And for the next 260 years or so, the Tokugawa bakufu was the main government of Japan. The primary virtue of this government was not necessarily its efficiency or its forward-thinking policies, but its stability. Stability, the most underrated of governmental virtues. Let's go to the Thought Bubble. The Tokugawa bakufu wasn't much for centralization, as power was mainly in the hands of local lords called daimyo. One odd feature of the Tokugawa era was the presence of a class of warriors who by the 19th century had become mostly bureaucrats. You may have heard of them, the samurai.