Tokugawa Ieyasu

Japanese shogun (r. 1603-1605)

• Born: January 31, 1543
• Birthplace: Okazaki, Mikawa Province (now in Aichi Prefecture), Japan
• Died: June 1, 1616
• Place of death: Sumpu, Suruga Province (now Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture), Japan

Ieyasu united Japan under a feudal administration and brought it to the height of its cultural tradition in a closed society that lasted for more than two centuries.

Early Life

Tokugawa Ieyasu (toh-koo-gah-wah ee-eh-yo-soo) was born Matsudaira Takechiyo in Okazaki Castle, the son of a minor warrior chieftain, Matsudaira Hirotada, whose lands lay between the domains of the Imagawa and the Oda families on the Pacific Ocean. To cement an alliance with Imagawa Yoshimoto, Hirotada dispatched Ieyasu as a hostage in 1547. Ieyasu, however, was seized by Oda Nobuhide, who held him hostage for two years. A truce between Yoshimoto and Nobuhide allowed Ieyasu, whose father had died in the meantime, to be taken as hostage to Sumpu, the castle town of Yoshimoto. His grandmother, Keyoin, a nun in Sumpu, started Ieyasu’s education by teaching him calligraphy and arranging for a Zen monk, Tagen Sufu, adviser and kin of Yoshimoto, to educate him further. Sufu, an expert in the principles and practice of warfare and well versed in tactics and strategy, taught Ieyasu the relationship of warfare to government and administration. Ieyasu’s education in both military and civil affairs, continually internalized through practical application, eventually refined him into the greatest political and military figure in the history of Japan.

As early as the age of ten, Ieyasu began to participate in military duties, initially in noncombatant positions, such as commander of the castle guard. At age twelve, he became an adult and took the name Motonobu. The following year, in 1556, he returned to Okazaki as head of the family to find his Matsudaira retainers awaiting him, although the Imagawa family continued to garrison the castle. In 1558, at the age of fifteen, he made his first sortie, an assault on a peripheral fortress of Oda Nobunaga , who had succeeded his father, Nobuhide. Ieyasu destroyed the fort, raided the area, and before withdrawing smashed a pursuit force dispatched by Nobunaga. When Yoshimoto refused to recall the Imagawa garrison at Okazaki, Ieyasu changed his name to Motoyasu. For two more years, he served Yoshimoto until Yoshimoto was killed in battle by Nobunaga forces at Okehazama in 1560. Although Ieyasu had successfully overrun a Nobunaga frontier fortress, he realized that Nobunaga had been victorious and that Yoshimoto’s heir was incompetent. Ieyasu thus returned to Okazaki, reclaimed the domain for his family, forced the Imagawa garrison out, and established himself as an independent lord at the age of seventeen.

In 1561, Matsudaira Takechiyo joined hands with Nobunaga and took the name Ieyasu. Little by little, he encroached on Imagawa holdings until he controlled both Mikawa and Totomi provinces. In 1567, an imperial order pronounced him Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, and, as an ally of Nobunaga, he extended his holdings eastward along the seacoast. Fighting much of the time against the Takeda family, he added Suruga Province to his holdings.

When Nobunaga was murdered in 1582, his chief general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi , began taking over his domains and alliances. In 1583, to offset Hideyoshi’s power, Ieyasu made an alliance with Hōjō Ujimasa in Odawara and split the eastern Takeda domains, taking the Kai and Southern Shinano Provinces. When Hideyoshi became kampaku(regent to the emperor) in 1585, some Tokugawa allies went over to his side, and Ieyasu, to maintain peace on his western borders, struck a deal with Hideyoshi in 1586 and swore loyalty to him in 1588. Thus, when Ujimasa refused to submit to Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi attacked, using Ieyasu as his point man.

When Odawara fell in 1590, the Hōjō leaders were ordered to disembowel themselves, and the Kanto Plain, with its six provinces of Izu, Sagami, Musashi, Kozuke, Kazusa, and Shimosa, was given to Ieyasu along with 110,000 koku (one koku is equivalent to an area that would harvest five bushels of rice) of land in the Omi and Ise Provinces not far from Kyōto in exchange for Ieyasu’s lands in the Mikawa, Totomi, and Suruga Provinces. It provided Ieyasu with a one-million-koku increase in land, separated him further from Hideyoshi, and made him point man for further expansion of Hideyoshi’s control to the east. Ieyasu now established his castle in Edo, which is the modern Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and began a promising future.

Life’s Work

The 1590’s was a decade of preparation. The policies Ieyasu followed in consolidating his control in the Kanto Plain were later successfully pursued to unify and administer Japan for two and a half centuries of peace following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the subsequent subordination of all the feudal lords under Ieyasu’s control.

Ieyasu believed that good government consisted of keeping the goodwill of the governed. Consequently, he immediately lightened taxation, punished or got rid of administrators who exploited or abused the collection of taxes, tightened administrative regulations to restrict the authority of district administrators, and established mechanisms of inspection to audit their performance. It is not surprising that peasants from other domains began filtering into Tokugawa holdings to escape high taxes and harsh rule.

Ieyasu regarded religion as one of the instruments of government and guaranteed the lands of temples and shrines that accepted his leadership. He issued sets of regulations to guide abbots in administering the temples and priestly behavior and made religious controversy against the law. Eventually, everyone had to carry an identification card that stipulated to which Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple he belonged. Ieyasu adroitly used nuptial services in politics, marrying his daughters and granddaughters to important feudal lords. These marriages eventually related Ieyasu to almost every major feudal lord in the country, thus consolidating his relations with the strategic feudal houses. Moreover, he soon began arranging marriages among feudal houses, thus strengthening his political infrastructure.

