'There was no room for mercy in view of their crime." None asked, none given. "They met their end ... with ... a touching acquiescence in their fate."
The world we are entering is that of Osaka novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). It was, first of all, a world of peace — the gated, barred, frozen peace imposed by Japan's new Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868) after 400 years of on-and-off, mostly on, mind-numbingly meaningless civil carnage in which one's self, one's "I," was good for one thing only: sacrifice to one's feudal lord.
Peace stirred commerce, commerce enriched merchants at the expense of the very samurai who so loftily despised them, and merchants, newly empowered by money if not respect, made a momentous discovery, what a later age would call "the pursuit of happiness."