Tokugawa Ieyasu: The Patient Man Who Outlasted Everyone

The portrait of Tokugawa Ieyasu that hangs in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya — not the famous Kanō Tan’yū seated portrait, but the lesser-known Shikamizu sketch commissioned from a court painter in the days after his defeat at Mikatagahara in the first month of 1573 — shows a man sitting on a camp stool with his fist tight against his mouth, staring at the middle distance. He had just lost half his army to Takeda Shingen. He had just ridden back into Hamamatsu Castle having soiled himself from terror on the retreat (this is in the Edo-period chronicles; Ieyasu himself is supposed to have commissioned the painting as a reminder never to let pride commit him to a battle he could not win again). He was thirty-one years old. He would live another forty-three years, fight at Sekigahara, become shōgun, extinguish the Toyotomi family, and die as the founder of the regime that would rule Japan for 265 years. And the expression in that sketch — tight-lipped, exhausted, faintly furious with himself — is as close as any surviving image gets to the actual operational personality of the man who outlasted everyone.

Ieyasu is the least glamorous of the Three Unifiers, and the most effective. Nobunaga was a gambler; Hideyoshi was a showman; Ieyasu was a man who spent six decades refusing to be drawn into fights he could not finish, waiting for other people to make their mistakes, and then picking up the pieces. He was hostage for thirteen years as a child. He lost Mikatagahara in 1573 and never again committed his whole army to a single field battle. He fought Hideyoshi to a draw at Komaki in 1584 and accepted the draw. He was moved from his Mikawa homeland to a marshland called Edo in 1590 and turned it, over the next thirty years, into the capital of Japan. He outlived Hideyoshi by seventeen years, and in those seventeen years he took everything.

Takechiyo — the hostage who ran the realm later

Ieyasu was born on 26 December 1542 by the old lunar calendar, which is 31 January 1543 in the Western reckoning, at Okazaki Castle in Mikawa Province (the eastern half of modern Aichi Prefecture). The name his parents gave him was Matsudaira Takechiyo. His father Matsudaira Hirotada was the young and struggling daimyō of the Anjō-Matsudaira line, in charge of a strip of the Tōkaidō road wedged between the Oda of Owari to the west and the much larger Imagawa of Suruga to the east. His mother Odai-no-kata was 15 years old when she gave birth to him; his father was 17. Within a year the Mizuno clan to whom his mother belonged defected to the Oda, and Hirotada divorced Odai and sent her home. Takechiyo was approximately three when he last saw his biological mother. He would not see her again until she was a middle-aged woman and he was a grown daimyō; by then they were effectively strangers.

In 1547, when Takechiyo was six, his father shipped him as a hostage to the Imagawa clan, whose protection was the only thing keeping the Matsudaira from being overrun by the Oda. The convoy was intercepted en route. The young hostage’s great-uncle-by-marriage Toda Yasumitsu betrayed the Matsudaira, diverted the boy, and sold him instead to Oda Nobuhide — Oda Nobunaga’s father. Takechiyo spent two years in Oda custody at the Honshō-ji temple in Nagoya. The Edo-period tradition that the six-year-old Takechiyo met the teenage Nobunaga during this period is almost certainly apocryphal — contemporary documents say nothing of it — but it makes sense as a later invention because the two men were going to be allies for twenty years.

In 1549 his father Hirotada died, probably of natural illness (the assassination story popular in the Edo-period chronicles has been quietly retracted by most modern Japanese historians). The Imagawa, now finally able to extract him through a hostage exchange, took the nine-year-old Takechiyo from Oda custody to their capital at Sunpu. This is where he would live for the next ten years, through his teens, through his coming-of-age ceremony, through his first marriage, through the birth of his first son — as a hostage of Imagawa Yoshimoto, educated by Yoshimoto’s tutors, married to a niece of Yoshimoto’s, given the Imagawa character Moto (元) in his adult name. He was Matsudaira Motonobu from 1555, Matsudaira Motoyasu from 1557. Everything he did, until his late teens, was performed under Imagawa supervision, in service of Imagawa ambitions, from inside Imagawa Sunpu. His actual Matsudaira retainers back in Mikawa ran his ancestral castle at Okazaki under Imagawa viceroys while he sat in Sunpu as a political guarantee.

