Buke Shohatto

The Buke shohatto, commonly known in English as the Laws for the Military Houses, was a collection of edicts issued by Japan's Tokugawa shogunate governing the responsibilities and activities of the daimyo and the rest of the samurai warrior aristocracy. These edicts formed the basis of the bakuhan taisei, the shogunate-domains system that underlay the Tokugawa regime, and their contents were treated as a code of conduct and a description of proper honorable daimyo behavior rather than solely as laws to be obeyed, so that appeals to morality and honor secured compliance the shogunate could not otherwise enforce directly. They were first read to an assembly of daimyo by the retired shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu at Fushimi Castle in the seventh lunar month of 1615, having been compiled by scholars in shogunate service including Ishin Suden, chiefly to limit the daimyo's power and protect shogunate control of the country; Ieyasu's son, the reigning shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, formally promulgated the edicts shortly after, and each successive shogun reissued them, though the rules developed and changed across the generations that followed.