8. Edo Period (1600-1868) Tokugawa Ieyasu, who defeated other vassals of the deceased Toyotomi Hideyoshi a the Battle of Sekigahara and thereby gained control of Japan, established the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo (now Tokyu). The Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan for over 260 years, and for some 200 of these years the country was virtually shut off from foreign contact be the shogunate’s policy of national seclusion. From the end of the 17th century through the beginning of the 18th century, a colorful, down-to-earth new culture developed among the townsmen of the older cities of Kyoto and Osaka. Ihara Saikaku composed his ukiyo-zoshi (book of the “floating world”), Chikamatsu Monzaemon portrayed tragic relationships between men and women in his puppet plays, and Matsuo Basho raised the comic haiku verse form to the level of a literary art. By the Bunka and Bunsei eras, at the beginning of the 19th century, this new merchant-class form of culture was also flourishing in the shogunal capital of Edo. The kabuki drama was in its heyday. The printing of books had become an industry. The art of the woodblock print (ukiyoe) was born, with Sharaku producing his portraits of actors, Utamaro his pictures of beautiful women, and Hokusai and Hiroshige their landscapes.9. Meiji Period (1868-1912) The meiji Restoration, by which political authority was restored from the shogunate to the imperial court, ushered in a period of far-reaching reform. The policy of national seclusion was rescinded, and the culture and civilization of the West began to pervade every aspect of Japanese life. Japan’s victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars enabled it to assume the stance of a modern, imperialistic world power. Modern Japanese literature was born with the publication of Futabatei Shimei’s novel Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds), the first literary work to be written in the modern colloquial language. A Japanese version of romanticism soon appeared, with writers making their first attempts at free, natural expression of people’s true feelings.
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