In the Japanese system of historical periodization the Tokugawa era generally corresponds to the kinsei period, though in the Japanese historiography there are the different viewpoints on the chronological limits of the latter. There is no direct equivalent of the term kinsei in the European history. It is usually translated in English as «early modern». It’s likely to be a kind of the transition period from medieval epoch to Modernity, which lasted 264 years.
The Tokugawa era was preceded by the times of unrest. The second half of the XVI century in Japan was marked by the struggle for the unification of the country. In 1600 the battle of Sekigahara has put an end to the long-lasted period of civil wars and the country started to reestablish it’s political stability. The new phase in the history of Japan was termed after the victor in the battle of Sekigahara — Tokugawa Ieyasu — who proclaimed was a shogun[10] in 1603, and so founded the third — Tokugawa — shogunate (1603–1867) in the Japanese history. It is also known as the «Edo period» — after the name of the city that became the residence of the Tokugawa shoguns[11].
The epochs, just like people, leave their heritage, and not rare are tendentiously evaluated by their posteriors. For instance, for a long time the Tokugawa era was generally considered to be a period of Japan’s stagnation and self-isolation from the outside world[12], which resulted in the conservation of it’s backwardness in the preindustrial epoch. Actually, the Tokugawa era was not reach in outstanding events. Nevertheless, the social and cultural achievements of that period determined the subsequent developments in Japan.
A study of the Tokugawa era raises a number of important research problems. For instance, it should be yet investigated, whether such measures of the Tokugawa shoguns as «shutting doors» before the foreigners were a benefit or harm for Japan. Or, in which proportion the rapid development of capitalism in Meiji Japan was a natural consequence of the preceding national history, or the result of an external impact? These and other resembling questions are closely related to some fundamental problems of the socio-economic development of Oriental countries: namely, to the definition of the socio-economic formation they belonged to before the invasion of the colonialist powers; to the identification of the interaction model of the internal and external factors of development of capitalism; and, finally, to finding out common and particular features in the historical development of a specific country.
