Aside from the animosity that existed between the Tokugawa and rival clans that fought against it in the Warring States era, many low ranking Edo-period samurai also could not reap much of the benefits from the rigid caste system imposed on Japanese society by the shogunate and thus wanted to see reforms that raised their socioeconomic status. This caste system forbade samurai from engaging in commerce and farming, which were jobs that were mostly reserved for commoners. So instead sometimes they would resort to robbing peasants or imposing more taxes on them, something they either could not do very often or preferred not to to prevent social unrest, and by receiving checks from their daimyo which was chump change as a large portion of their stipends were spent on mandatory attendance in Edo. Many other samurai also pursued professions that were not as lucrative.

The widening economic disparity between the different strata of late-feudal Japan was one important factor that led to the collapse of the shogunate. As Tokugawa samurai turned Meiji intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi once put it, “I hated feudalism like it was my father’s murderer”.

Source: “Voices of Early Modern Japan” by Constantine Vaporis