Taming Samurai with Terror and Paperwork

Three men spent sixty years turning a century of civil war into a functioning state. This episode covers the Era of Pacification — Nobunaga’s secular brutality, Hideyoshi’s global overreach, and Ieyasu’s cold institutional genius. By 1630, the swords were confiscated, the peasants were tied to the land, the Christians were being hunted, and Edo had grown from a fishing village into a city of 150,000. The Sengoku period was over. Japan had been engineered.