For a view of what this looked like on the ground, you should check out "Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai".

It's the autobiography of Katsu Kokichi (Musui is another name he was known by), a samurai born in the early 19th century to a very low-ranking family. It's a firsthand account of life at the very lowest fringe of Shogunate society at the very end of that system, and is quite entertaining because Katsu is a lazy good-for-nothing who can't even get one of those pointless bureaucracy jobs and survives by doing "lowly" merchant work. I think it would make a pretty funny TV show because the protagonist is such a hapless loser.

I can't be the only person here who read this comment and thought of Gintama.

Sounds like Only Fools and Horses :-)

My major source for all this was Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan. It's a sweeping book - 600 pages, I think, and covers everything from 1300 to 2000 - but one of its main focuses is the end of the Sengoku period and the rise of the Tokugawa.

This looks fantastic, thank you.

you could also read shogun by james clavell, which is a fictional novel based on tokugawa. i read his whole asian saga series because that first book was so good.

Oh yes and a bet a large number of readers fell in love with Mariko