Hello, and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 563, You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party, part two. You have to imagine that from a certain perspective, something like the great Tenme riots of 1787 might seem like an act of God.
If you were a samurai living in the shogun's capital city in that year, you probably had been educated in Confucian philosophy, where one of the signs that a government is faltering and losing its mandate from heaven to rule was an uptick in uprisings by the commoners.
And probably you didn't have the highest opinion of the commoners in general. They were an unwashed, uneducated mass who existed primarily to provide their betters with sustenance and to be morally improved by the virtuous acts of their superiors. They certainly didn't do things on their own or act independently. After all, that was why it was so important when they did get uppity to find out who was organizing the masses and to make an example of those people.
And this perhaps explains why, when in the fifth lunar month of 1787, the peasants of Edo began to riot and burn huge chunks of the city, One of the most commonly seen refrains in samurai commentary was that some sort of divine presence was assisting them. To be fair, the sheer scale of what was happening probably lent it all a sense of heavenly judgment. The first riots, driven by increasing hunger among the city's poor, began in the neighborhoods of Asakusa, Honjo, and Fukugawa.
In other words, the poor areas of the Shtamachi, the lower town outside the well-manicured warrior neighborhoods at the heart of Edo. However, when the northern and southern city magistrates, the officials responsible for managing Edo, in that year respectively Magaribuchi Kagetsugu and Yamamura Takaakira, dithered on how to respond,
the rioting spread very quickly. The emboldened rioters began going into the wealthier neighborhoods of Yotsuya, Aoyama, Shinbashi, and Kyobashi, and eventually all the way to Nihonbashi at the heart of the city.
just a few miles from the Shogun's palace. Merchants all across these neighborhoods had their homes and warehouses torched and looted, The only ones to escape were those who either had a very good reputation among the people or who, seeing the mob coming, immediately offered them charity by flinging their storehouse gates open.
All in all, from the records we have, around 500 merchant houses were targeted and damaged in some way or another. And given the scope of the violence from those unwashed, supposedly easily led masses, no less, it's perhaps not surprising that many of the elite suspected something divine behind it all. Who or what that was, of course, was a bit up in the air. Interestingly, the most commonly given answer was a mysterious, nameless figure
who crops up in an astonishing number of reports from the period. None of these reports give much in the way of detail, but they all discuss a young, handsome man leading the rioters. I'll quote here at length from Anne Walthall's fascinating essay on the history of the Edo riots. In his diary entry for the 22nd day of the fifth month, Moriyama Takamori, a shogunal official,
reported seeing an unshaven youth of 17 or 18 and a man of unusual strength. He was not an ordinary man, another diarist exclaimed. Perhaps he was a tengu. He was referring to the apparitions at once half man and half bird, who simultaneously could destroy the world of the Buddhist law and act as representatives of the mandate of heaven by encouraging good and chastising evil.
A purveyor to temples, Kamea Rofu, also wondered whether the man was a tengu and mentioned a priest of superhuman strength as well. Hitayu Jun wrote, I saw a youth with the strength of a sumo wrestler. By 1823, Takizawa Bakin had declared the youth must have either been a tengu or Yoshitsune, the legendary 12th century warrior hero. In 1846, the novelist Santo Kyozan
Remembered a beautiful youth and strong man who flew about like a veritable Hercules. The word Walt Hall is translating as Hercules, by the way, is Kongorikshi. a sort of Buddhist guardian deity who a few others claim to have simply seen on his own and not manifesting as a hot young guy, leading the crowds in their righteous fury.
Yoshitsune, meanwhile, is Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the great general and commander of the late 1100s, and one of the most storied figures of Japanese literature, to the point that separating the man from the nigh-legendary character is near impossible. Others claim to have seen Benkei, the warrior monk and Yoshitsune's faithful retainer and companion, or Tengu, those long-nosed winged goblins who can help or harm those they encounter
or literal violent gods, or in one case, a giant priest and a white-haired old man. In all these cases, they appear to be claims of hearsay. I met a guy who met a guy who swears he totally saw this. and more reflective of a general sense of panic among the elite. None of these mysterious figures are quite as common in the records of the riot, however, as our mysterious handsome young man.
Honestly, we're still not really sure what was going on there. There are similar reports of this mysterious young man from a food riot in Nagasaki three years prior. So perhaps he was a sort of cultural meme of this period, this character floating around in people's discussions of politically charged events or moments. Maybe the people of Edo were aware of this, and younger, handsome men among the rioters decided to put themselves forward to inspire their peers.