Okehazama 1560 — the break that made him

What ended the Sunpu years was Nobunaga. In June 1560, Imagawa Yoshimoto marched west with 25,000 men to test the Oda in Owari. The eighteen-year-old Motoyasu was given a forward detachment and ordered to take the Oda outpost at Marune, which he did — competently, quickly, by the standards of every contemporary source. The main Imagawa army meanwhile encamped in a valley at Okehazama on the afternoon of 19 June. A thunderstorm hit. Nobunaga’s 3,000 men moved under cover of the storm and destroyed Yoshimoto’s headquarters in the space of an hour, killing the lord and sending the rest of the Imagawa army into flight. For the detail of what happened that afternoon the separate piece on the Battle of Okehazama is the one to read; here what matters is what Motoyasu did next.

He went home. Not back to Sunpu — home, to Okazaki Castle, which the fleeing Imagawa garrison had abandoned. He walked his detachment up to the gate, entered his ancestral fortress for the first time in a dozen years, and refused to leave. Yoshimoto’s successor Imagawa Ujizane was weak and distracted; Motoyasu correctly guessed he would not have the resources to come back and reclaim Mikawa by force. The gamble held. Within a year Motoyasu had gone openly over to the Oda side in what is called the Kiyosu Alliance — signed in early 1562 at Nobunaga’s Kiyosu Castle — and the Imagawa presence in Mikawa began to disintegrate. In 1563 he engineered the return of his wife Tsukiyama and infant son Nobuyasu, who had been held as counter-hostages in Sunpu, by raiding a subsidiary Imagawa castle at Kaminogō and trading the lord’s sons back. In 1566 — the detail worth pausing on — he petitioned the imperial court for permission to change his surname from Matsudaira to Tokugawa, claiming descent from the Seiwa-Genji through a Nitta branch that had settled at a place called Tokugawa in Kōzuke Province. The documentary evidence for this claim was thin to vanishing (a convenient genealogy turned up in the Manri-kōji family collection at exactly the right moment); the emperor signed off anyway. Tokugawa Ieyasu was now his name. He was twenty-four.

Mikawa consolidation and the Ikkō uprising

Between Okehazama in 1560 and the break with the Takeda in 1572, Ieyasu did the unglamorous work of turning Mikawa from a contested borderland into a single administered province. Most of this was low-level campaigning against local landlord clans who had grown comfortable under Imagawa supervision and were not immediately willing to accept a young Matsudaira claiming the whole province. The most dangerous moment was the 1563-64 Mikawa Ikkō-ikki uprising, in which the Pure Land True sect (Jōdo Shinshū) temples of Mikawa — backed by peasant militia and, damagingly, by some of Ieyasu’s own retainers who were sect members — rose against his authority. Ieyasu was fighting on the front line at the Battle of Azukizaka in January 1564 when multiple bullets struck his armour and failed to penetrate; contemporary Jesuit reports from Nagoya note that his men took this as divine protection and the rumour probably helped consolidate morale. By 1565 the Ikkō had been broken, the Mikawa monto temples had been forcibly suppressed, and the province was his.

Between 1568 and 1570 he extended his reach east into Tōtōmi Province — the modern Shizuoka plain — at the expense of the collapsing Imagawa. The agreement was nominally coordinated with Takeda Shingen, who would take Suruga to the north while Ieyasu took Tōtōmi to the south, with the Ōi River as the border. Ieyasu installed himself at Hamamatsu Castle in 1570 and made it his operational base. He would live at Hamamatsu for the next seventeen years. The castle became known in Japanese as the shusse-jō — the “success castle” — because Ieyasu’s career expanded from it; later Edo-period appointees who lived at Hamamatsu were statistically over-represented in bakufu promotions, a tradition the locals still claim. His famous retainers — Honda Tadakatsu, Sakai Tadatsugu, Sakakibara Yasumasa, Ii Naomasa, who would collectively be called the Four Heavenly Kings of the Tokugawa — formed around him here.

