Japan's longest-ruling shoguns may have invented their own noble ancestry
Only descendants of the Seiwa Genji line could traditionally become shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu duly claimed that lineage, tracing his family back through the Nitta to the Minamoto. Historians doubt the pedigree, but in 1603 the Imperial Court accepted it, and his clan went on to rule Japan until 1868.
The family's origins are murky. Tokugawa records traced them to Nitta Yoshisue, who settled at a place called Tokugawa in Kozuke province and adopted its name. The founder of the Matsudaira line that followed was said to be Chikauji, a poor Buddhist monk who married into a family in Mikawa province. Records from the Kamakura and Muromachi periods show no clear unbroken line, and some scholars see the chain as a reconstruction built to serve Ieyasu's ambitions. Contemporary documents even show early Matsudaira using the surname Kamo, and their hollyhock crest hints that they may have been vassals of the Kamo clan.
Ieyasu, born in 1542 as a Matsudaira, broke away from the Imagawa clan in 1566 on the advice of his senior retainer Sakai Tadatsugu. He reorganised Mikawa around hereditary vassals, splitting his forces into a personal guard and eastern and western provincial armies. In 1567 Emperor Ōgimachi recognised him as a Seiwa Genji descendant, and he adopted the Tokugawa name.
Fifteen Tokugawa shoguns followed during the Edo period, so dominant that some historians call it the Tokugawa era. Three senior branch houses in Owari, Kishū and Mito, and later three more, stood ready to supply an heir if a shogun died without one, while many cadet lines kept the Matsudaira name. The clan's chief shrine is the Tōshō-gū at Nikkō.
The end came on 9 November 1867, when Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the fifteenth shogun, offered his resignation to Emperor Meiji. His heir Iesato was made a prince in 1884, a title swept away by the 1946 constitution. The current head, Tsunenari, founded the Tokugawa Memorial Foundation in 2003 and wrote The Edo Inheritance, arguing that roughly 250 years of Tokugawa peace produced not stagnation but economic reform, rich urban culture and the most urbanised society on Earth.
Source: Tokugawa clan
