The bodies in the streets of Edo had barely been cleared when Matsudaira Sadanobu (松平定信, Matsudaira Sadanobu) took power.

The Tenmei famine (天明の飢饉, Tenmei no Kikin) had been a seven-year descent into catastrophe. It began in 1782 and deepened in the summer of 1783, when Mount Asama (浅間山, Asamayama) erupted with enough force to darken the sky over northern Japan. Volcanic ash and the cold summer it caused destroyed crop after crop across the Tohoku region. Estimates of the dead vary widely — some sources say 300,000, others more than a million — but the suffering was impossible to deny: bodies abandoned in mountain villages, refugees flooding Edo's outskirts, a merchant class enriched by grain speculation while the poor starved. In the spring of 1787, the pressure finally broke. Rice riots erupted in more than thirty cities — Edo, Osaka, Nagasaki, Hiroshima among them — as desperate crowds stormed merchant warehouses.

The shogunate's senior councilor Tanuma Okitsugu (田沼意次, Tanuma Okitsugu), who had presided over this period and whose era was associated with merchant influence and what critics called corruption, was dismissed in 1786 after Shogun Ieharu died. The system had been discredited. Something had to change.

That something arrived in the form of Matsudaira Sadanobu.

He was twenty-nine years old and the grandson of Tokugawa Yoshimune (徳川吉宗, Tokugawa Yoshimune), the eighth shogun whose Kyoho Reforms (享保の改革, Kyoho no Kaikaku) in the early 18th century had become the standard against which all reform efforts were measured. Sadanobu had spent years conscious of this inheritance. When he managed his domain of Shirakawa (白河, Shirakawa) through the famine, the contrast with surrounding domains — which saw mass migration and starvation — was stark. He had built rice reserves, kept his farmers on their land, and done it with Confucian-inflected austerity. His reputation traveled ahead of him.

In 1787, he was appointed roju (老中, rōjū), then roju shuseki (老中首座, rōjū shuseki) — chief senior councilor, effectively regent for the new fourteen-year-old shogun Tokugawa Ienari (徳川家斉, Tokugawa Ienari). He moved quickly.

The Kansei Reforms (寛政の改革, Kansei no Kaikaku) that followed were comprehensive in their scope and deeply nostalgic in their philosophy. Frugality edicts constrained spending across all classes. A debt-cancellation edict in 1789 — the kienrei (棄捐令, kienrei) — erased or reduced debts that samurai retainers owed to merchants, restoring financial stability to the warrior class at the merchants' expense. Farmers who had migrated to Edo seeking work were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to return to the countryside. Mandatory rice stockpiles were established across Edo to prevent future famine riots.

But the reform that provoked the most lasting resentment was cultural. In 1790, the Prohibition of Heterodox Studies — the Kansei Igaku no Kin (寛政異学の禁, Kansei Igaku no Kin) — declared that only Zhu Xi Confucianism (朱子学, Shushigaku) could be taught at the official Shoheizaka Academy (昌平坂学問所, Shoheizaka Gakumonjo). Dutch learning, other philosophical schools, heterodox ideas of any kind were driven from official institutions. Sadanobu wanted to restore the clean, legible moral order his grandfather had presided over — and the way to do that, he believed, was to control what was thinkable.

He also went after the writers.

The kibyoshi (黄表紙, kibyoshi) — yellow-cover satirical novellas that skewered officials with paper-thin historical disguises — were suppressed. The sharebon (洒落本, sharebon), witty fiction set in the floating world, were banned. Writers were arrested. And yet the writers had the last word, at least in spirit. A poem circulated, attributed to no single author but clearly aimed at Sadanobu:

"White waters — / how I miss the days / of muddy water."

The "muddy water" was the Tanuma era: corrupt, mercantile, vibrant. The "white waters" were Sadanobu's sterile purity. The people who wrote and read and laughed at kibyoshi knew exactly what they had lost.

Sadanobu was dismissed in 1793. The teenage shogun he had served as regent had grown into a young man who resented being managed, and Ienari moved quickly to install his own favorites at court. The Kansei Reforms disintegrated within years.

What followed was the Bunka-Bunsei era (文化文政時代, Bunka-Bunsei Jidai) — perhaps the most culturally vibrant period in Edo's history. Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿, Kitagawa Utamaro), Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎, Katsushika Hokusai), and Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重, Utagawa Hiroshige) produced their masterworks. Fiction flourished. The floating world bloomed.

Everything Sadanobu had tried to suppress came roaring back the moment he left.

He retired to Shirakawa, wrote poetry and calligraphy, composed a memoir called Uge no Hitokoto (宇下人言, Uge no Hitokoto) defending his reform philosophy, and lived until 1829. Thoughtful, capable, genuinely concerned with the welfare of ordinary people — and profoundly wrong about the solution. His instinct, when faced with crisis, had been to look backward.

That instinct was not his alone. It was the Tokugawa shogunate's deepest reflex. It would manifest again in the Tenpo Reforms (天保の改革, Tenpo no Kaikaku) in the 1840s — each iteration more desperate, less effective, and more hostile to the world that had grown up around it. Until the world finally refused to be governed by nostalgia anymore.