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. One of the things that made this hereditary class so interesting was that each samurai was entitled to an annual salary from the daimyo called a stipend. This privilege basically paid them off and assured that they didn't become restless warriors plaguing the countryside, that is, bandits. We tend to think of samurai as noble and honorable, but urban samurai, according to Andrew Gordon's book A Modern History of Japan, were a rough-and-tumble lot.