The machine that bought 250 years of peace: mapping Edo's 260 domains<br>Edo · 江戸<br>The machine that bought 250 years of peace.<br>In 1600, a century and a half of civil war ended. Japan was left with some 260 warlords who had spent their whole lives fighting. You cannot execute them all. So the Tokugawa shogunate did something stranger: it put them on a schedule, and turned its own capital into a device for pinning an entire warrior class in place.
~260<br>Domains
250+<br>Years of peace
1.02M koku<br>Largest domain
The problem<br>Too many lords, too many swords<br>For the Sengoku century, the islands had been a patchwork of private armies. When Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and took the title of shōgun, the fighting stopped — but the armies did not vanish. Roughly 260 大名 (daimyō), the great lords, still ruled their own land, taxed their own peasants, and kept their own samurai. The shogunate directly controlled only about a quarter of the country. The rest was held by men who, a generation earlier, would have been rivals on a battlefield.<br>One of them was the Mōri clan of the far west. They had backed the losing side at Sekigahara, and Ieyasu punished them for it, stripping their holdings from roughly 1.2 million 石 of rice income down to 369,000. They did not forget. Keep an eye on them.
The machine<br>A schedule, not a prison<br>The device was called 参勤交代 (sankin-kōtai), “alternate attendance.” Every daimyō had to spend every other year living in Edo, in attendance on the shōgun, then return to govern his domain for a year, then come back. Year in the capital, year at home, forever.<br>The genius was in the detail that made it a cage rather than a commute: when a lord went home, his wife and his heir stayed in Edo — permanently, as hostages. To raise an army against the shōgun was to sign your own family’s death warrant. Below, every domain that can be placed on the map, each tethered to Edo by the road it travelled twice a year.
EdoChōshū · 369,000 kokuHover or tap any domain — dot size is its rice income (石高). 228 of 270 plotted.1,000,000 koku100,00010,000<br>Choose a domainKaga Domain — 金沢藩 (1,022,700 koku)Satsuma Domain — 鹿児島藩 (770,800 koku)Sendai Domain — 仙台藩 (625,600 koku)Owari Domain — 名古屋藩 (619,500 koku)Kishū Domain — 和歌山藩 (555,000 koku)Kumamoto Domain — 熊本藩 (540,000 koku)Fukuoka Domain — 福岡藩 (520,000 koku)Hiroshima Domain — 広島藩 (426,000 koku)Chōshū Domain — 萩藩 (369,000 koku)Saga Domain — 佐賀藩 (357,000 koku)Mito Domain — 水戸藩 (350,000 koku)Tottori Domain — 鳥取藩 (325,000 koku)Tsu Domain — 津藩 (323,950 koku)Fukui Domain — 福井藩 (320,000 koku)Okayama Domain — 岡山藩 (315,200 koku)Aizu Domain — 会津藩 (280,000 koku)Tokushima Domain — 徳島藩 (257,900 koku)Hikone Domain — 彦根藩 (250,000 koku)Tosa Domain — 高知藩 (242,000 koku)Kurume Domain — 久留米藩 (210,000 koku)Kubota Domain — 久保田藩 (205,800 koku)Morioka Domain — 盛岡藩 (200,000 koku)Yonezawa Domain — 米沢藩 (187,248 koku)Matsue Domain — 松江藩 (186,000 koku)Shōnai Domain — 庄内藩 (170,000 koku)Maebashi Domain — 前橋藩 (170,000 koku)Kōriyama Domain — 郡山藩 (151,288 koku)Takada Domain — 高田藩 (150,000 koku)Himeji Domain — 姫路藩 (150,000 koku)Kokura Domain — 小倉藩 (150,000 koku)Takamatsu Domain — 高松藩 (120,000 koku)Yanagawa Domain — 柳川藩 (119,600 koku)Odawara Domain — 小田原藩 (113,129 koku)Sakura Domain — 佐倉藩 (110,000 koku)Kuwana Domain — 桑名藩 (110,000 koku)Fukuyama Domain — 福山藩 (110,000 koku)Obama Domain — 小浜藩 (102,558 koku)Yodo Domain — 淀藩 (102,000 koku)Nihonmatsu Domain — 二本松藩 (100,700 koku)Hirosaki Domain — 弘前藩 (100,000 koku)Tanagura Domain — 棚倉藩 (100,000 koku)Oshi Domain — 忍藩 (100,000 koku)Matsushiro Domain — 松代藩 (100,000 koku)Shibata Domain — 新発田藩 (100,000 koku)Daishōji Domain — 大聖寺藩 (100,000 koku)Toyama Domain — 富山藩 (100,000 koku)Ōgaki Domain — 大垣藩 (100,000 koku)Akashi Domain — 明石藩 (100,000 koku)Tsuyama Domain — 津山藩 (100,000 koku)Uwajima Domain — 宇和島藩 (100,000 koku)Nakatsu Domain — 中津藩 (100,000 koku)Tsuchiura Domain — 土浦藩 (95,000 koku)Takasaki Domain — 高崎藩 (82,000 koku)Kawagoe Domain — 川越藩 (80,400 koku)Kasama Domain — 笠間藩 (80,000 koku)Koga Domain — 古河藩 (80,000 koku)Nagaoka Domain — 長岡藩 (74,000 koku)Utsunomiya Domain — 宇都宮藩 (70,850 koku)Oka Domain — 岡藩 (70,440 koku)Yoshida Domain — 吉田藩 (70,000 koku)Miyazu Domain — 宮津藩 (70,000 koku)Shimabara Domain — 島原藩 (70,000 koku)Nobeoka Domain — 延岡藩 (70,000 koku)Shinjō Domain — 新庄藩 (68,200 koku)Hirado Domain — 平戸藩 (61,700 koku)Hamada Domain — 浜田藩 (61,000 koku)Tatebayashi Domain — 館林藩 (60,000 koku)Matsumoto Domain — 松本藩 (60,000 koku)Hamamatsu Domain — 浜松藩 (60,000 koku)Nishio Domain — 西尾藩 (60,000 koku)Zeze Domain — 膳所藩 (60,000 koku)Sasayama Domain — 篠山藩 (60,000 koku)Ōzu Domain — 大洲藩 (60,000 koku)Karatsu Domain — 唐津藩 (60,000 koku)Ueda Domain — 上田藩 (53,000 koku)Hisai Domain — 久居藩 (53,000 koku)Kishiwada Domain — 岸和田藩 (53,000 koku)Marugame Domain — 丸亀藩 (51,512 koku)Tatsuno Domain — 龍野藩 (51,089 koku)Obi Domain — 飫肥藩 (51,080 koku)Murakami Domain — 村上藩 (50,090 koku)Usuki Domain — 臼杵藩 (50,060 koku)Kakegawa Domain — 掛川藩 (50,037 koku)Yamagata Domain — 山形藩 (50,000 koku)Miharu...