The Tokugawa State

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system structured daimyo life. They were assigned plots of land in Edo appropriate to their status. Most maintained three spacious mansions there. They staffed them with service corps and samurai attendants, and maintained their personal family and their principal vassals families at the shogunal capital. They themselves were to come in alternate yearsor, for some, alternate halfyearsto pay homage to the shogun. Begun as a system of hostages, the system became the basis of a rotating service life for the elite. By its workings future daimyo were born and raised at the metropolitan center and never visited their domain until they were invested as daimyo, after which they rotated between Edo and their ef. Within a generation or two the system had transformed the military leaders of Sengoku times into cultured urban aristocrats trained to appreciate the ner points of the tea ceremony, cuisine, culture, and costume. Next came requirements for the registration of commoners. The bakufu and individual domains conducted registers of population and livestock from an early date, but methods for combining this with guarantees against religiousChristiansubversion were worked out as the drive against Christianity intensied. The bakufu instituted registration of all residents of its own domains at Buddhist temples beginning in 1614. As the persecution of Christians increased in Iemitsus years the bakufu tightened requirements in its own territories, and a few decades later, in 1665, domains were ordered to carry them out as well. The following year this was strengthened to require that registrations be carried out annually. The implementing agency was the Buddhist temple, which was co-opted in the service of state security. Henceforth temple registers were submitted by village headmen and city elders to mon aratamecertify there were no Christians among their numbers. The shu , sect investigation registers, served as powerful measures of central govcho ernment intervention in private life throughout Japan. The Buke shohatto also specied that domain laws should follow those of the bakufu in broad outline. The twenty-rst regulation in the 1635 code stipulated that in all matters the example set by the laws of Edo is to be followed in all provinces and places. As this took effect there was a further resonance between the content of major bakufu codes and those of major domains. The bakufu thus took it upon itself to issue orders for the whole country, gi, the public as with the proscription of Christianity. Its claim to represent ko interest, gave it the right to oversee and interfere. It issued and mounted signsatsu, which appeared at conspicuous locationsintersections and boards, ko bridgesthroughout the country, in daimyo as well as bakufu lands. Originally renewed when era names changed and at the accession of a new shogun,