The order of repeal came quickly. That may be the most revealing fact about Tsunayoshi's twenty-nine years as shogun.

Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (徳川綱吉, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi) died on February 19, 1709, officially of measles — an epidemic that had spread from Nagasaki up through Japan's port cities and into Edo. He was four days short of his sixty-third birthday. His successor, Tokugawa Ienobu (徳川家宣, Tokugawa Ienobu), wasted almost no time. The Shōruiawaremi no rei (生類憐みの令, Shōruiawaremi no rei) — the Edicts on Compassion for Living Things — were repealed within days of the new shogun's accession. Popular historical accounts say the people of Edo celebrated openly. This is not hard to believe.

The edicts had begun in 1687. Their stated purpose was Buddhist compassion for living creatures, rooted in the belief — reportedly reinforced by the Shingon (真言, Shingon) monk Ryūkō (隆光, Ryūkō), whose counsel Tsunayoshi and his devout mother Keishō-in (桂昌院, Keishō-in) took seriously — that Tsunayoshi's failure to produce an heir was karmic punishment for killing in a previous life. The remedy: protect life, especially the lives of animals, especially dogs. Tsunayoshi had been born in the Year of the Dog.

What began as a religious directive became something far stranger. Over twenty-two years, the edicts multiplied. They eventually covered horses, cattle, birds, fish, and insects. They forbade the abandonment of sick animals. They established a system of government kennels — the inu-yashiki (犬屋敷, inu-yashiki) — to house strays. The largest compound, at Nakano (中野, Nakano) in what is now a quiet Tokyo suburb, eventually held more than 100,000 dogs, fed daily on rice and dried fish. The cost fell on Edo's residents through special levies.

The penalties were serious. A man was executed for killing a dog. Another was punished for wounding one. Samurai (侍, samurai) — the warrior class, men trained from childhood in the controlled application of violence — were required to address stray dogs using honorific speech: the polite forms of Japanese reserved for social superiors, directed at animals wandering the city streets. The humiliation was not incidental. It was, in a sense, the point. A shogun who could make a samurai bow to a dog had demonstrated the totality of his power.

And yet Tsunayoshi was not simply a tyrant of peculiar tastes. He was a serious intellectual. He delivered Confucian lectures to his retainers personally — unusual and even slightly undignified for a shogun, who was typically expected to govern through distance and ceremony rather than direct instruction. He was deeply engaged with the culture of the Genroku era (元禄時代, Genroku Jidai), the great flowering of merchant-class art that produced the mature forms of kabuki (歌舞伎, kabuki), haiku (俳句, haiku), and ukiyo-e (浮世絵, ukiyo-e) woodblock printing. Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉, Matsuo Bashō) died in 1694, during Tsunayoshi's reign. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門, Chikamatsu Monzaemon) wrote some of his greatest works under his rule. The cultural brilliance of the period was real, and Tsunayoshi was part of it.

There is also a murder rumor that circulated for generations and has never quite died.

The Sanno Gaiki (山槐記, Sanno Gaiki), a gossipy chronicle compiled after Tsunayoshi's death, claimed that his consort had stabbed him — a revenge killing triggered by his attempt to name an illegitimate child as his heir. Historians have consistently attributed this to political gossip rather than fact, pointing to contemporary records and the epidemic conditions that made measles a plausible cause. But the story circulated widely enough to be recorded in multiple chronicles, and it still surfaces in popular retellings. The image of the Dog Shogun killed not by disease but by a woman protecting dynastic order is too dramatic to fully disappear.

Modern historians have substantially rehabilitated Tsunayoshi's reputation. The Shōruiawaremi no rei are now recognized as among the world's earliest large-scale animal welfare legislation — preceding comparable European laws by nearly two centuries. The intention, at least initially, was genuinely humane: Tsunayoshi reduced the use of death penalties in his criminal code in the same period, and the overall murder rate in Edo declined during his rule. The implementation, however, had metastasized past any reasonable humanitarian purpose into something closer to institutional mania.

That final accounting doesn't change what happened the day the fifth shogun died. Over 100,000 dogs in the Nakano kennels were dispersed into a city that no longer had to feed them. Twenty-two years of accumulated edicts — more than a hundred separate rules — were voided by his successor in a matter of days. The entire apparatus had been held in place by one man's singular, uncompromising will.

When that will stopped, so did the world he had made.