Mikatagahara 1573 — the worst day

Takeda Shingen broke the alliance in October 1572 and marched south with an army of 30,000 men, aiming at Kyoto. Ieyasu at Hamamatsu had perhaps 8,000 Tokugawa troops and a 3,000-man Oda reinforcement sent grudgingly by Nobunaga, who could not spare more. Every rational calculation pointed to Ieyasu staying inside Hamamatsu Castle and letting Shingen pass. He did not. On 25 January 1573, Ieyasu marched out to intercept a Takeda force that was already twice his size and moving past his city with the contempt of not bothering to besiege him. The battle fought that afternoon on the plateau north of Hamamatsu is covered in full at Mikatagahara; the short version is that Shingen’s classic fish-scale formation enveloped Ieyasu’s smaller army on both flanks, broke it in the first hour, and killed an estimated 2,000 of his men as they ran for Hamamatsu. Ieyasu only survived because Natsume Yoshinobu took his armour and horse and rode back into the rout shouting the lord’s name, drawing the Takeda cavalry after him. Natsume was killed. Ieyasu escaped through the Tenryū River plain.

The Mikatagahara story that every Japanese schoolchild still gets taught is the one where Ieyasu, returning to Hamamatsu that night, ordered the castle gates thrown open and the braziers lit, bluffed the pursuing Takeda into believing it was a trap, and thereby saved the castle. This is probably half true. Whether it’s also true that he commissioned a defeat-portrait of himself on the camp stool with his fist to his mouth is more contested — the Shikamizu image exists (Tokugawa Art Museum has a version) and the tradition that he wanted it hung in his bedchamber as a permanent humiliation is plausible, but the contemporary documentation is thin. What is documented is that Ieyasu never again committed his whole field army to a pitched battle he had any serious chance of losing. Everything afterwards — the slow starvation campaigns, the political marriages, the seventeen-year wait for Hideyoshi to die — reads as a response to the lesson of 25 January.

The lesson was delivered by a man who was already dying. Takeda Shingen collapsed from illness in April 1573, four months after Mikatagahara, without capitalising on his victory. The Takeda retreat from Mikawa began within weeks. In 1575, with Oda reinforcements present and in strength, Ieyasu contributed the left wing at the Battle of Nagashino, where the combined Oda-Tokugawa gun lines destroyed the Takeda cavalry under Shingen’s son Katsuyori. In 1582 he joined Nobunaga’s final campaign of annihilation against the Takeda house, which ended at Tenmokuzan with Katsuyori’s suicide. A decade of Takeda pressure was done. Mikatagahara’s shadow, in Ieyasu’s retelling, had been the thing that made the Takeda defeat possible.

Iga-goe — the twelve days after Honnō-ji

On 21 June 1582, Ieyasu was on a state visit to Sakai — modern south Osaka — as Nobunaga’s ally and guest, viewing the merchant quarter with a small retinue of about thirty men. News arrived that morning that Akechi Mitsuhide had attacked Nobunaga at Honnō-ji in Kyoto and killed him. Ieyasu, 200 kilometres from home, in territory now controlled by an Akechi sympathiser network, with thirty men, had to get back to Mikawa alive. The route he took is known as the Iga-goe — the “Iga crossing” — through the mountainous Iga and Kōga regions east of Kyoto, historically the country of the ninjutsu schools and the famously bandit-prone Kōga ji-samurai. He made it back to Okazaki in about three days of hard travel, protected by ji-samurai allies who had been quietly courted for years — notably Hattori Hanzō Masanari, who organised the escort through Iga-country passes, and the Kōga clan intermediary Tarao Mitsuhiro. Ieyasu would later say, in one of his rare retrospective moments, that the Iga-goe was the worst stretch of his life. Worse than Mikatagahara. He had been a child then, protected by retainers; in June 1582 he was forty and had only thirty men.

By the time he reached Okazaki, Hideyoshi had already turned his Chūgoku army around and was marching on Akechi from the west. The summer of 1582 was consumed with the Kiyosu Conference of succession, which Ieyasu did not attend, and the rapid ascendancy of Hideyoshi over Shibata Katsuie. Ieyasu spent the same months consolidating his own position — moving into the former Takeda territories of Kai and Shinano provinces during the so-called Tenshō Jingo no ran, the chaos of the year that followed Honnō-ji. By spring 1583 he controlled five provinces: Mikawa, Tōtōmi, Suruga, Kai, and southern Shinano. He had become one of the three or four largest daimyō in Japan, by quiet accumulation during a year of everyone else’s civil war.

