Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) was a daimyo, a regional military lord, who became the ruler of all Japan. He is counted as the third of the “three unifiers” who ended more than a century of civil war, after Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He founded the Tokugawa shogunate, also called the Edo shogunate, which governed Japan from 1603 until 1867.

Ieyasu’s career was long and full of reversals. He was a hostage as a child, an ally of Nobunaga as a young man, a rival and then a vassal of Hideyoshi in middle age, and only in his late fifties did he become the most powerful man in Japan. He was known for caution, patience, careful management of his followers and a readiness to be ruthless when he judged it necessary.

The system he created combined the shogun’s government in Edo with some 200–300 domains ruled by daimyo. It brought a long period of internal peace, during which cities, trade, education and popular culture flourished, while the government tightly controlled religion, foreign contact and the movements of the warrior class.

Ieyasu was born at Okazaki Castle in Mikawa Province as Matsudaira Takechiyo, the son of Matsudaira Hirotada, a minor lord squeezed between two powerful neighbours: the Oda to the west and the Imagawa to the east. When he was still a baby, his mother was sent back to her own family for political reasons, and he did not see her again for many years.

At about the age of five, Takechiyo was sent as a hostage to the Imagawa, but on the way he was seized and handed over to the Oda, who held him for about two years. After an exchange of prisoners he was taken to Sunpu, the Imagawa capital, where he spent the rest of his childhood and youth. His father died in 1549, and the Imagawa effectively took control of the Matsudaira lands.

Life as a hostage was not a prison. The boy received an education suitable for a warrior of good family, came of age in a ceremony that gave him an adult name, and married a woman of the Imagawa clan, later known as Lady Tsukiyama. But he learned early how fragile loyalty and power could be.

In 1560 the Imagawa leader Yoshimoto was killed by Oda Nobunaga at the Battle of Okehazama. The young Matsudaira lord, then called Motoyasu, seized the chance to return to Okazaki and break free of the Imagawa. In 1562 he made an alliance with Nobunaga that lasted twenty years. He soon took the name Ieyasu and, in 1566–1567, adopted the surname Tokugawa, claiming descent from the famous Minamoto warrior lineage.

The early years were hard. In 1563–1564 Ieyasu had to put down an uprising by followers of the Ikkō (True Pure Land) Buddhist sect in Mikawa, in which some of his own retainers joined the rebels. He then expanded east into Tōtōmi Province and moved his base to Hamamatsu in 1570. He fought beside Nobunaga at the Battle of Anegawa in 1570 and at Nagashino in 1575, where massed musket fire helped defeat the Takeda.

Ieyasu also suffered defeats. In early 1573 the great general Takeda Shingen crushed his army at Mikatagahara. In 1579, in one of the darkest episodes of his life, his wife Lady Tsukiyama was killed and his eldest son Nobuyasu was forced to commit suicide after accusations that they had plotted with the Takeda; the reasons are still debated. After the Takeda were destroyed in 1582, Nobunaga rewarded Ieyasu with Suruga Province.

In June 1582 Nobunaga was attacked by his general Akechi Mitsuhide at the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto and died. Ieyasu, who was visiting the Sakai area with a small escort, made a dangerous journey back to Mikawa through the mountains of Iga. In the confusion that followed, he fought the Hōjō and others for former Takeda lands and gained Kai and Shinano, becoming lord of five provinces.

Nobunaga’s general Toyotomi Hideyoshi quickly took the lead among his successors. In 1584 Ieyasu backed Nobunaga’s son Nobukatsu against Hideyoshi and fought him to a standstill at the Battles of Komaki and Nagakute. Instead of fighting on, both men chose a settlement. In 1586 Ieyasu formally submitted to Hideyoshi, who had given him his sister in marriage and sent his own mother as a hostage to reassure him.

In 1590, after Hideyoshi’s campaign destroyed the Hōjō of Odawara, Ieyasu was moved from his home provinces to the Kantō plain in the east, a larger but distant territory. He chose the small castle town of Edo as his headquarters and began to develop it. This transfer, often seen as an attempt to keep him far from the centre, gave him a large, compact power base.

When Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592 and 1597, Ieyasu was stationed at the headquarters at Nagoya in Hizen, northern Kyushu, but did not send his troops across the sea. As a result he avoided the heavy losses suffered by many western daimyo.

Hideyoshi died in 1598, leaving a five-year-old son, Hideyori. He had appointed a Council of Five Elders, of whom Ieyasu was the most powerful, and five commissioners to govern until the boy grew up. Ieyasu soon began making marriage alliances and acting independently, alarming the administrator Ishida Mitsunari and others loyal to the Toyotomi house.

