A demotion, and the start of Edo

The notes take up a book of Japanese history they say is not taught at school, and stay with Tokugawa Ieyasu’s move to Edo. It was not, they write, a free choice. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s political design it was a de facto demotion: he left Sunpu, the old center, for a waste of reeds and swamp.

His feeling, they add in the book’s own figure, was as if the sky had fallen. He did not collapse. He began not with a castle but with houses for his retainers, then a commercial quarter and supply roads. Edo, in this reading, was born as a unit of government, and later became the center of a unified realm.

People used as tools, and a reversal

Hideyoshi, they record, often said that people should be used like tools. He did not openly remove Ieyasu. He set him at a political distance and kept him off the central stage — a transfer of fief that looked like a demand for loyalty, and was in fact a strategic isolation.

The calculation, they write, produced another result. Ieyasu seemed to be used, and under that appearance prepared a future, rooting himself in waste ground and turning it into the heart of a realm. The notes read Hideyoshi’s saying as having caught his own foot.

Water before weapons

The growth of Edo, they write, was not mere expansion but a precise design for survival. The author, who is not named, stresses that Ieyasu first turned not to weapons but to waterways, to make a flood-soaked land livable.

The notes linger on a Tamagawa water supply that used a difference of height. They leave the subject there, before later tables. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on a book of Japanese history they say is not taught at school, staying with Ieyasu and Edo.

Last updated 15 November 2026