Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Japanese society underwent fundamental changes that led to the dissolution of the traditional state structure and the appearance of new forms of state and social organization. This chapter focuses on the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. The transformation of cultural activities into enterprises engaged in by the individual houses influenced in various ways the thought and religious outlook of this period. The most prominent evidence of the establishment of Buddhism among the populace on a national scale in this period is the fact that a majority of the Buddhist temples surviving into the modern era were founded during this time. The outlook characteristic of Tokugawa Buddhism linked the everyday life and human relations that centered on the house with the sacred. In Chinese Confucianism, the principles of Heaven regulated the entire universe, including the seasonal cycles.

Japan passed from a state of extreme political dissolution and social upheaval to a new era of unity and peace, it also turned inward and away from the relative cosmopolitanism of the Christian Century's first half. From sengoku, Japan was transformed into sakoku, a closed country. For the daimyo, the establishment of a new order meant a reduction to fealty under the Tokugawa shogunate. For the Christian missionaries and their converts, it meant a bitter persecution and the nearly total eradication of their religion in Japan. For the country at large, it was the beginning of more than two centuries of national seclusion. The daimyo Shimazu Takahisa, Ōuchi Yoshitaka, and Ōtomo Yoshishige, who were the most important political personages of western Japan, were also the Christian missionary Francis Xavier's most important collocutors in the country. Christianity had been the objects of suspicion, denigration, and occasional persecution in various parts of Japan from the day of Xavier's arrival in the country.