In 1600, while Ieyasu led an army against Uesugi Kagekatsu in the northeast, Mitsunari and his allies raised a “Western Army”. Ieyasu turned back with his “Eastern Army”, which included many daimyo who disliked Mitsunari. On 21 October 1600 the two armies met at Sekigahara, a valley in Mino Province. During the battle several western commanders, most famously Kobayakawa Hideaki, switched sides or stayed out of the fighting, and the Western Army collapsed within a day.

After the victory Ieyasu executed Mitsunari and other leaders, confiscated or reduced the lands of those who had opposed him, and redistributed territory to reward his allies and relatives. This reshaping of the map of Japan laid the foundation of Tokugawa power.

In 1603 Emperor Go-Yōzei appointed Ieyasu sei-i taishōgun, the title held by the military rulers of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras. Unlike those regimes, he governed from Edo rather than Kyoto. He ordered daimyo to provide labour and materials to rebuild Edo Castle on a vast scale, a project that both strengthened the shogunate and drained the resources of potential rivals.

In 1605 Ieyasu handed the title of shogun to his son Hidetada, signalling that the office would be hereditary in the Tokugawa house. He moved to Sunpu, but as ōgosho, “retired lord”, he kept control of major policy, surrounded by advisers who included officials, Buddhist monks, the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan, merchants and the English pilot William Adams.

The last obstacle was Toyotomi Hideyori, who remained in Osaka Castle with great wealth and prestige. In 1614 Ieyasu seized on the inscription on a temple bell cast for Hideyori, claiming it insulted him, and launched the Winter Campaign against Osaka. After a truce and the filling of the castle moats, the Summer Campaign of 1615 ended with the fall of Osaka Castle and the deaths of Hideyori and his mother Yodo-dono. The Toyotomi line was extinguished.

In 1615 the regime issued laws for the military houses (Buke shohatto), rules for the imperial court and nobility, and an order limiting each domain to one castle. Ieyasu died at Sunpu on 1 June 1616, probably of a stomach illness, perhaps cancer. The long-told story that he died from eating fried sea bream is doubtful, since he fell ill months before his death.

Historians call the system Ieyasu founded the bakuhan system, combining the bakufu (the shogun’s government) and the han (domains). The shogunate directly controlled large territories, major cities such as Kyoto, Osaka and Nagasaki, and important mines. The daimyo governed their own domains with considerable autonomy, but under rules set by Edo.

The daimyo were classified by their relationship to the Tokugawa: shinpan (relatives), fudai (hereditary vassals who had followed the Tokugawa before Sekigahara) and tozama (“outside” lords who had submitted later). Fudai daimyo were placed in strategic locations and staffed the shogunate’s offices, while powerful tozama such as the Shimazu of Satsuma and the Mōri of Chōshū were kept away from central government. Two centuries later, these same tozama domains would lead the movement that overthrew the shogunate.

The shogunate also governed the relationship between warriors and other groups. Warriors were expected to live in castle towns, peasants to farm and pay taxes in rice, and the regime watched religious institutions closely. Many features often associated with the Tokugawa, such as the system of alternate attendance in Edo and the strict limits on foreign contact, took their mature form under Ieyasu’s son and grandson, but they built on his foundations.

Ieyasu inherited a hostile relationship with Korea after Hideyoshi’s invasions. He moved to restore peace, partly for trade through the Sō family of Tsushima. In 1604–1605 the Korean monk and envoy Samyeong (Yujeong) travelled to Japan, met Ieyasu at Fushimi and arranged the return of captives. In 1607 a Korean embassy came to Edo and Sunpu, officially described as a mission to answer a letter and bring home captives, and in 1609 the Treaty of Kiyū (Giyu) with Tsushima reopened regulated trade at Busan. Later Korean embassies to Japan grew out of this settlement.

Ieyasu was curious about Europe. In 1600 the Dutch ship De Liefde arrived in Kyushu, and its English pilot, William Adams, became his adviser on ships, trade and foreign affairs. The Dutch opened a trading post at Hirado in 1609 and the English in 1613. The shogunate also licensed Japanese merchants to trade across Southeast Asia on “red-seal ships”.

