We reach the final part of our story. Bakumatsu is drawing to an end. Don’t be dismayed though; the final act proves to be far more shocking and bloody than anything we’ve seen so far. A power great enough to rival the shōgunate is beginning to form, and there may be little the shōgunate can do to stop it. Part three of our story begins…
Welcome to part two of this coverage of Bakumatsu, arguably one of the most exciting times in Japanese history, detailing the downfall of the shōgunate and the samurai. In part one, we looked at how the arrival of foreign forces stirred up a panic in Japan, causing a number of social and economic problems that set off the whole chain of events. Satsuma han dominated…
Bakumatsu… The end of the Edo shōgunate… No shōgunate goes down without a fight! The Kamakura shōgunate ended with a two-year war orchestrated by Emperor Go-Daigo. The Muromachi shōgunate slowly faded out as the Sengoku daimyō rose to power until it was eventually finished off by Oda Nobunaga. The end of the Edo shōgunate, however, was significantly more complicated. It involved a series of political…