I've read one research paper suggesting the figure of the handsome young man is a result of the influence of kabuki, specifically a character archetype called Aragoto. Without going too into the weeds, Kabuki makes use of a lot of stock character archetypes, one of which is the Tachiaku, the male hero. And the most exciting Tachiaku roles are played as Aragoto, the rough style, more over-the-top heroic dramatics, which contrasts to the more nuanced and softer Wagoto-style leads.
So perhaps rioters during this period, looking for a heroic figure to lead them, conjured up someone who fit the part based on their understanding of what a hero looked like, an Aragoto lead from a play. Maybe they even found someone to intentionally dress the part. It's hard to be sure. I suppose the modern equivalent would be something like showing up to a riot in a Captain America costume because your notion of what heroics looks like comes mostly from Marvel movies.
More clear-eyed than most observers was the doctor Sugita Genpaku, known today for his book Kaitai Shinshō, or A New Treatise in Anatomy, a translation of a Dutch work on medicine, as well as his pioneering work in Western-style dissections. Sukita lived through these riots and wrote in the aftermath, quote, there was no one who could be called a leader. 300 men would get together over here, 500 over there as the spirit moved them.
They beat on drums and rang their bells and gongs. Day and night, ceaselessly, they broke into shops, tossed bags of grain out into the street, and ripped them open. Regardless of who was actually behind it, the general sense among the samurai in the aftermath of the rioting, which did die down after the shogunate intervened militarily and released a great deal of aid to the urban poor, was that the whole thing was the result of heaven's will.
As a Mito domain samurai, Tsuda Nobuhiro, put it in his recollections 15 years later, this was not something that could have been done by human hands alone. The king of heaven aided the people. He was far from alone in this sentiment. Another samurai official writing around the same time recalled that quote, owing to bad policies, the riot was a calamity that arose naturally out of the deeds of heaven. Yet another quote,
What heaven mandates is truly frightening. Much of the blame for these failures was cast on Tanuma Okitsugu, that advisor of the old shogun Iemoto, who was, as the riots were going down, in the midst of losing a political battle to his foes and being sidelined. He thus made a convenient target for the blame, and to be fair, his economic policies, as we discussed last week, certainly didn't help.
Still, he wasn't the only one at fault, the city magistrates, for example, definitely could have managed things better, but given that he was forced out of office and then conveniently died and was thus unavailable to defend his reputation, His fate as the whipping boy for the riots was not unexpected. The conventional explanation for the riots among those outside the halls of power became...
Tanuma's policies were greedy and unconfusion, and as one retainer to the shogun, Uazaki Kyuhachiro, put it in a letter giving his thoughts on the matter, Tanuma's greed was such that, quote, people in the world had no choice but to do likewise. Thus, morality declines, and since heaven and humans are united, yin and yang become naturally unbalanced, crop failures follow, and then there are riots.
That whole narrative was of course very satisfying to many because the people had rioted because of an official who lacked virtue, but now he's gone, the problem is fixed. The reality though is a bit more complicated. From the rioters themselves, of course, we don't have any direct records. Even if most people who were engaged in the riots weren't punished, statistically doing so was impossible. Writing anything down about the experience would have been foolish.
Besides, from what we can tell, most of the thousands of people who took part in the riots were a part of the city's lower class of renters and day laborers, meaning the vast majority, if not all of them, were illiterate. We have some interrogation records from those that were arrested and the recollections of those that saw the riots, and that's about it.
We'll get to the arrests and interrogations in a second, and we've already talked about the recollections of those who were there, all samurai writing after the fact. There is one other interesting place to look for the legacy of the riots, though. fiction written after the fact about the events. Of course, you couldn't actually, in the aftermath of the Great Tenmei Riots, write a play or a book about them, especially if you were casting them in any sort of positive light.
The Tokugawa shogunate maintained a system of censorship intended to restrict critical discussion of state policies. But that system was far from perfect, and if you were clever, you could find ways to circumvent it as a writer.
For example, one kibyoshi, literally a yellow cover book, a type of cheap dime store proto-comic book, was able to skirt the censors by means of clever puns. I'll turn to Anne Walthall's description of this book, quote, Set in the Kamakura period from 1180 to 1333 to evade government censors, a standard device of writers when they dealt with contemporary politics, its plot turns on a pun between Come, rice, and Kame, tortoise.