At first Ieyasu tolerated Christian missionaries for the sake of trade, but his attitude hardened. After a bribery scandal involving a Christian official, the shogunate banned Christianity in its own lands in 1612 and nationwide from the end of 1613, expelled missionaries in 1614 and exiled prominent Japanese Christians such as Takayama Ukon. The persecution that followed, and the later restrictions of the 1630s, shaped Japan’s relations with the outside world for two centuries.

In 1609, with shogunal permission, the Shimazu of Satsuma invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom, which thereafter paid tribute both to China and to Satsuma.

Ieyasu valued practical learning. Contemporaries recorded that he liked the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean, Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese political classic Essentials of Government of the Zhenguan Era and the Azuma kagami, a chronicle of the Kamakura shogunate. He sponsored printing projects, first with wooden movable type at Fushimi and later, at Sunpu, with copper movable type; Japanese movable-type printing in this period drew on Korean type and techniques brought back during the invasions.

He employed the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan, a student of Fujiwara Seika, whose Neo-Confucian learning had been stimulated by contact with the Korean scholar Kang Hang, a captive in Japan after the invasions. The Hayashi family later directed official Confucian learning under the shogunate, although Buddhism and Shinto remained central to Ieyasu’s religious world.

Ieyasu wished to become a protective deity for his descendants. After his death he was buried at Kunōzan near Sunpu and, in 1617, enshrined at Nikkō under the divine title Tōshō Daigongen, “Great Avatar Illuminating the East”. His grandson Iemitsu rebuilt the Nikkō Tōshōgū in lavishly decorated form in the 1630s. Together with nearby shrines and temples, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999.

Under the Tokugawa, Ieyasu was venerated as Tōshō Daigongen, and official histories presented him as a wise founder. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new government, which had overthrown his descendants, promoted an emperor-centred history in which the shogunate appeared as an obstacle, and Ieyasu was often cast as a cunning, calculating “old badger” (tanuki oyaji) who had cheated the Toyotomi.

In the twentieth century his image changed again. A long popular novel by Yamaoka Sōhachi, published from 1950, portrayed him as a patient seeker of peace, and in postwar Japan he was widely read as a model of leadership and management. Television dramas continue to reinterpret him, sometimes as a hesitant, anxious young man who grows into a ruler.

Several famous sayings attributed to Ieyasu are later inventions. The hototogisu (cuckoo) verses comparing the three unifiers come from later writing. The well-known “testament” that begins “Life is like walking a long road carrying a heavy burden” is regarded by Japanese scholars as a forgery of the Meiji era, modelled on a text attributed to Tokugawa Mitsukuni; a related set of teachings, the Tōshōgū goikun, is also of doubtful authenticity. Such sayings tell us more about how later generations wanted to see Ieyasu than about the man himself.

In Korea, views of Ieyasu have tended to be relatively favourable compared with those of Hideyoshi, because he ended the Toyotomi regime and restored diplomatic relations. Joseon officials also understood his government as a continuation of the earlier Kamakura and Muromachi shogunates.

Much of what is told about Ieyasu comes from sources written by his followers or by the shogunate. The Mikawa monogatari, a memoir by the Tokugawa retainer Ōkubo Tadataka written in the 1620s, is vivid but partisan. The official Tokugawa jikki, compiled in the nineteenth century, drew on earlier records but was written to glorify the dynasty. Contemporary diaries such as the Ietada nikki of a Matsudaira vassal, letters and documents, and records from the Oda side such as the Shinchō kōki provide important checks.

Historians still debate key episodes. The 1579 deaths of Lady Tsukiyama and Nobuyasu have been explained as Nobunaga’s demand, as the result of a real plot with the Takeda, or as the outcome of conflict within the Tokugawa house between Okazaki and Hamamatsu factions. Recent research on Sekigahara has questioned dramatic details, such as the story that Ieyasu ordered his troops to fire on Kobayakawa Hideaki’s position to force him to defect, and has re-examined when the defections actually happened.

The foreign policy of the early shogunate is also debated. The older idea of a “closed country” (sakoku) has been challenged by historians such as Ronald Toby, who emphasised that the shogunate maintained managed relations with Korea, the Ryukyus, the Ainu, China and the Dutch, and used diplomacy to support its own legitimacy. Research on Japan–Korea relations has also shown that the Sō family of Tsushima altered official letters in the early seventeenth century to smooth the restoration of relations, a fact exposed in the 1630s.

Finally, historians weigh how much of the Tokugawa order was Ieyasu’s design and how much was developed by his successors. Most see him as the founder who secured military supremacy and set basic principles, while the institutions of the mature shogunate took shape over the following decades.