In what would turn out to be the twilight decades of early modern Edo, cracks appeared in the foundations of its society and politics. Scholars of Western medicine discovered that the Chinese philosophical ideas that underpinned not just scientific understanding but also morality and the political order could be wrong. The appearance of American warships at the mouth of Edo Bay in 1853 challenged the government and culminated in the signing of humiliating treaties with foreign powers, exacerbating concerns about the shogunate’s ability to govern. And two years later, the fierce Ansei earthquake depleted government coffers, further demonstrated the limits of shogunate power, and fueled popular desires for world renewal. After the Tokugawa regime was toppled in 1868, bringing an end to the early modern order and the very notion of a shogunate, Edo was renamed Tokyo and strategically remade into the capital of an emergent modern nation.