Tokugawa Ieyasu was no stranger to the brutal politics of the age, having once ordered his own wife's execution when Nobunaga suspected her of treason, and he spent the first five years after Hideyoshi's death consolidating his power and destroying rival _daimyo_. When Hideyoshi's son came of age, Ieyasu was ready to move. Hideyori was living in the family citadel at Osaka defended by an army of disenfranchised _samurai _and disaffected Christians, but Ieyasu held the power. In the ensuing bloodbath Hideyoshi's line was erased from the earth, and the Christians' faulty political judgment caused their faith eventually to be forbidden to all Japanese under threat of death. Christianity continued to be practiced on a surreptitious basis, however, as the Christians found shelter in, of all places, the Zen monasteries. With the passing of Hideyoshi's line, the Tokugawa family became the only power in Japan, a land at last unified and with an imposed peace. Viewing foreign influences as a source of domestic unrest, the Tokugawa moved to bring down a curtain of isolationism around their shores: Christian Europeans were expelled and Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad. Ieyasu established a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and required the local _daimyo_ to spend a large amount of time and money in attendance. Thus he craftily legitimatised his own position while simultaneously weakening that of the _daimyo_--a technique used with equal effect almost a century later by Louis XIV, when he moved his court from Paris to Versailles to contain the French aristocracy. Content with the status quo, members of the Tokugawa family felt it could best be preserved by extreme conservatism, so they sent forth a volley of decrees formalizing all social relationships. Time was brought to a stop, permitting the Tokugawa to rule unhindered until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the country was again opened to foreign trade under the guns of American warships. During the Tokugawa regime another Chinese "religion" assumed the place in the hearts of the shoguns that Buddhism had enjoyed in centuries past. This was Confucianism, more a philosophy than a religion, which in its original form had taught a respect for learning, the ready acceptance of a structured hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience to authority (that of both elders and superiors). The Tokugawa perverted Confucianism to establish a caste system among their subjects, separating them into the _samurai_ class, the peasant class, and the merchant and artisan classes--the order given here denoting their supposed status. However, as the Japanese social system began to evolve, the idea backfired, causing great difficulties for the government. The reasons for this are interesting, for they bear directly upon the eventual role of Zen culture in Japanese life.