Like all epics and tales, it begins with a villain, Manenya Kakoemon, who promoted tortoise cuisine, then cornered the market by buying tortoises directly from the sea god and storing them in the dragon palace. a representation of the merchants who had been accused of hiding rice in the mansions of the daimyo. Even the shogun's retainers had gone beyond the bounds of common decency by hoarding rice. By his promotion of tortoise cuisine,
Kakoemon angered the turtles. There is no way we can bear this. We are already on the verge of starvation. The turtles complained in a quotation taken directly from what the rioters said to the shogun's police. Turtle-based puns, of course, weren't the only way around the censors. Another text in the aftermath of the riots recast the Shogun and his advisors as figures from the early Heian period, almost a thousand years earlier.
to escape censorship and rewrote the disasters that led to the riots as a series of blessings upon a well-run state. Thus, Mount Asama's volcanic eruption launches money into the air, for example. In this version, our mysterious handsome youth even makes an appearance for the riot scenes, which are generally played more for comedy with the rioters dressed in fine cloth like fancy gentlemen.
But this one was a little bit too on the nose. It was actually suppressed by the censors after a few months in circulation. Such literature can give us some idea of how people were talking about the riots as an attack on an unjust order. that was mistreating them and thus had no legitimacy. The basic narrative among the commoners appears to have been the merchants of the city greedily hoarded rice, which was against their basic social duty,
because their commerce was supposed to serve the people, not them. Officials of the shogunate either looked the other way, or were incompetent, or in the worst cases, actively aided this injustice. In such a scenario, the people had to stand up for themselves. There was quite literally no other option if justice was to be served.
This is, of course, merely an inference based on available evidence. There's no way to know for sure what people were thinking given the available sourcing. But it would fit largely with the other records we have from the rioters themselves, interrogation reports. The 1787 riot, you see, was massively embarrassing for the Tokugawa shogunate. A riot in the shogun's capital city that this time wasn't just a small affair targeting one merchant who could easily eat the blame for all this.
but which seemed to implicate the entire system, which had raged across the entire city, which had lasted almost a week. Clearly something had gone really wrong. and there would need to be some serious searching to figure out who was going to be held accountable for that. Investigations by the city magistrate's office and eventually by the shogun's own advisors into the causes of the riot started in its final hours and continued for over a year.
To be sure, there were plenty of suspects in the immediate aftermath as troops stationed on the walls of Edo Castle moved into the city to reassert order. Almost 1,000 people were arrested and taken to a temporary detention center.
set up at Kodenmachol, a bit east of the Shogun's palace. However, and here's the part that's a bit surprising, In the end, the vast majority of those arrested were released despite the fact that they had been caught during the riot, quite literally red-handed in most cases.
How could that be? This was not, after all, some sort of common law system where they had to be tried and found guilty by a jury. A magistrate with enough evidence, which any magistrate just looking at the case files would have. could just pronounce these people guilty and it wasn't like they could file an appeal. Heart of the issue, of course, was that a thousand people is a lot of people.
Punishing that many would be both a logistical nightmare and likely to create a lot of martyrs that would just make your problems worse. But more fundamental to the issue was a question of the laws of the shogunate, and specifically a legal notion called Kenka. Today, that's a word that just means fight, but in the feudal era, Kenka had a legal significance. It was a type of private, personal quarrel between two people. We've actually encountered this idea before.
Kenka among members of the samurai class was very heavily regulated. They were often discouraged to the point that two samurai engaged in an unauthorized brawl were actually liable to both be executed. Those fights... were only allowable in specific circumstances and required prior authorization to be lawful, because obviously you can't run a society while having both your military and political leadership running around killing each other every time they get offended.
You just can't run a functional government that way. But of course, those outside the samurai class were just as capable of brawling and fighting as those within it. They, however, did not have ready access to weapons and martial training and were just generally thought of as less important, and so their fights were treated differently.
The basic structure of the Tokugawa shogunate was set up such that its various social classes more or less governed themselves. Households were expected to manage their own affairs. Members of that social class would be given power in exchange for ensuring that their fellow peasants or townsmen or whoever followed the rules. These would be your neighborhood chiefs in the cities, your village headman families in the countryside.
