With the rise of the samurai class and the need to keep land holdings intact, inheritance tended toward inheritance by a single son during the centuries before the end of the Edo period. In the Edo period, Tokugawa Ieyasu established a ‘code’ which did not specify that the eldest son would inherit. In the early… [Read more]
Urban Renewal
In the Edo period, urban renewal was accomplished on a regular basis as a result of fire – a major hazard which frequently swept through parts of the large cities and devastated smaller towns. Edo took particular pride in the frequency of fires and the speed with which the city recovered from them. Merchants kept… [Read more]