I've never looked much at Japan's history prior to 1853, so I did a
little research this morning. There's very little information
available on the Edo period, except for pretty worthless summaries,
like "1603 to 1868 was very peaceful."
On the other hand, there are vague references to "peasant revolts"
during this period. However, when you try to get information
on these peasant revolts, there are many links, and almost every
one of them is behind a paywall.
Apparently there's an ideological debate as to the nature of the
peasant revolts during the Edo period, but information on what
happened is pretty much hidden away.
One article on the Edo period is at
http://www.history.com/topics/meiji-restoration
Here are some very brief excerpts:
> To guard against external influence, they also worked to close off
> Japanese society from Westernizing influences, particularly
> Christianity. ...
> Suspicious of foreign intervention and colonialism, the Tokugawa
> regime acted to exclude missionaries and eventually issued a
> complete ban on Christianity in Japan. Near the beginning of the
> Tokugawa period, there were an estimated 300,000 Christians in
> Japan; after the shogunate’s brutal repression of a Christian
> rebellion on the Shimabara Peninsula in 1637-38, Christianity was
> forced underground. The dominant faith of the Tokugawa period was
> Confucianism, a relatively conservative religion with a strong
> emphasis on loyalty and duty. ...
> For their part, peasants (who made up 80 percent of the Japanese
> population) were forbidden from engaging in non-agricultural
> activities, thus ensuring consistent income for landowning
> authorities. ...
> The Genroku era (1688-1704) in particular saw the rise of Kabuki
> theater and Bunraku puppet theater, literature (especially Matsuo
> Bosho, the master of haiku) and woodblock printing.
So here's what we can infer from these brief excerpts:
- The crisis war climax was in 1600.
- There were Christian anti-government revolts in 1637-38, towards
the end of the Awakening era.
- Genroku era (1688-1704) was another Awakening era, based
on the growth in the arts.
- Working backwards, there must have been a crisis war in the 1660s,
probably putting down the Christians once and for all.
This is fairly speculative, but there's just no open source
available that I could find.
Here's a paragraph from another document:
https://webspace.yale.edu/wwkelly/pubs- ... y_21-3.pdf
> For the past three decades Japan has experienced a prolonged
> "history boom" — a burgeoning of academic research and media
> attention to the nation's past.
> One considerable benefit to scholarship of this often partisan and
> sometimes frivolous boom has been a widespread search for primary
> documents, their accessioning in public archives, and their
> publication as document collections and in local and perfectural
> history series. For several reasons, much of this new material has
> concerned social and economic conditions in the Tokugawa
> centuries, 1600-1868. Japanese historians, themselves the
> collectors and annotators, quickly exploited these records,
> diaries, and other public and private documents to renew debates
> about the nature and significance of commoner protest during those
> centuries. Western historians, however, wary of the polemics and
> unfamiliar with the sources, are only now beginning to deal
> confidently with these primary materials and secondary
> scholarship.
So the situation is that there were definitely peasant uprisings
during the Edo period, but it's impossible to do a complete
generational analysis, because almost no open source information
is available.
If you want to do your own research, the last document quoted
above is a review of two books:
- Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884. By Herbert P. Bix (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986. xxxix plus 296 pp.).
- Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan. By Stephen
Vlastos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1986. xii plus 184 pp. $20.00).
If you want to do your own research, and if your purchase these two
books, you might have enough information to do a complete generational
analysis of the Edo period. If you do that, then please post your
findings here.