The Empire of Things: Tokugawa Ieyasu's Material Legacy and Cultural Profile

Abstract

This biographical sketch of Tokugawa Ieyasu aims to construct a cultural profile of the man primarily through a reading of a portrait of him done (after his death) by Kanō Tan'yū, ‘Dream Portrait of the Tōshōgu Deity’. The depiction shows his grounding in classical Chinese texts, his collection of Chinese ceramics and other objects, his large collection of swords, and his enduring interest in falconry. Each of these is investigated as a means to illuminating the social networks of patronage and cultural practices through which he established and maintained the power of his clan. These perspectives reveal Ieyasu as a representative sixteenth-century warrior, a product of the particular social and political conditions of his time, whose eventual apotheosis was an ideal which shaped the educations and aspirations of millions of samurai throughout the ensuing Edo period.

Notes

¹Reproduced in Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, Dai Tokugawa ten, 64.

²See Gerhart's discussion of Tan'yū's portraits of Ieyasu based on the dreams of his patron, Tokugawa Iemitsu, in ‘Visions of the Dead’. On warrior portraits in general, see Miyajima, Buke no shōzō.

³Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 58.

⁴Kamii, ‘Sengoku jidai no jinshitsu’.

⁵Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 65.

⁶Ibid., 66.

⁷Ōkubo, Mikawa monogatari, 72–73. Also Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 68–72.

⁸Ōkubo, Mikawa monogatari, 73.

⁹Ibid., 76. Also, Kuroita, Tokugawa jikki, 29–30.

¹⁰Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 91–92.

¹¹Swords appear in the earliest records of Japan. Archaeologists have unearthed ceremonial swords from ancient tumuli, probably symbols of authority rather than actual tools of war. Swords also play a key role in the early myths of Japan, particularly as one of the three sacred regalia of the imperial family. Sword exchanges and sword gifts are recorded as early as the Kojiki[Records of Ancient Matters], but seem to have become particularly common during the late medieval period.

¹²Imai Sōkun, for example, was instrumental in mediating the important relationship between Ieyasu and Date Masamune: Takahashi, ‘Imai Sōkun to Date Masamune’, 294–323.

¹³Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu monjo no kenkyū, vol. 2, 209–224.

¹⁴See ibid., 238–239.

¹⁵Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology, 112. In note 3 on the same page, Ooms notes that emperors and shoguns had heard such lectures on this text on many occasions in the past. See also Seika monjo, Bunroku 2/12, cited in Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 286, and his ‘Tokugawa Ieyasu kō shōsai nempu’, in the same volume but numbered separately, 82.

¹⁶De Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 14–15.

¹⁷See Boot's useful summary of Razan's services to the bakufu, in ‘The Adoption and Adaptation of Neo-Confucianism in Japan’, 184–186.

¹⁸See, for example, Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology, and Bodart-Bailey, The Dog Shogun.

¹⁹Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 332.

²⁰Ieyasu was also active as a collector of books, a founder of libraries, and as a supporter of publishing and circulation of books. See Kornicki's recent article, ‘Books in the Service of Politics’, for more information.

²¹See, for example, Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes.

²²This is not to suggest that old or imported things were inviolate. Japanese collectors often cut down Chinese paintings or used Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian ceramics in contexts for which they had not originally been intended. See Watsky, ‘Locating “China” in the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan’, for a compelling analysis of the process of renaming and thereby relocating Chinese things that occurred in the community of tea practitioners during Ieyasu's lifetime.

²³Several theorists of collecting have posited that acquisition and ownership of fetishized objects can function as a kind of psychological dominance. See for example, Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, and Baudrillard, The System of Objects. Photographs of the objects mentioned in the text are reproduced in the following catalogue issued by Tokugawa Bijutsukan and Tokugawa Hakubutsukan, Ieyasu no isan.

²⁴Precedents exist for the inclusion of falcons in portraits of warriors. See the portrait of the warrior Makabe Hisamoto (1522–1589) sitting under a pine tree with a falcon on its branch (Miyajima, Buke no shōzō, Figure 47) and the portrait of an unknown subject (sometimes said to be the Kamakura-period warrior Oda Haruhisa, 1283–1353, though the connection is weak) who sits on a bench and holds a falcon in his left hand (Miyajima, Buke no shōzō, Figure 48).

²⁵See Gerhart's discussion of pine trees in Tokugawa painting in The Eyes of Power, 25–31.

²⁶Falconry (takagari) has not received much treatment in English. See Jameson, The Hawking of Japan, and Saunders, ‘Pursuits of Power’, for a more recent summary. Nesaki, Shōgun no takagari, offers a useful summary in Japanese of the history of takagari in the first chapter.

²⁷See, for example, Nesaki, ‘Takagari’, in Tokugawa Ieyasu jiten, 274.

²⁸Ieyasu had 11 sons and five daughters.

²⁹Irimoto, among other historians, estimates this army to have numbered around 100,000 men. See Tokugawa sandai to bakufu seiritsu.

³⁰These events are recorded in entries for the third and fourth months of Keichō 10 in the noble Yamashina Tokitsune's diary, Tokitsune kyōki, 136–174.

³¹See Ōkubo, Mikawa monogatari,73, for an early reference.

³²Nakamura, ‘Tokugawa Ieyasu kō shōsai nempu’, separately numbered in Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 29.

³³Kimura, Butoku hennen shūsei, entry for Tenshō 11/10/25.

³⁴Matsudaira Ietada, Ietada nikki, vol. 2, 66.

³⁵Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu monjo no kenkyū, vol. 1, 673–674.

³⁶Ibid., 720.

³⁷Ibid., 768.

³⁸See the document ‘Sumpuki’, entry for Keichō 16/11/1-6, in Ono, Ieyasu shiryō shū, 25–26.

⁴⁰Ibid.

³⁹Nesaki, Shōgun no takagari, 36–37.

⁴¹Nakamura, Tokugawa Ieyasu kō den, 673–682.

⁴²Recorded in ‘Sumpu owakemono odōgu chō’, 653–739 and 756–865.

⁴³Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology, 60.

⁴⁴On this topic, see Gerhart, ‘Visions of the Dead’ and The Eyes of Power.