The Tokugawa Bakufu was a revolutionary development in Japan's history, it brought peace to a country that had been in civil war for centuries and provided stability. Most common people had little connection with the Tokugawa Bakufu, but the peace brought with it had a large effect on them, farmers could concentrating on farming without worry that his fields would become a battlefield and trade flourished bringing with it popular culture. That's not to say the Bakufu had no effect on the common populous, but it was often in an indirect way.
In Tokugawa times the status of farmer, merchant, artisan or samurai was fixed and hereditary.1 Therefore there was no social mobility between classes, this meant most commoners were stuck being farmers, (around 80% of the population were farmers2). There was graduations in each class though, from the lowest farm labourers to small land owners to large land owning farmers, for example, and these were easier to transcend. Also within the structure there was some freedom as the Tokugawa Bakufu did not “micromanage”3 the lives of commoners and left them to manage village affairs themselves so by the end of the Tokugawa era commoners were imitating the lifestyle of the samurai and had adopted their values.4
The Tokugawa Bakufu did not have direct power over the commoners,5 which had a huge effect on the lives and literacy of the common people. As the Bakufu and domain governments…show more content… Taxes were applied in the form of town maintenance fees which were collected by the street and were relative to the strength of business on the street.16 In the peace that the Tokugawa Bakufu created trade flourished, especially in the big cities, merchants became very well off and started supporting their own forms of entertainment, such as Kabuki, Bunraku and woodblock