Outside of this, as long as you paid your taxes and followed the general rules, you were pretty much left to your own devices if you were not a samurai. And so the position of the shogunate when it came to brawls between non-samurai... was that such things were simply put beneath its notice. Who cared if the commoners beat the hell out of each other? They were not a Confucian governing class whose moral virtue was supposed to inspire good behavior. If anything,
you had to expect this kind of boorishness from such inferior men. City magistrates were expected to apprehend commoners involved in brawls, to be sure, but only to limit the damage and physically separate the fighting parties. At a basic level, both sides were assumed to be equally at fault regardless of the circumstances because commoners, of course, were all equally foolish in their behavior.
Deaths if they did occur were investigated and punished and serious injuries might result in the government stepping in to force the guilty parties to pay medical bills. Particularly serious misconduct might result in exile. less is a punishment and more to prevent such disagreements from escalating into tit-for-tat vendettas. But that sort of reaction was very rare. And the thing was, the commoners of Edo and everywhere else in Japan
seemed to be pretty aware of this, and so those arrested in the 1787 riots largely maintained they had just been engaged in Kenka. They were quarreling personally with the rice merchants, whose behavior in hoarding rice and refusing to sell cheaply had offended them because it violated the rules of propriety and justice. And so we have the diary entry of one Moriyama Takamori, a samurai living in the city from the sixth lunar month of 1787, so a couple weeks after the end of the riots. Quote,
They also took into custody a large number of rice dealers. But after deliberations, the officials judged what happened to be a fight, a brawl among individuals. They pardoned them all and released them from detention. Another diarist reported similarly, quote, and officials released everyone from detention. The shogunate seems to have accepted the fight justification in part because the actual conduct of the rioters seems to have backed that up.
Here we return again to a samurai and diarist living in Edo in the aftermath of the riots, Kanazawa Toko. Kanazawa wrote of the riots, quote, The people who had been grumbling did not form a gang and commit some act of injustice. That is to say, they had particular rice shops in mind that they wanted to attack, and so they made up posters saying that those shops were going to sell rice at especially low prices at such and such a time on such and such a day.
Then they hung up the posters at various places all around the city. They crowded around and tried to buy the rice. The shop owners had not seen the signs and they had no idea what was going on. Both sides would get to talking back and forth, yelling at each other. and pretty soon a fight would break out. The leaders then gave a signal, and their followers would break into the shop and take out the rice. Then everyone joined in, even the ones who had actually come to buy the rice.
In other words, he's saying the commoners were actually smart enough to stage a bunch of these incidents such that they fit the legal definition of a brawl in order to protect themselves from legal prosecution. The same samurai Moriyama Takamori quoted earlier also wrote of the riots, I heard that a great number of rioters demolished several rice shops. The next morning I learned more details about what had happened.
that more than 20 shops in the Akasaka area had been destroyed totally, and I went to look things over myself. I walked about the shops located near Akasaka Gate, which guarded a crossing over the moat that surrounded the outer castle grounds, and I saw that the clothing and furnishings from the shops had been thrown into the street and stomped into the mud and dirt. Rice and soybeans were strewn everywhere. But I was told none of the rioters removed a single thing from the scene.
They were careful not to start any fires and not to cause any damage to the shops and homes located next to the rice dealers whom they'd attacked. The discipline of these rioters was such that another samurai living in Edo, Santo Kyozan, wrote, quote, give him a sound thrashing, and bring back the goods he tried to steal. They are acting according to an unwritten set of rules, the same code of conduct the city's firefighters respect.
That reference to the firefighters refers to the city's firefighting brigades taking a very dim view of attempts to loot the scene of a fire. while also being known for, for example, taking advantage of one of the common methods of firefighting at this time, demolishing nearby homes to prevent a blaze from spreading, to settle some personal scores. Oh no, that guy who was a jerk to me has a house that's in the way of this fire. Sucks to be him, I guess.
The commoners of Edo, in other words, appeared to have had a code of what you might call street justice that was unwritten but which governed how they behaved in any sort of extreme circumstance. Of course, these excuses didn't work for absolutely everyone. 30 people were punished, because remember, the shogunate's understanding of how riots worked did require some totol.
instigators who riled the people up from their otherwise tranquil state. So, for example, we have the fate of one Hikoshiro, an artisan working on a paper lantern shop in a backstreet in the Fukagawa Rokenbori neighborhood. Hikoshiro was judged to have conspired with six others because of his poverty, and in particular his inability to consistently provide for his family,
to destroy the rice shop of one Denjiro, an act of insolence against public authority to quote the final judgment of the city magistrates. Thus he was sentenced to a severe beating with a bamboo rod, followed by what is called Second Category Exile, banning him permanently from the city of Edo and the broader Kanto region. That fate is pretty typical of the 30 people judged to have been instigators in the rioting.
