The Shogun’s Ruthless Machine for Peace

Two hundred and fifty years after Sekigahara, it took four American warships to bring it all down. This episode traces the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate — the fiscal rot, the famines, the ideological crisis, and the moment the Black Ships arrived and made the Bakufu’s weakness impossible to ignore. From Perry’s arrival to the Boshin War, the Great Peace ended the way it had begun: with war.