Tokugawa Ieyasu was a Japanese shogun, warrior, and statesman, who founded the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan. He is widely considered one of the most significant figures in Japanese history.
Background
Tokugawa Ieyasu was born from a lineage of a local warrior who lived several miles from the east of modern Nagoya. The families around this area we are struggling hard to survive in a brutal age of endemic civil strife, and this made his childhood scarcely auspicious.
His father, Matsudaira Hirotada, was involved in a network of shifting alliances that repeatedly drew him into battle. When Ieyasu was two years old, his mother was permanently separated from his father’s family because of one such change in alliances, and in 1547 military adversity compelled his father to send him away as a hostage to the Imagawa family, powerful neighbors headquartered at Sumpu (now the city of Shizuoka) to the east.
Education
After Tokugawa Ieyasu was taken to a hostage that is when he was trained to be a warrior and developed a great love for falconry. Imagawa clan gave him the education which was suitable for a nobleman.
Career
In 1560 Imagawa Yoshimoto was slain during a battle with Oda Nobunaga, who was rapidly gaining power, and young Ieyasu seized the opportunity to return to his family’s small castle and assume control of his surviving relatives and vassals. Within months he took steps to ally himself with Nobunaga, at the same time pacifying the new and inept leader of the Imagawa house long enough to recall his wife and son from Sumpu. Freed for a few years from warring with neighbors, he directed his military efforts to crush rebellious Buddhist sectarian groups within the Matsudaira (after 1566, Tokugawa) domain. Concurrently, he devoted much energy to improving his small army’s command structure, appointing civil administrators, and formulating and enforcing procedures of taxation, law enforcement, and litigation.
During the later 1560s, the Imagawa domain disintegrated, and Ieyasu expanded to the east as opportunity permitted. In 1570 this expansion led him to move his headquarters eastward to Hamamatsu, a small coastal town that he developed into the commercial and strategic center of a thriving domain. Relying heavily on his alliance with the now-mighty Nobunaga, Ieyasu survived the vicissitudes of endemic war and slowly extended his territory until, by the early 1580s, he had become an important daimyo (feudal baron), in control of the fertile and populous area stretching from Okazaki eastward to the mountain barrier at Hakone.
In 1582 Nobunaga was wounded by a rebellious subordinate and committed suicide; Toyotomi Hideyoshi, his most brilliant general, quickly avenged the death and moved to assume Nobunaga’s preeminent political position. Ieyasu, then in the prime of life, emerged as his principal rival. After a few bloody but indecisive skirmishes, however, the cautious Ieyasu offered a vow of fealty, and Hideyoshi was content to leave Ieyasu’s domain intact. During the rest of the 1580s, while Hideyoshi busily extended his control over the daimyo of southwestern Japan, Ieyasu strengthened himself as best he could. He continued to enlarge his vassal force, increase his domain’s productivity, and improve the reliability of his administration. And in 1586, for greater security, he moved his headquarters even farther to the east, away from Hideyoshi, to Sumpu, the town he had known years before as a hostage.
In 1589 Hideyoshi determined to obtain vows of subordination from the Hōjō daimyo, who held a large district east of the Hakone mountain barrier. When the Hōjō refused to submit, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu mobilized a great army and navy that blockaded the Hōjō forces in their seaside castle at Odawara. After a long and patient siege, the Hōjō were starved into capitulation. At Hideyoshi’s suggestion, Ieyasu then surrendered his coastal provinces west of Hakone in return for the Hōjō domain to the east. As rapidly as possible he moved thousands of vassals, their military equipment, and their households to the little fort and farmlands near the fishing village of Edo (modern Tokyo), nearly a month’s march from Hideyoshi’s headquarters near Kyōto.
During the 1590s Ieyasu, unlike several great daimyo from western Japan, avoided involvement in Hideyoshi’s two disastrous military expeditions to Korea. Instead, he grasped the opportunity afforded by his transfer to his new lands to deploy his forces rationally and to make his domain as secure as possible. He stationed his most powerful vassals on the perimeter of his territory and along main access routes, keeping the least powerful-and least dangerous to himself-nearer Edo.
He then placed large tracts of land close by the town under direct administration by appointed officials, thereby assuring his castle inhabitants easy access to the largest possible supply of foodstuffs, and made detailed land and property surveys in order to regularize taxation. He also confiscated the weapons of all villagers, thereby reducing the likelihood of peasant rebellion, and moved vigorously to attract skilled artisans and businessmen to his new castle town. He undertook engineering projects to enlarge his castle, facilitate urban growth, and assure a water supply for the town populace. When Hideyoshi died in 1598, Ieyasu had the largest, most reliable army and the most productive and best-organized domain in all Japan.
