Mito Domain

Mito (水戸藩, Mito-han^?) was a Japanese domain of the Edo period. It was associated with Hitachi Province in modern-day Ibaraki Prefecture.

In the han system, Mito was a political and economic abstraction based on periodic cadastral surveys and projected agricultural yields. In other words, the domain was defined in terms of kokudaka, not land area. This was different from the feudalism of the West.

The domain's capital was the city of Mito. Beginning with the appointment of Tokugawa Yorifusa by his father, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, in 1608, the Mito branch of the Tokugawa clan controlled the domain until the abolition of the han system in 1871. During the Edo period, Mito represented the center of nativism largely as a result of the Mitogaku, an influential school of Japanese thought, which advanced the political philosophy of sonnō jōi ("revere the emperor, expel the barbarians") that had become a popular sentiment after 1854. Mito's sponsorship of the Dai Nihon-shi (A History of Great Japan) established the domain's tradition of intellectualism. Later, Mito scholars and their ideology influenced many of the revolutionaries involved in the Meiji Restoration.

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