owning weapons of any sort. A game-changing warlord, he issued a nationwide " Sword-Hunt Edict" in 1588. Such ambiguity didn't sit well with General Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Before then, all of society was militarized and there was no distinction between peasants and warriors." As Thomas Conlan - a professor of East Asian history at Princeton University - told us via email, "The samurai became an identifiable social status only in the 1590s. This was also a time when Japan redefined its relationship with samurai. International trade was tightly regulated and the shoguns took pains to discourage political squabbling. But things stayed calm under the Tokugawa regime. Yet in practice, these figures were far more powerful and it was they who truly called the shots.Įarlier centuries had been plagued by constant warfare. Shoguns were hereditary military dictators who'd been ruling the country since 1192. The Tokugawa Period takes its name from a shogun family that assumed control of Japan in 1603. Particularly relevant to our discussion are the Sengoku Period of 1467 to 1603 and the successive Tokugawa (or "Edo") Period that lasted until 1868.
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Japanese history is broken down into eras and periods.