Tosa school
After Tokugawa Ieyasu established Edo, the city went into a long period of isolation. The third shōgun of Tokugawa, shut off Japan from the world to make his hold more secure, besides very limited contacts at the port of Nagasaki. Differences of opinion among the Christian missionaries who had been in Japan for nearly a century helped to bring about the exclusionist policy which at around 1637, closed Japan to all foreign interaction. During this time, Edo Japan flourished into a very political economic and artistic center of Japan. It slowly grew to be one of the largest cities of the world, and its art in many ways showed the spirit of the new and boisterous metropolis. This is when Edo saw an emerging middle class. Fortunately the activities of each class, as long as they did not seem to conflict with the prestige of the higher-ranked military clans, were allowed to develop their own social styles and culture. Before this, the arts were usually reserved for the upper class and the more fortunate courts. Artists were not under the Kyoto courts pressure to produce work only for the higher class. In the "floating world", artists were free to select their own style and even their own target audience. With this, arose new types of art appropriate to the interests of merchants and the middle class. Art was no longer reserved for the elite class, now it belonged to whoever could afford it. The Shōgun of Edo and the Kyoto court continued to support the Tosa school as well as the other prominent school of the time, such as the Kano school.