Tokugawa Ieyasu: the shogun who won the peace

Of the three great unifiers, it was Tokugawa Ieyasu who reaped the harvest. Where Nobunaga and Hideyoshi built and could not hold, Ieyasu waited, endured, and at the decisive moment struck to found a peace that outlived him by two and a half centuries.²

The hostage

Ieyasu was born in Okazaki Castle in Mikawa province, in what is now eastern Aichi, on the 26th day of the 12th month of Tenbun 11 by the Japanese calendar, which falls in early 1543 by the Western one. His childhood name was Takechiyo. His father, Matsudaira Hirotada, was the lord of Okazaki, a minor house that had sunk into dependence on the powerful Imagawa family of neighboring Suruga; his mother, Odai, was the daughter of the lord of Kariya. When the boy was three, she was sent back to her family, and he was parted from her.³

In the Sengoku period, the age of warring states, families bound their alliances by exchanging hostages, and Ieyasu spent most of his childhood as one. In 1547, at the age of six, he ended up in the hands of the Oda of Owari instead of the Imagawa; most accounts say he was seized on the way to Suruga. Two years later, after his father's death, the Imagawa captured Oda Nobunaga's elder half brother and exchanged him for Takechiyo, who was taken to the Imagawa capital, Sunpu. He came of age there in 1555, taking the name Motonobu, and in 1557 married a woman of the Imagawa clan, later known as Lady Tsukiyama.⁴

Okehazama and the alliance

In 1560 Imagawa Yoshimoto invaded Owari. The young Matsudaira Motoyasu, as he now called himself, had just run supplies into Odaka Castle for the Imagawa when news came that Yoshimoto had been killed by Oda Nobunaga at Okehazama. When the Imagawa garrison abandoned Okazaki Castle, he entered it and was home again. He broke with the Imagawa and allied himself with Nobunaga.⁵

In 1563 his eldest son was betrothed to Nobunaga's daughter, and he took the name Ieyasu. That year a rising of the militant Ikko Buddhist leagues in Mikawa split even his own retainers, but by 1564 he had crushed it, and by 1566 he controlled the whole province. At the end of that year, with imperial sanction, he changed his family name to Tokugawa. In 1570 he moved his seat east to Hamamatsu, to guard against the westward advance of Takeda Shingen, and that same year he fought beside Nobunaga at Anegawa in Omi.⁶

Mikatagahara

The alliance made Ieyasu Nobunaga's shield against the Takeda of Kai, and he paid for it. On the 22nd day of the 12th month of 1572 by the Japanese calendar, January 1573 in Western reckoning, Shingen's army advanced on the castle. Ieyasu chose not to wait for a siege. He marched out and met the Takeda on the Mikatagahara plateau.⁷

Against the overwhelming Takeda force his army was routed, and Ieyasu fell back to Hamamatsu Castle. Hamamatsu's own exhibition still calls it "the greatest defeat of Ieyasu's life," and Nippon.com describes it as a crushing defeat.⁸

Nagashino and Nobunaga's death

In 1575 Ieyasu and Nobunaga together crushed his son and heir, Takeda Katsuyori, at Nagashino. The alliance still had its price. In 1579 Ieyasu lost both his wife, Lady Tsukiyama, and his eldest son, Nobuyasu, who had married Nobunaga's daughter. In 1582 he shared in Nobunaga's final campaign against the Takeda and received the whole of Suruga as his reward.⁹ › Battle of Nagashino, 1575

On the 2nd day of the 6th month of 1582 Nobunaga was killed at the Honno-ji temple in Kyoto. Ieyasu was in the port of Sakai. He made for home at once, crossing through the hill country of Iga and Ise to reach Okazaki on the 4th: an escape remembered as the "Iga crossing." In the confusion that followed he seized Kai and southern Shinano, left masterless by the fall of the Takeda, and came out of the year as lord of five provinces.¹⁰

Hideyoshi's greatest lord

Hideyoshi emerged from the chaos as Nobunaga's heir. Ieyasu backed Nobunaga's son Nobukatsu against him, and the Komaki-Nagakute campaign of 1584 ended in a standstill with neither side giving way. Peace followed in 1586: Hideyoshi's half sister Asahi became Ieyasu's wife, and in the 10th month Ieyasu went to Osaka Castle to meet Hideyoshi and acknowledge him. That year he moved his seat to Sunpu.¹¹