Ieyasu was the perfect specimen of a type that Japanese nationality and training tends to produce. With a powerful physique, he ensured his own physical health with a frugal diet, the avoidance of any excess, a fondness for all kinds of exercise, and an outdoor, active life. Hawking was his real interest, although he was skilled in archery, fencing, and horsemanship and excelled at shooting.

A disciplined man with great self-control, Ieyasu kept his powder dry during Hideyoshi’s two Korean campaigns between 1592 and 1598 and after Hideyoshi’s death was in a position to consolidate his strength and establish an administration that covered all Japan. Ieyasu was appointed shogun by the imperial court in 1603 and reconstituted the bakufu (shogunate), which both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had ignored.

In patterning his shogunate on the previous Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates, Ieyasu studied the basic codes of those regimes in the Azuma Kagami (mirror of the east) and Kenmoku Shikimoku (code of the Kenmu year period), respectively. The Azuma Kagami particularly provided historical justification for his regime. As a history of the founding of the Kamakura shogunate, its lessons are clear. A shogun rules through his vassal bands. He rules justly, punishing insurgents and rewarding loyal followers. He keeps the peace and, through the action of a grateful and cooperative court, receives and at the same time passes on to his heir and descendants the title of shogun. Consequently, Ieyasu took care to ensure that no person or institution should be able to interfere with Tokugawa rule and that the military class under his family should be the ruling power. To protect his family position, he retired in 1605 and had his son Tokugawa Hidetada appointed shogun, although he continued to rule. He also saw to it that his grandson Iemitsu would succeed his father, Hidetada, when Ieyasu died.

In a strategic distribution of fiefs following the Battle of Sekigahara, Ieyasu placed fudai lords (hereditary lieges) in key domains throughout Japan to keep an eye on the tozama (outside lords) with whom he had no hereditary ties. In order to reduce their wealth and thus limit their military strength, Ieyasu imposed upon the feudal lords obligations such as rebuilding castles, expanding the Imperial Palace in 1611, and building roads.

Ieyasu was devoted to the accumulation of wealth, but he did not spend it. Instead, he repeatedly advised vassals to live frugally and in his own daily habits tried to serve as a model. This is one of the reasons why the pursuit of profitable foreign trade was inimicable to his interests. Ieyasu had taken the English captain Will Adams into his service in 1601, sanctioned the visits of the Dutch in 1606 and the English in 1613, and approved Japanese trading ventures to Southeast Asia. Profits on a six-month round-trip voyage to Southeast Asia, for example, ranged from 35 percent to 110 percent, averaging 50 percent per voyage. Once Toyotomi power had been eliminated by the capture of Ōsaka Castle in 1616, however, two other factors came into play discouraging foreign trade. One was the persecution of Christians, who were regarded as the advance guard of foreign invasion. The other and most important was the domestic policy of Ieyasu, which brought all the feudal lords under his control. Foreign trade could only help the western tozama lords become wealthy, and that caused gradual foreign restrictions until the country was closed off completely in 1640 under Iemitsu.

Significance

In his early years and all through his life, Tokugawa Ieyasu was a good fighter and a born strategist. He fought more than forty-five battles. He did not win them all, but at Mikatagahara he defeated a force led by Takeda Shingen twice as great as his own. Later, he defeated Hideyoshi twice at Komakiyama and Nagakute before submitting himself as a vassal. The Battle of Sekigahara showed his true mettle as a general. He smashed a combined force larger than his own and settled once and for all his military supremacy over all the other feudal lords.

In his later years after 1590, when he took over the Kanto Plain, he showed his genius as an administrator. Ieyasu made no effort to create a systematic government. He gave direct orders rather than governing by legislation. What legislation there was was neither bulky nor particularly original. It carried on the codes of the Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates with the purpose of keeping the Tokugawa family in a position of complete and unassailable domination. It included terms of the oath to be taken by all daimyos (feudal lords) and laws to be observed by the imperial house and court nobles and by the feudal lords and their samurai retainers. Ieyasu exacted unconditional obedience of the whole military class. Moreover, the court could do nothing without the consent of the shogunate, restricting itself to ceremony and aesthetics.

Bibliography

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. A classic examination of the century of foreign trade prior to the closing of the country in 1640. Examines Ieyasu’s changing attitude toward Christians.

Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Gordon, a professor of history at Harvard University, devotes several chapters to the establishment of the Tokugawa regime, discussing the country’s social, economic, and intellectual transformation during the Tokugawa period.

Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Includes chapters on Tokugawa Ieyasu’s rise to power, the creation of his government and shogunate, and foreign relations, culture, education, and religion during the Tokugawa period.

Menton, Linda K., Noren W. Lush, Eileen H. Tamura, and Chance I. Gusukuma. The Rise of Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. The first chapter, “Building the Early Modern State, 1600-1912,” devotes a section to the Tokugawa shogunate. Extensively illustrated with photographs, graphs, charts, maps and time lines.

Sadler, A. L. The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu. London: Allen & Unwin, 1937. The first major effort to capture the life and times of Ieyasu and the meaning of his life.

Sansom, George. A History of Japan, 1334-1615. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961. Contains two excellent chapters on Ieyasu’s life and the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as a chapter on the Tokugawa government.

Totman, Conrad. Tokugawa Ieyasu: Shogun. San Francisco: Heian International, 1983. A well-written, in-depth biography of Ieyasu that employs flashbacks to heighten interest.