Komaki-Nagakute 1584 — the draw with Hideyoshi

By 1584 Hideyoshi had eliminated Shibata Katsuie at Shizugatake and was clearly the senior Oda successor. Ieyasu, backed by Nobunaga’s surviving second son Oda Nobukatsu who had been cut out of the succession, mobilised against him. The campaign that resulted is known as Komaki-Nagakute. Over several months in spring and summer 1584, the two armies stared at each other across fortified lines in Owari without either committing to a decisive engagement. The one sharp action — the Battle of Nagakute on 9 April, where Ii Naomasa’s vanguard destroyed a Hideyoshi detachment under Mori Nagayoshi and Hashiba Hidetsugu — was a Tokugawa tactical victory that did not change the strategic balance. Hideyoshi could not dislodge Ieyasu; Ieyasu could not displace Hideyoshi. The campaign wound down into political negotiation. In November 1584 Ieyasu sent his second son Yūki Hideyasu to Hideyoshi as a nominal hostage, and Hideyoshi sent his own mother Ōmandokoro and sister Asahi to Okazaki as a counter-hostage — the counter-hostage including a marriage between Asahi and the widowed Ieyasu, which was a pure political transaction conducted between a forty-three-year-old daimyō and a forty-four-year-old woman neither of them had met. Asahi died at Jurakudai four years later, still Ieyasu’s official wife, without him ever having established a household with her.

This is the thirteen-year period that everyone remembers as Ieyasu’s waiting-game phase. He did not fight Hideyoshi again. He sent troops on Hideyoshi’s Kyūshū campaign, on his Odawara campaign, on his Korean campaign staging (though Ieyasu himself was kept in Japan as part of the Tokugawa troops’ notional garrison role). He attended court functions in Kyoto, paid respects at the Jurakudai in 1588, bent the knee without apparent complaint, and lived with the understanding that every day Hideyoshi was alive was a day in which Ieyasu could not make a move. Hideyoshi was seven years his senior. The calculation was simple. Ieyasu was patient enough to do the calculation and stick to it.

1590 — the forced move to Edo

The 1590 Odawara Campaign was Hideyoshi’s destruction of the Late Hōjō family, who had ruled the Kantō plain for four generations from their mountain fortress at Odawara. Ieyasu fought in the campaign as a dutiful Toyotomi senior retainer. Hideyoshi won, Odawara fell, and in the July 1590 settlement that followed, Hideyoshi announced that the former Hōjō territory — eight provinces covering 2.5 million koku, the largest single block of land in Japan — would be transferred to Ieyasu. In exchange, Ieyasu would give up his five ancestral provinces in Mikawa, Tōtōmi, Suruga, Kai, and southern Shinano, which were centrally located, economically developed, and bordered directly on Hideyoshi’s own core power in Kyoto and Osaka.

This was a forced move dressed up as a reward. The Kantō was larger by a third, but it was unfamiliar country to Ieyasu, the political organs of the region had just been destroyed, the existing Hōjō-era administration had to be rebuilt from nothing, and — crucially — Ieyasu would be physically 400 kilometres further from Kyoto than he had been before. Hideyoshi was buying himself geography. The Mikawa and Tōtōmi lands were reassigned to reliable Toyotomi generals. And the capital Ieyasu would now live in — Hideyoshi’s specific direction on this was loosely phrased as “wherever you please,” which was in practice the requirement to pick somewhere other than the traditional Kantō capital at Kamakura — was a fishing village on a muddy estuary called Edo.

Ieyasu arrived at Edo in September 1590. What he found was a small fortified post built by Ōta Dōkan in 1457, long since declined to a third-rate Hōjō subsidiary fortress, surrounded by marshland, at the head of a shallow bay without a proper port, with a population of a few hundred samurai households and fishermen. Over the next decade he began the project that would eventually turn Edo into the largest city in the world by 1700: rechannelling the Nihonbashi River system to drain the marsh, building the spiral do-no-ji moat network that still frames central Tokyo today, commissioning stone walls from daimyō labour corvée, and laying out the grid of samurai residential districts that the modern Kōkyo imperial palace still sits at the centre of. The decision was being taken during these years, quietly, that the Tokugawa capital would be Edo rather than Kyoto or Osaka — and that decision, once Ieyasu was shōgun, would shape the geography of Japan for the next 400 years. Hideyoshi had sent him to the marsh. The marsh became the capital.

