The capital moves to Kyoto. For four centuries, a refined aristocracy invents a great deal of Japanese aesthetics: court literature, the cult of the season, a sense of beauty that has never really left the country.
Two hundred and fifty years of peace imposed by the Tokugawa shoguns, a country closed in on itself, and the rise of an urban, merchant culture: the woodblock print, kabuki theatre, and the great highways such as the Nakasendo, still walked today.
The country is forced open to Western trade, then modernises at an unprecedented pace: industry, army, Western institutions, all while keeping the emperor as its central figure.
