Shōgunate

In this latter instance, as we know, came not the distant anathema of future generations, but the swift vengeance of war, the permanent humiliation, the exile to obscurity, of the Tokugawa family, and the abolition of the shōgunate and the dual system forever.

Fortunately the next shōgun, Iyenari (1787-1837), and his great councilor, Matsudaira Sadanobu, reverted to the strict policy of Yoshimune and the illustrious founders of the Tokugawa shōgunate.

The bureaucratic pretensions of the Nara and Heian periods, however, had given way to a more modest apparatus under the Kamakura and Muromachi shōgunates and in the struggle for territory and power literacy was less functional than it had been.