Sekigahara 1600 — the day he took everything

Hideyoshi died at Fushimi Castle on 18 September 1598. Ieyasu was one of the five regents charged with preserving the succession of Hideyoshi’s six-year-old son Hideyori. The five regents were meant to balance each other. What actually happened, over the next eighteen months, was that Ieyasu methodically outmanoeuvred Maeda Toshiie (who died in April 1599), detached Uesugi Kagekatsu from the coalition by provoking him into a regional revolt that justified sending the Toyotomi army north to fight him (the famous Naoe jō letter from Uesugi’s chief retainer giving Ieyasu the pretext), and marched out of Osaka at the head of the Toyotomi main army in June 1600 — ostensibly to crush Uesugi, actually to leave the door open for Ishida Mitsunari and the western regents to mobilise against him, which would convert the civil war from a private feud into a sanctioned punitive campaign.

Mitsunari took the bait and declared against Ieyasu in July 1600. The armies converged in mid-October at a mountain pass called Sekigahara in western Mino Province. The battle that followed on 21 October 1600 is covered in depth at Sekigahara; the short version is that Ieyasu’s Eastern Army of 75,000 fought Mitsunari’s Western Army of 85,000 in heavy morning fog, and the battle was settled at noon when Kobayakawa Hideaki’s 15,000 men — notionally Western Army — defected to the East at Ieyasu’s signal and attacked Ōtani Yoshitsugu in the flank. The Western Army collapsed within three hours. Mitsunari escaped briefly, was caught, and was beheaded in Kyoto along with Konishi Yukinaga and Ankokuji Ekei. Every daimyō who had fought for the West had their domains confiscated and either redistributed or returned at reduced size. The realm belonged to Ieyasu, aged fifty-eight, by right of conquest.

Shōgun 1603-1605 — the two-year bluff

On 24 March 1603, Emperor Go-Yōzei appointed Ieyasu Sei-i Taishōgun — “barbarian-quelling great general,” the military title that Minamoto no Yoritomo had taken in 1192 and that had been dormant under the Ashikaga and then vacant since 1573. The appointment was ceremonially fundamental: it gave Ieyasu a constitutional basis to establish a military government — the bakufu — separate from and dominant over the civil court in Kyoto. The Tokugawa bakufu, established at Edo in 1603, would govern Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu was sixty-one at his investiture. He had been waiting, in one form or another, since Mikatagahara — thirty years earlier.

Two years later he abdicated. On 10 April 1605 he passed the shogunal title to his third son Tokugawa Hidetada — his eldest surviving son, after the death of Nobuyasu in 1579 and the diversion of Yūki Hideyasu into a side branch — and retired to Sunpu, 200 kilometres south of Edo, in his old Suruga heartland. The formal retirement did not mean loss of power. Ieyasu became Ōgosho — “retired great lord” — and continued to run the realm from Sunpu for the next decade, with Hidetada serving as the ceremonial shōgun at Edo while the strategic decisions were still made by Ieyasu. The purpose of the 1605 abdication was succession-proofing: by installing Hidetada as shōgun while he himself was still alive and in full control, Ieyasu demonstrated that the Tokugawa shogunate was hereditary. It was not a personal commission from the emperor that ended on Ieyasu’s death. The office would pass as the land passed, from father to son. Every subsequent Tokugawa succession — fourteen shōguns over 265 years — followed the 1605 pattern.

Osaka 1614-1615 — the one open matter

The open matter was the Toyotomi. Hideyori, Hideyoshi’s son, had been six when his father died in 1598 and twenty-one when Ieyasu became Ōgosho. He still controlled Osaka Castle, still commanded approximately 65,000 retainer households, still held symbolic seniority within the old Toyotomi network, and was the living reminder that the Tokugawa shogunate had been grafted onto a system that was formally the continuation of Hideyoshi’s regime. Ieyasu was seventy-two in 1614. The calculation was straightforward: if he died with Hideyori still alive, his grandchildren would face what he himself had faced after Hideyoshi’s death. The Toyotomi would have to be eliminated in his lifetime.

