Person1543 – 1616

Tokugawa Ieyasu

Founder of the Edo shogunate, who won at Sekigahara in 1600, became shogun in 1603 and destroyed the Toyotomi house in 1615

Born into the Matsudaira, minor lords of Okazaki in Mikawa, he spent his childhood as a hostage of the Oda and Imagawa. Independent after Okehazama, he allied with Oda Nobunaga, and in 1590 Hideyoshi moved him to the Kantō, where he made Edo his base. During the invasion of Korea he went as far as Nagoya in Kyushu but never crossed the sea. After handing the shogunate to his son in 1605 he kept real power from Sunpu (today’s Shizuoka), where he died in 1616; he was enshrined as a deity at the Tōshōgū in Nikkō.

Show on the map

Where they went

Open the full map

OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors

2 related events

1
1600 – 1603Battle of Sekigahara and the Founding of the Edo Shogunateleader
In 1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Ishida Mitsunari’s Western Army at Sekigahara, and in 1603 he became shogun and established his government at Edo. The Edo shogunate lasted some 260 years, until 1867.
2
1615 – 1635The Bakuhan System and Alternate Attendancecreator
The Edo shogunate built the bakuhan system, in which the shogun’s government (bakufu) and the daimyo domains (han) shared rule over land and people, and bound the daimyo with the Laws for Military Houses (1615) and alternate attendance (1635).

People who appear alongside

Konishi Yukinaga1558 – 1600
Led the first Japanese division from the Busan landing up to Pyongyang
Tokugawa Iemitsu1604 – 1651
Third Tokugawa shogun (r. 1623–1651), who institutionalised alternate attendance and completed the ban on Christianity and the closed-country system

Themes this person appears in

Ming, Qing and Edo Japan1500 – 1800
The age when the Ming, shaken by northern raiders, southern pirates and the silver economy, fell to Li Zicheng’s rebels, and the Manchu Qing reached its greatest extent and prosperity under Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — as Japan was unified out of the Warring States into the Edo shogunate’s bakuhan order and closed country, and Joseon, after two great wars, met its neighbours through embassies to Edo and the Northern Learning