The black ships
In July 1853 four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry anchored off Uraga, at the mouth of Edo Bay, and demanded that Japan open its ports. Perry came back the next year, and the shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854. More treaties followed in 1858, with the United States and the European powers, on terms that favoured them.
Revere the emperor
The shogun’s own title called on him to subdue barbarians, and he had let them in. His opponents took up the slogan sonnō jōi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”. The great domains of Satsuma and Chōshū in the southwest, old rivals of the Tokugawa, learned from their own clashes with foreign warships that expelling them was impossible, and turned instead against Edo.
The last shogun
In November 1867 the fifteenth and last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, handed his governing powers back to the emperor. In January 1868 the court declared the restoration of imperial rule, and the Boshin War that followed ended the Tokugawa cause by 1869.
Edo was renamed Tokyo, the Eastern Capital, and the young Emperor Meiji moved into the shogun’s castle, which is now the Imperial Palace. Yoshinobu lived quietly for another four decades and died in 1913. The office of shogun was never revived.