Why wasn't there a revolution in Japan like the one in France? The suffering was as great in 18th-century Japan as in the realm of ill-fated King Louis XVI, the government here as callous and incompetent as the government there. How did Japan's old order — rotting internally, as its collapse under foreign threat in the 1860s proved — escape being overthrown by the starving and enraged masses?

Rage smoldered perpetually and erupted frequently. By one count there were 2,967 peasant ikki (uprisings) during the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867); by another, 6,889. It depends on what degree of violence qualifies as an ikki. The worst of them were very violent indeed, so much so that a mere threat was sometimes enough to make a prudent daimyo (feudal lord) back down. He would have in mind, perhaps, the Shimabara peasant revolt in 1638 in Kyushu's present-day Nagasaki Prefecture — a victory for the shogunal forces that crushed it, though at the cost of 15,000 casualties.

The living conditions in Shimabara were especially harsh. Tax was piled on tax — door tax, shelf tax, hearth tax, cattle tax, birth tax, death tax — all this in addition to the basic tax on produce.