The regulation of the night hours did not depend on public illumination. A symbol of political presence in Europe, streetlights would have been a sign of gross negligence in the combustible cities of early modern Japan. In their stead, legislative alternatives were put in place by shoguns and domain lords to keep the night in check. Their path toward the regulation of the night may have differed from that of their European counterparts, but the endpoint was the same: By controlling darkness, they demonstrated both around-the-clock presence and a commitment to order. The beliefs and practices of the urban residents for the most part aligned with the vision of rulers and administrators. Regulation, thus, came not just from above but also from below. The Tokugawa urban night, regulated from above and below, challenges triumphal rhetorics of luminous progress crafted by the Meiji ideologues first and picked up by modern historians later. More broadly, it shows how Tokugawa Japan participated in the global transformation of the night not by following a path traced by others but by charting its own.