The classes were not arranged by wealth or capital but by what philosophers described as their moral purity. A social order called “the four divisions of society” was adapted to stabilize the country, comprised of samurai, farming peasants, artisans, and merchants. Next came the shogun, daimyōs, and layers of feudal lords. At the top were the Emperor and the court nobility, invincible in prestige but weak in power.
Edo society had an elaborate social structure in which everyone knew their place and level of prestige. The Tokugawa shogunate also went to great lengths to suppress social unrest. It required the feudal lords to reside in Edo every other year, prohibited the construction of ocean-going ships, proscribed Christianity, restricted castles to one per domain (han), and stipulated that bakufu regulations were the national law. It encompassed private conduct, marriage, dress, types of weapons, and numbers of troops allowed. A code of laws was established to regulate the daimyō houses. This represented a new unity in the feudal structure, which featured an increasingly large bureaucracy to administer the mixture of centralized and decentralized authorities. In the bakuhan, the shogun had national authority and the daimyōs had regional authority. The political system evolved into what historians call bakuhan, a combination of the terms bakufu and han (domains) to describe the government and society of the period. 
This period brought 250 years of stability to Japan. 
Between 16 Japanese society was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, a period known as the Edo period. A shogun’s office or administration is the shogunate, known in Japanese as the bakufu. The shogun held almost absolute power over territories through military means. In most of this period, the shoguns were the de facto rulers of the country, although nominally e appointed by the Emperor. Shogun was the military dictator of Japan from 1185 to 1868 (with exceptions).
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