In 1590 Ieyasu joined Hideyoshi's campaign against the Hojo of Odawara. When they fell, Hideyoshi moved him to their old lands in the Kanto in exchange for his provinces in central Japan, and on the first day of the eighth month he entered the castle of Edo, which became his base.¹²

Sekigahara

Hideyoshi died in the 8th month of 1598, leaving a young son, Hideyori, and a Council of Five Elders and five commissioners to govern for him. Ieyasu was the most powerful of the elders and gradually took the lead. One of the commissioners, Ishida Mitsunari, formed a faction against him, with another elder, Mori Terumoto, at its head.¹³

The armies met at Sekigahara, in Mino province, on the 15th day of the 9th month of 1600 by the Japanese calendar, 21 October by the Western one. Counts differ: the National Diet Library gives about 70,000 men on Ieyasu's side and 80,000 on Mitsunari's, while the National Park Service puts both armies at about 80,000. The fighting swung back and forth through the morning.¹⁴

Large parts of the Western Army never moved. Kikkawa Hiroie, leading the Mori troops in place of his lord, had come to an understanding with Ieyasu and kept the Mori army out of the fight. Kobayakawa Hideaki, who had promised himself to both sides, finally came down from his hill against his own allies, and the Western lines collapsed into an overwhelming victory for Ieyasu.¹⁵

The Nihon Daihyakka Zensho encyclopedia argues that the real question at Sekigahara was whether Japan would go on being mobilized for Hideyoshi's endless wars, and that in that sense the outcome was settled before the battle began.¹⁶ › The Battle of Sekigahara, 1600

Shogun

Ieyasu used his victory to redraw the map of Japan. He confiscated, cut or enlarged the domains of lords across the country, keeping some land for himself and moving rivals away from their home regions. The pattern he set, placing his hereditary vassals, the fudai, in small but strategic domains and the great outside lords, the tozama, far from the center, would last through the whole Edo period.¹⁷

On the 12th day of the 2nd month of 1603 he was appointed shogun, the title Minamoto no Yoritomo had held when he founded the first warrior government, and he opened his shogunate at Edo. The lords of Japan were made to contribute to the building of a castle there worthy of a shogun. In 1605 he handed the title to his son Hidetada, to show that it was hereditary in the Tokugawa family, and in 1607 he retired to Sunpu, where as the "retired shogun" he went on ruling. There he had scholars such as the monk Ishin Suden and the Confucian Hayashi Razan publish old books from his collections.¹⁸

Osaka

One rival remained: Hideyori, still living in Osaka Castle. In 1614 a dispute over the inscription on a new bell at the Hoko-ji temple in Kyoto gave Ieyasu his pretext. The winter campaign of 1614 ended in a truce, but in 1615 the fighting resumed. In the summer campaign Hideyori was killed, Osaka Castle fell, and the Toyotomi house was destroyed.¹⁹

That same summer the shogunate issued the codes that bound the warrior houses and the imperial court, the Buke shohatto and the Kinchu narabini kuge shohatto, the basic laws for the whole warrior class and the key to its control of the court.²⁰

Command style

Ieyasu was a soldier for his whole life, from his youth to the last campaign at Osaka in 1615, and he lost as well as won: Mikatagahara taught him what it cost to fight a stronger enemy in the open. His great gift was not daring but timing. He waited through decades of alliance and service until the balance tipped his way, and he prepared his decisive battle with diplomacy, securing the inaction or the defection of a large part of the Western Army before a shot was fired at Sekigahara.²¹

Death and legacy

Ieyasu was named Grand Minister of State in the 3rd month of 1616 and died at Sunpu Castle on the 17th day of the 4th month, at the age of 75 by Japanese count. As he had instructed, he was buried at Kunozan near Sunpu. The next year the imperial court granted him the divine title Tosho Daigongen, and he was enshrined at Nikko.²²

His shogunate ruled Japan for more than 250 years, until 1868. After its fall Edo became the capital and was renamed Tokyo, and Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace, whose walls and moats still recall Tokugawa power.²³

Follow the decisive day in our account of the Battle of Sekigahara, meet his rival Takeda Shingen and the other great commanders of feudal Japan, compare the samurai and the knight, explore the early modern era, or see what else happened on 21 October.