Thus, from the shogunate's perspective, the issues behind the riot had been solved. The perpetrators dealt with, order restored, and in the aftermath, price controls on rice were softened to ease the burden on city folk. But the thing was, as you're probably seeing by now, these riots were fundamentally a result of the core problems of Tokugawa society itself.
The social order that the shogunate wanted to maintain required high prices to make its taxes and samurai stipends worth anything. But everyone else needed food prices to come down in order to, you know, eat. The shogunate could offer short-term fixes with charity rice and things like that, but the core problem would remain the same, and by the end of Tokugawa rule and the time of the final major Edo riot, things would only get worse.
That last riot took place in 1866, by which time the Tokugawa shogunate was in a very different place from the 1780s. Its finances, of course, were still a mess, if anything more of a mess. The same problems remained and had been allowed to get worse over almost 70 years. And then, of course, there was the issue of the foreigners. Starting in 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Perry, Japan's economy was increasingly opened to foreign trade, thanks to the unequal treaties under very unfair terms.
Prices began to shoot up as Japanese businesses struggled to stay afloat against competition from the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western countries, and while food prices weren't directly affected, Almost everything else was. As more and more businesses began to succumb to Western economic pressure, as early as 1861, the shogunate began releasing charity rice to day laborers.
peddlers, and even some property owners, a sign of how bad things were getting. In the past crises, anyone who owned property had largely been okay. Prices got even worse in the mid-1860s, when the shogunate mobilized two massive armies to fight the rebellious domain of Choshu, and bought up huge quantities of rice to supply those forces, driving prices up.
Meanwhile, respect for the governing order for the rules of the Tokugawa system was at an all-time low. By the 1860s, literacy was way more common than in past decades, and so the populace of Edo was both more aware of what was going on politically, especially around the foreign crisis, and far more able to comment, for example, through the anonymously published newspapers known as Kawaraban.
The sheer volume of discussion also made it nearly impossible for the shogunate to censor effectively, meaning that the old prohibitions on political discussion became functionally dead letters.
There was no more softening of criticism by placing it in the past or engaging in vague metaphors about turtles or whatever. By the 1860s, the commoners of Edo were very aware of the weakness of the Tokugawa shogunate, its inability to deal with pressure from Western empires, and they were actively mocking it. The extent to which the authorities had begun to lose control of the non-samurai population was made clear by the lead-up to the 1866 riots marked by something unheard of in 1733 or 1787.
For almost a year leading up to the riots themselves, posters appeared around the Shogun's capital literally calling for a riot to take place. One such appeared next to a guardhouse in the Shinbashi neighborhood in the fifth lunar month of 1865. It read, Since the price of rice keeps rising, the poor have a hard time making a living and they are suffering hardships.
we are now telling the rice shops that we are going to smash up property because we will all starve to death if prices rise any higher. Sympathizers should gather at the signal at Yanagihara.
signed the leaders of the poor in Kanda and Asakusa neighborhoods. There were other forms of popular protest as well. My personal favorite, the first of which took place in the sixth lunar month of 1865, were children who marched around to local rice shops with toy weapons as well as drums, flags, and conch shells, imitating the rioters of past with a little game they were playing.
The shogunate swiftly banned children from doing this, and a few days later even more posters went up criticizing that decision and the rice merchants of Edo for their greed. The Shogunate did what it could to alleviate these problems, including new rules that more or less allowed for free trade in rice to bring prices down, but prices also didn't really fall that much either.
Either because merchants continued hoarding their rice in hopes of making a profit, or because the economy was just that bad, it's not entirely clear. By early 1866, tensions were very high. The following poster, found in the second lunar month of the year on the wall of a rice warehouse in Kobunecho, is pretty indicative of the tone.
The price of rice has gotten very high, and if it goes higher, the entire city will undoubtedly be rocked by a riot. The people pushing up prices are to be investigated and condemned to death immediately. There are rumors that some are hoarding rice. They will be punished in the same way. We volunteer our hearts and lives to carry out the retribution of heaven in order to save the people, signed the Righteous of the Realm.
The tone of the poster, making pretty clear demands, was indicative of the nature of sentiment in the city, which was clearly and decisively turning against the shogunate and really the whole system. By the fourth month, the posters were getting even more aggressive. Quote, If anyone mingles with us who appears to be a samurai or carries even one sword, he will be killed as soon as he is spotted.
