Tokugawa Yoshimune was the eighth Shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, ruling from 1716 until his abdication in 1745.
Background
Tokugawa Yoshimune was born in 1684 in the rich region of Kii, a region which was then ruled by his father. He was the son of Tokugawa Mitsusada, the grandson of Tokugawa Yorinobu, and the great-grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yoshimune's childhood name was Tokugawa Genroku. At that time, his second cousin Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was ruling in Edo as shogun. Kii was a rich region of over 500, 000 koku, but it was still in debt. Even during Mitsusada's time, Kii was in deep debt and had a lot to pay back to the shogunate.
In 1697, Genroku underwent the rites of passage and took the name Tokugawa Shinnosuke. In 1705, when Shinnosuke was just 21 years old, his father Mitsusada and two older brothers died. Thus, the ruling shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi appointed him daimyō of Kii. He took the name Tokugawa Yorimasa and began to administer the province.
Career
The chief means by which the Tokugawa were able to maintain this hegemony was the policy of national seclusion that they instituted in the 1636. According to this policy, only the Dutch and the Chinese were permitted to trade on a limited scale at the single port of Nagasaki.
When the seventh shogun died without an heir in 1716, he was succeeded by Tokugawa Yoshimune, the daimyo of a branch family of the Tokugawa. Yoshimune had been a successful administrator and reformer in his own domain, and he now sought to apply his ideas on the national level.
His reforms included a restressing of the martial arts among the country's ruling warrior (samurai) class, the reclamation of agricultural lands, and the reminting of coins to correct the periodic debasements engaged in by his predecessors. Scholars are in disagreement about the success of Yoshimune's reforms, many of which were highly reactionary. But he was responsible for at least one measure that was unquestionably of great importance for the future.
On the advice of his aides, Yoshimune lifted the ban on the importation of foreign books that had been imposed at the time of adoption of the national seclusion policy. So long as they did not deal with Christianity, which the Tokugawa regime regarded as a dangerously subversive creed, books from China and the West could henceforth (from 1725) be brought into Japan through Nagasaki.
It was through these books that a small but crucial number of Japanese scholars were able to acquire a basic knowledge of advancements in Western technology that proved invaluable to their country when it was forced to abandon its seclusion policy and to enter the modern world in the mid-19th century. Yoshimune abdicated the office of shogun in favor of his son in 1745.
He died 6 years later.
Achievements
Yoshimune succeeded to the post of the shogun in Shōtoku-1 (1716). His term as shogun would last for 30 years. Yoshimune is considered among the best of the Tokugawa shoguns. He attempted most energetically to revitalize the Tokugawa shogunate after it began to encounter economic and other difficulties in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Established in the early 17th century by Tokugawa Ieyasu at Edo (present-day Tokyo), the Tokugawa shogunate was based on a form of government that has been described as "centralized feudalism. " Beginning with Ieyasu, the Tokugawa shoguns exercised hegemony over some 260 daimyos, or regional barons, who in turn ruled their own virtually autonomous domains.
Connections
He had a legitimate wife whose name was Fushimi-no-Miya Masako (1691–1710) and about 5 concubines with whome he had 5 children. He also had two adopted daughters Tonehime, married Date Munemura of Sendai Domain and Takehime (1705–1772), daughter of Hirosada Seikan'in and adopted by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and married Shimazu Tsugutoyo of Satsuma Domain later known as Joganin had 1 son, Shimazu Munenobu and 1 daughter, Kikuhime.
