Who were the Tokugawa?

A small family on the edge of great ones

The Tokugawa began as the Matsudaira, a family of local warriors in Mikawa Province, in what is now eastern Aichi Prefecture. In the sixteenth century they were squeezed between two far larger neighbors, the Imagawa to the east and the Oda to the west.

The family later traced its descent to the Minamoto, the great warrior lineage of Japan’s medieval shoguns, through the Nitta branch. Historians treat that genealogy as doubtful; the early history of the family is largely unknown, and the claim served a purpose, since only a man of Minamoto descent was traditionally eligible to be shogun.

The boy who was traded

Ieyasu was born in 1543 as Matsudaira Takechiyo. As a child he was sent away as a hostage to guarantee his father’s loyalty, first falling into the hands of the Oda and then spending years in the Imagawa household at Sunpu.

He was freed by the Imagawa defeat at Okehazama in 1560, when Oda Nobunaga destroyed a much larger Imagawa army. Ieyasu went home, allied himself with Nobunaga, and in 1567 received imperial permission to take the surname Tokugawa.

Tokugawa tradition adds a darker scene to that escape. Pursued after Okehazama, the young lord took refuge at Daiju-ji, his family’s temple near Okazaki, and meant to take his own life before his ancestors’ graves. The abbot talked him out of it, the temple held off his pursuers, and the words the abbot gave him, “leave this defiled world, seek the Pure Land,” became his battle standard. The story comes from the family’s own chronicles, written long after, and was retold for centuries.

Beside Nobunaga

For twenty years Ieyasu fought as Nobunaga’s ally. At Nagashino in 1575 their combined army broke the cavalry of the Takeda clan from behind field defenses, with arquebusiers playing a central part. It became one of the best-known battles of the period, and one of the first in which firearms decided the day, though historians still argue over how the guns were actually used.

When Nobunaga was killed at Honnō-ji in 1582, Ieyasu was near Sakai with a small escort and in serious danger. He escaped home through the mountains of Iga, a crossing remembered in Tokugawa tradition as one of the great perils of his life.

Patience, then one decisive day

Ieyasu came to terms with Nobunaga’s successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and in 1590 accepted a transfer to the Kantō plain. He made his headquarters at Edo, then a modest castle town. It is now Tokyo.

The move followed Hideyoshi’s siege of Odawara that same year, which destroyed the Hōjō, the family that had ruled the Kantō for five generations. Their lands went to Ieyasu, and with them the largest domain of any lord in Japan.

After Hideyoshi died, the great lords divided into two camps. At Sekigahara in October 1600, Ieyasu’s eastern army won the battle that settled the question. In 1603 the emperor appointed him shogun, and in 1615 the fall of Osaka Castle ended the last serious challenge to his house.

Two hundred and sixty-five years

Fifteen Tokugawa shoguns governed Japan from Edo. Their system bound the great lords to the capital, kept the realm at peace for more than two and a half centuries, and turned Edo into one of the largest cities in the world. The era is so closely identified with the family that historians often call it the Tokugawa period.

Ieyasu secured the succession early. In 1605, only two years after taking the title, he passed it to his son Hidetada while keeping real power in retirement, so that by his death in 1616 the office was already a family inheritance.

It ended in 1867, when the fifteenth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returned governing authority to the emperor. The Meiji Restoration followed. The family itself did not end; it continues today.

Maru ni mitsuba aoi

The Tokugawa crest is usually called the hollyhock in English, but the plant is aoi, a wild ginger. It is the sacred plant of the Kamo shrines of Kyoto, and the Matsudaira shared their crest with the Kamo family, which is one reason some historians suspect the Matsudaira’s real roots lay there rather than with the Minamoto.

Once the family ruled, the crest became theirs alone. During the Edo period only the Tokugawa and their branch houses were permitted to use it. Each spring a messenger carried aoi from the Kamigamo shrine to Edo for the shogun, a ritual that drew on the shared plant. A well-known story holds that Ieyasu was offered a new crest by the emperor and kept his own; it is repeated often and may be true, but it is a story.