His contemporaries hardly knew what to make of him. Their bewilderment is reflected in the name by which he is best known to us: the "dog shogun."

Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, born in 1646, became shogun by accident. He ruled from 1680 until his death in 1709. If global politics in his day had been what they are in ours, he would no doubt have met and conferred with his contemporary, King Louis XIV of France — and found, though professing Confucianism as against Louis' Christianity, that they had much in common: absolutism, most notably.

But there were no global politics back then — Japan was 40 years into a self-imposed isolation that was to last deep into the 19th century — and neither is likely to have known of the other's existence.