tokugawa period

Artist's rendition of Amakusa Shirō, leader of the peasantry during the Kirishitan Uprising The Sparks of Rebellion (1570s-1630s) Japan in the 1630s was a relatively peaceful area (when compared to anywhere else in the world). The state had been pulled out of the long Sengoku Era that ravaged...

Suppose that the Tokugawa government starts its modernization earlier - perhaps by having Yoshinobu become shogun in 1858 instead of the teenage Iemochi - and they manage to win the Boshin War. How would Japanese policies, domestic and foreign, be affected? Would the country continue to have two...

From 1633 to 1639, the nation of Japan closed its doors to the outside world at the edicts instituted by Tokugawa Iemitsu. Westerners and Christian missionaries were forcibly removed from mainland Japan, the only point of contact with the Western world being the Dutch outpost on the island of...

Point of Divergence ... In 1669, a chief of the Ainu people, Shakushain, led a revolt against the Matsumae clan on Hokkaido, Japan's northern most island. This was in response to the Matsumae clan controlling trade and trade relations in the Hokkaido area. When Shakushain's forces surrendered...

Suppose that the christian Shimabara Rebellion (1637) in OTL southern Japan either never happens or is crushed earlier (no Amakusa Shiro?), and the Tokugawa Shogunate's plan to invade the Spanish Philippines with support from the dutch goes through. Could the japanese and dutch succeed in...

23 March, 1638, near the Edo castle . The afternoon weather was fine, and cherry have just started to blossom. Mitsuhisa Shimazu, the heir of the powerful Satsuma Domain and the hostage of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo, was watching the arrival of the daily mail dispatch from the window of his...

One thing that's always quite interested me in terms of allohistorical potential is post-Sengoku early modern Japan developing in a different manner than OTL. Primarily by way of the OTL Tokugawa shogunate not coming into existence, and Japan's developments up until the 19th century taking on a...