The pretext came from an inscription. The Toyotomi had been rebuilding Hōkō-ji temple in Kyoto, Hideyoshi’s great memorial foundation, and in 1614 the new temple bell was cast with an inscription reading Kokka Ankō / Kun-shin Hōraku — “May the country be peaceful, may lord and retainer prosper.” The characters included “國家安康” — where the characters for “Ankō” split Ieyasu’s personal name 家康 across two phrases. The bakufu scholar Ishin Sūden, advising Ieyasu, argued that this was a ritual curse embedded in the inscription, splitting the shōgun’s name to call for his death. This was a hostile reading, and contemporary observers including the Jesuits noted it was a transparent pretext — but it was sufficient. In October 1614 Ieyasu’s forces marched on Osaka Castle. The Osaka Winter Campaign lasted two months; it ended with a negotiated truce that required the castle’s outer moats to be filled in. They were. When the Osaka Summer Campaign began in May 1615, the castle’s moat-and-bastion defences had been demolished by the terms of the previous truce. The castle fell on 3 June 1615. Hideyori committed seppuku; his mother Yodo-dono (Nobunaga’s niece, Hideyoshi’s concubine, the last living senior Toyotomi) killed herself with him; Hideyori’s seven-year-old son Kunimatsu was caught and executed; the Toyotomi were extinguished. Ieyasu was seventy-three. Sixty-three years after leaving Sunpu as an Imagawa hostage, he had won.

Sunpu 1616 — the death and the deification

He did not enjoy it long. In the autumn of 1615 Ieyasu was hawking at his Sunpu estate when he developed stomach pains that persisted into the winter. The traditional story — probably true in its essentials — is that a meal of fried sea bream in January 1616 accelerated the illness; modern Japanese historians who have reviewed the surviving retainer diaries generally conclude that he had gastric cancer, with the fried fish being a final aggravation rather than the cause. He lingered through spring 1616, drafting final instructions to Hidetada on the management of the court at Kyoto, on the daimyō regulations that would become the Buke Shohatto, and on the construction of the shrine at Nikkō where he intended to be enshrined. He died at Sunpu on 17 April 1616 (1 June Western reckoning). He was seventy-three.

The deification came fast. Within days of his death, under instructions he had left himself, Ieyasu’s body was buried provisionally at Kunōzan outside Sunpu — the hill above the Pacific coast south of Shizuoka — and a shrine was built there within months, opening in December 1616. Emperor Go-Mizuno granted him the posthumous divine title Tōshō Daigongen (“Great Gongen Shining in the East”). One year later the remains were translated to Nikkō in Tochigi, 150 kilometres north of Edo, where the shogunate began construction of the Nikkō Tōshō-gū mausoleum that would be completed in 1641 under his grandson Iemitsu. The Nikkō complex would become the most elaborate shrine in Japanese history, covered in gold leaf, painted in vermilion, carved with hundreds of thousands of sculpted figures including the famous three wise monkeys. The scale was deliberate. Where Hideyoshi’s deification as Toyokuni Daimyōjin had been quickly dismantled by the Tokugawa themselves after 1615, Nikkō Tōshō-gū was built to be undismantlable. It survived. It still survives, as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Where to visit Ieyasu today

Okazaki Castle — the birthplace

Okazaki Castle, east of Nagoya in the city of Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, is the obvious starting point. The current keep is a 1959 concrete reconstruction on the original stonework foundations, sitting above the Oto River on the same site where Ieyasu was born in 1542. The Mikawa Bushi-no-Yakata museum inside the grounds (admission ¥300, open 9am-5pm, closed Dec 29-31) has a usable collection of Mikawa-era armour, genealogies of the Anjō-Matsudaira line, and a diorama of the 1560 Okehazama battle that you can orient yourself against. The surrounding Okazaki Park is genuinely pleasant in spring — the castle-moat cherry blossoms are among the better sakura viewings in Aichi — and the Ieyasu birth-well (Ieyasu-kō go-tanjō-i), inside the inner compound, is the specific stone-curbed well the Matsudaira clan used. Ieyasu’s placenta is supposed to be buried beside it. The local story is earnest enough that the city maintains the stone and installs fresh offerings every few months.

Getting there: Higashi-Okazaki Station on the Meitetsu Nagoya Main Line, about 25 minutes from Nagoya. The castle is a fifteen-minute walk from the station through Okazaki’s downtown, which is itself worth a loop — the city’s Hatchō Miso brewery district, where the very dark Mikawa-style soybean miso has been brewed continuously since the 14th century, is four blocks from the castle and open for free brewery tours at Kakukyū and Maruya Hatchō Miso (English signage, 30-minute tours on the hour). Allow a half day for the castle-plus-brewery combination, a full day if you’re also doing the Ōjuji temple where Ieyasu sheltered after Okehazama.