We will smash up all the government purveyors, then all those who deal in foreign goods, and after that we will treat all the houses of the police patrolmen in the same way. The bit about samurai is pretty interesting. Clearly by now there were at least some in Edo who saw their food insecurity as a product of the feudal system itself, and who blamed not just greedy merchants, but the samurai and the whole system for the issue.
though, as we'll see, that view was not universal. What was more universal was a disdain for the patrolmen, the lower samurai, and some commoners who were tasked as the beat cops of the city, for lack of a better word. Just one day after that last poster I just quoted went up, another accused patrolman of corruption, bribe-taking, and extortion, and ended, quote, This has nothing to do with the administration of the city, and because of it, they will be punished.
The riot, when it did finally break out, was in terms of absolute damage smaller than 1787. Only 226 stores were burned, so about half as many as the last go-round. But it lasted two days longer and attempts to bring this riot under control were much more half-hearted and ineffective. In one instance, a group of children attacked a rice shop literally next to a guardhouse for patrolmen, and the patrolmen inside did nothing, instead allowing spectators to egg the kids on into smashing the place.
Four days into the riot, the city magistrates did issue a new ordinance, which forbade people to gather in large crowds in order to watch the destruction. Why such a lax attitude? No doubt in part because of a fear of inflaming crowds further, but it's also worth noting that unlike 1787, most of the rioting in 1866 took place on the outskirts of Edo.
The more central neighborhoods of the Shogun's capital were not heavily affected, likely the merchants there arranged on their own to distribute charity rice to protect themselves. Still, the lack of intervention in the riots didn't go unnoticed. When one patrol attempted to enforce the new rule against crowds gawking at the rioting, another group of samurai who happened to be nearby started mocking them for arresting spectators but not the rioters.
Then, these two groups, the samurai and the patrolmen, started to brawl, and one of the patrolmen was killed. The riots only began to peter out when, belatedly, the shogunate moved samurai off the walls of Edo Castle and into four of the affected neighborhoods. At the same time, the priests of Edo's most powerful Buddhist temples, led by Kaneji in the Ueno neighborhood, began distributing their own charity.
But even when things petered out, the people would not let the state forget its failures. One sign hung outside the city magistrate's office by an anonymous townsman read, quote, a reference to the state's inability to offer its people even charity to get by in these hard times. During and after the riots, the press of the city exploded.
the anonymous authors of the Kawaraban newspapers no longer couched their descriptions of events in references to the past or metaphors, but gleefully described exactly what was happening without fear of censorship. A few of them even included references to a mysterious, handsome young man. Clearly someone had been keeping the memory of 1787 alive. After the riots, public respect for the government, and the shogunate in general,
never really recovered. A few months later, the attempt to militarily chastise the rogue feudal domain of Choshu ended in disaster and defeat, and just at that moment, the young shogun himself would die. When his death was finally announced, after one month's delay as the remaining leadership hesitated about what to do, it came with the usual announcement there would be a public mourning period which included a prohibition of absolute silence.
during the shogun's funeral rites in Edo. The commoners of the city completely ignored this. During the shogun's funeral, they assembled in gangs with drums and gongs. going about in groups demanding alms and charity from the wealthy. One group even went up to the residences of the various daimyo in the center of the city to demand aid. Another harassed some Americans who happened to be walking by.
throwing rocks at them and accusing them of causing the nation's economic troubles. The city of Edo didn't technically fall into the hands of the shogun's enemies until early 1868, when its remaining garrison surrendered to the advancing imperial Japanese army. But in a very real sense, after the riots of the summer of 1866, the Tokugawa shogunate no longer controlled its own capital.
In the end, this is why the three great riots of Edo matter. The loss of control over the Shogun's own capital is, of course, important and telling in a symbolic sense. But beyond that... The very factors that led to those riots were rooted in the issues of the Tokugawa system itself. The riots, in other words, were symptoms of the fundamental problems of the shogunate. its reliance on an unstable economic system and on maintaining a social order that after 200 years just wasn't viable anymore.
Of course, the three big riots are not all there is to the story of rioting during the Edo period. Next week, we'll take a look at some smaller disturbances in one of Edo's neighborhoods. to round out our understanding of public violence in the age of the Shoguns. But for now, that's all for this week. Thank you very much for listening.
This show is a part of the Facing Backward podcast network. You can find out more about this show and our other shows at facingbackward.com. You can also donate to support the show on Patreon. Thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week. for part three.