This triumph left Ieyasu the undisputed master of Japan, and he moved swiftly to make his mastery permanent. Just as, in earlier years, he had consistently secured every military gain by adjusting administrative arrangements to fit his new needs, so, after the Battle of Sekigahara, he initiated an extensive project of shifting daimyo about. In the process, he stripped many erstwhile enemies of their lands, placed a number of his allies in strategic locations near surviving enemies, and secured for himself and his most faithful vassals direct control of much of central Japan. Then, having secured the strategic heartland, he proceeded over the next several years to make his control more sure by issuing regulations and establishing supervisory organs to constrain daimyo, imperial court nobles, and clerics, as well as his own vassals.
In 1603 the powerless but prestigious imperial court, which over the years had dutifully assigned Ieyasu titles that reflected his growing power, appointed him shogun (generalissimo), thereby acknowledging that this most powerful daimyo in Japan was the man officially authorized to keep the peace in the emperor’s name. Two years later Ieyasu formally retired, left Edo for the more pleasant surroundings of his old home at Sumpu, and had the shogunal title assigned to his son Hidetada, intending thereby to assure that the title was recognized as a hereditary Tokugawa prerogative.
Ieyasu’s daimyo transfers and political reforms of the years after Sekigahara had greatly strengthened his position, but he remained wary of the daimyo, and from 1604 until 1614 he had Hidetada keep them at work building and enlarging the castle at Edo. Thousands of ships and tens of thousands of men were employed for years on end hauling huge stones and great logs from distant points to Edo.
By the time of his death, Ieyasu had built the largest castle in the world, a sprawling network of broad moats, towering stone walls, long wooden parapets, huge gatehouses, and great fireproof warehouses full of rice and coin. Around it lay mansions in which the daimyo essentially lived as hostages. Edo became a bustling town and port, full of artisans, traders, clerks, and labourers.
After a hundred years of war and strife, Tokugawa Ieyasu was able to unify Japan and it’s when he became the first Tokugawa Shogun. For very many years rival lords or daimyo fought for power, but they did not succeed but when he came in he was able to gain unlimited power and build the largest castle in the world at Edo. However, besides being a military leader, he was a shrewd and calculating politician who was able to change the entire social structure of Japan this enabled him and his successors to control the various units he established a dynasty to make sure that the Tokugawa clan continued to rule even after his death. He was very observant of the Japanese diplomatic relations, and he passed an edict banning Christianity from Japanese shores.
Ieyasu was very rich by the time he was given the title shogun. He had acquired a lot of wealth. He had the one-quarter of the rice-producing farm of the country as the private area of the Tokugawa family. Also being the shogun, he nationalized many cities which he felt were more important including Kyoto-Osaka and Nagasaki. He also acquired some mining areas as well as other quality sites.
Religion
During the Tokugawa era, religion played a critical role in shaping Tokugawa culture. Christianity was a proscribed religion, and the government used Buddhism in enforcing the proscription. During Tokugawa Ieyasu rule every family was legally required to belong to a Buddhist temple. At one stroke, all Japanese were organized administratively into the real Buddhist structure. All the births were registered and also the deaths were recorded in the particular temple where the family belonged and are registered.
Politics
Tokugawa Ieyasu used a very complex political system similar to the European feudal system although it was bureaucratic, an attribute not at all associated with European feudalism. The political system was called the Bakugan system. Baku was derived from the name bakufu which was the state the Tokugawa leaders used to conduct their private affairs inside their fief. The Tokugawa shogunate was much similar to any domain government. It put more concern on the collection of taxes mainly from agricultural production, maintaining civil order, caring for the fief, controlling the cities, encouraging commerce and manufacturing, which were vital for the fief, limiting undesirable types of commerce, and so on.
As shogun, and then as retired shogun, Ieyasu assumed responsibility for foreign affairs, a responsibility he seems to have welcomed. Because the Ming dynasty in China was faltering and was without much influence abroad, the conduct of Japanese foreign affairs, which would normally have been mainly with China, involved responding to Portuguese, Dutch, and English requests for trade and to Portuguese and Spanish requests for the right to proselytize in Japan. Ieyasu welcomed the trade, seeing in it a means of acquiring firearms, commercial profits, and general information.
Personality
Leyasu had some great qualities which made him rise to power at the right time in the right places. Although Tokugawa was not very well-liked nor personally popular, he was very feared, and he was valued for his leadership. It is believed that he is one of the people who had great knowledge of Japan.
Quotes from others about the person
"Patience means restraining one's inclinations."
"The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience."
Connections
At the age of 15, Ieyasu married his first wife, Lady Tsukiyama, a relative of Imagawa Yoshimoto. His second wife was Asahi no kata.