Hamamatsu Castle — the seventeen-year base

Hamamatsu Castle in Shizuoka Prefecture is where Ieyasu lived from 1570 to 1586 — the seventeen years that included Mikatagahara, the break with the Takeda, Nagashino, the Iga-goe after Honnō-ji, and Komaki-Nagakute. The current keep is a 1958 reconstruction, smaller than Ieyasu’s original and on slightly different foundations; the original Toyotomi-era stonework survives at the base of the hill, and the long yagura-tate stone wall along the south face of the honmaru is recognisably the masonry from Ieyasu’s tenure. The castle is now the centrepiece of Hamamatsu-jō Park, an open green space in the middle of modern Hamamatsu city with the keep on the hilltop and a statue of the young Ieyasu (the post-Mikatagahara pose, fist to mouth) at the base. The inside of the keep is a museum of Ieyasu-era Hamamatsu with lacquered helmets, reproductions of the Takeda battle flags, and an English-language audio guide on the castle’s shusse-jō reputation.

Getting there: Hamamatsu Station on the JR Tōkaidō Shinkansen, with the Hikari express from Tokyo taking about 90 minutes. From the station a local bus runs every ten minutes to the Shiyakusho-mae stop; the castle is a four-minute walk. Open 8:30am-4:30pm, admission ¥200. If you’re visiting with any real interest in Mikatagahara, hire a taxi for an hour in the afternoon and drive ten kilometres north to the Saiganji temple and the Mikatagahara battlefield memorial stone — not much to see at either, but standing on the ground you can feel how close Ieyasu’s line was to the castle when Shingen broke it. The Saiganji holds Natsume Yoshinobu’s memorial.

Sunpu and Kunōzan — the retirement and the first grave

After his 1605 abdication Ieyasu moved the seat of real power 200 kilometres south of Edo to Sunpu Castle in modern Shizuoka city, where he had lived as an Imagawa hostage six decades earlier. The Sunpu of Ieyasu’s Ōgosho period was a major castle on the model of early Edo — a concentric four-moat complex with an enormous five-storey keep at the centre. The keep burned in 1635 and was never rebuilt; what remains today is the outer moat system, the stone bases of the tatsumi and hitsujisaru corner turrets (both of which have been reconstructed), and the inner plum garden where Ieyasu is supposed to have personally tended the trees. The Sunpu-jō Park museum (small, good, ¥200) has his travel desk and the Nanban clock that the English merchant William Adams — Miura Anjin — gave him in 1611.

Twenty kilometres south of Sunpu, at the Pacific coast, is Kunōzan — the hill where Ieyasu’s body was placed in 1616 before being transferred to Nikkō the following year. Kunōzan Tōshō-gū, the shrine built on the site, is still an active Shinto institution and is architecturally the direct model that the Nikkō complex was scaled up from. The climb from the coast up the 1,159-step approach is serious — budget 45 minutes each way if you’re in shape — but the shrine complex at the top is worth it. Ieyasu’s Shida gusoku armour is displayed in the museum (Important Cultural Property, rotated seasonally). The view from the upper tōrō gallery over the Pacific is one of the better views in eastern Shizuoka. You can also take a cable car from Nihondaira on the inland side, which most visitors do; I think the Pacific coast stairs are the correct approach, because they give you the sense of pilgrimage that the Tōshō cult was designed around.

Getting there: Shizuoka Station on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, 60 minutes from Tokyo. Sunpu Castle is a 10-minute walk north of the station. For Kunōzan, the Shizutetsu Just Line bus from Shizuoka Station runs to the Kunōzan-shita coastal stop in about 45 minutes, or to the Nihondaira cable car stop in 40. Allow a full day to do both sites properly.

Nikkō Tōshō-gū — the definitive pilgrimage

Nikkō Tōshō-gū in Tochigi Prefecture is the main Ieyasu pilgrimage site and the destination every serious visitor to his legacy ends up at. The complex was begun in 1617, one year after his death, with the body translated from Kunōzan in a funeral procession that took ten days. The shrine was massively expanded by Ieyasu’s grandson Tokugawa Iemitsu between 1634 and 1641, in a construction campaign that employed 4.5 million labour-days and reportedly used more gold leaf than any previous Japanese architectural project. The result is 55 buildings across a forested mountainside, with the Yomeimon Gate — the “Gate of Sunlight” — as the centrepiece: a two-storey structure covered in over 500 carved figures of Chinese sages, mythical birds, dragons, peonies, and children at play, every surface gilded or vermilion or paint-lacquered to a density that has no comparison anywhere else in Japanese religious architecture. The Tokugawa intended this. The Yomeimon is deliberately overwhelming, and the overwhelm is the theological argument.

Beyond the Yomeimon, the Nikkō complex includes the Kairō hallway with the famous sleeping-cat carving by the master carpenter Hidari Jingorō; the three-monkeys panel of the Shinkyūsha stable with its mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru (“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”) composition that has become a global cliché but originated here; the Honden-Ishi-no-ma-Haiden inner sanctuary where the priests perform the daily Tōshō-gū rites; and, a twenty-minute climb up the hill behind the main complex, Ieyasu’s actual grave — a comparatively plain bronze pagoda on a stone platform, surrounded by cedar trees, with no gold and no crowds. I always recommend visitors make the climb to the grave. The Yōmeimon is the ornament of the cult; the pagoda at the top of the 207 stone steps is the quiet centre.

Getting there: Tobu-Nikkō Station, 1h 50m from Asakusa on the Tobu Limited Express Kegon or Revaty. From the station a local bus runs every ten minutes to the Shinkyō stop (five minutes); the shrine is a 15-minute uphill walk from there through the World Heritage forest approach. Open 8am-5pm April-October, 8am-4pm November-March, admission ¥1,600 for the Tōshō-gū itself plus ¥1,000 supplementary for the Taiyū-in (Iemitsu’s adjacent mausoleum, which is smaller but even more atmospheric and worth doing). Allow a full day for Nikkō; if your itinerary permits, overnight at one of the ryokans in the Kinugawa hot springs 30 minutes east. Autumn colours in late October and early November are the single best time to visit.

Edo Castle — the Kōkyo in Tokyo

The castle Ieyasu moved into in 1590, began expanding immediately, and spent three decades converting from a Hōjō subsidiary fort into the capital of Japan — is now the Imperial Palace, the Kōkyo, in central Tokyo. The walls, moats, and inner stonework of Ieyasu’s Edo Castle mostly survive. The Meiji-era imperial residence sits inside what was the Edo-era nishi-no-maru western bailey; the modern palace and most of its grounds are closed to the public except for the Imperial New Year’s Greeting and the emperor’s birthday. What is open is the East Gardens (Kōkyo Higashi Gyoen), a 21-hectare section containing the honmaru, ninomaru, and sannomaru bailey ruins, the foundation stones of the 58-metre keep that burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt, the Shiomi yagura corner turret, and substantial stretches of the original Edo-period stone walls. Admission free. The Imperial Household Agency maintains the gardens to a high standard; the spring and autumn iris and maple displays in the Ninomaru landscape garden are quietly among the best formal gardens in central Tokyo.

Getting there: Ōtemachi Station on multiple Tokyo subway lines, two minutes to the Ōtemon Gate entrance. Open 9am-5pm most days, closed Mondays and Fridays and for imperial events. Allow two hours for a proper circuit. The one-to-200 model of Edo Castle at its 1635 peak, inside the Honmaru Rest House, is the correct reference point for imagining what Ieyasu actually built — the modern grounds are a fraction of the Edo-period footprint, which extended from the Imperial Palace grounds through the modern financial district and halfway to Tokyo Station. If you want to understand the scale of what Ieyasu’s marshland project became, this model is where you do it.

Closing — the hostage who outlasted everyone

What the Kanō painters were trying to smooth out in the later seated portraits is the specific shape of Ieyasu’s personality — the patient, cold, unglamorous operator who had learned in the Imagawa hostage years that premature action kills you, who had been reminded at Mikatagahara that pride also kills you, and who had spent the forty-three years afterwards refusing to commit to any fight he could not win. The country he ruled was not created by him; Nobunaga ground the rice, Hideyoshi kneaded it, and Ieyasu did indeed sit down to the finished cake. But Nobunaga was assassinated at fifty, Hideyoshi died at sixty-two on a long campaign he should not have started, and Ieyasu died at seventy-three in the bed at Sunpu with all his affairs closed. Longevity was his principal strategic advantage over the other two unifiers. He knew it. He looked after his body, he ate moderately, he rode and hawked into his seventies, he avoided the Korean campaign that killed so many of Hideyoshi’s generals, and he survived long enough to extinguish the Toyotomi with his own hand. The rest of the Edo period is the consequence of those extra fifteen years.

I am not sentimental about Ieyasu. He killed his own son Nobuyasu in 1579 on Nobunaga’s orders with no recorded objection; he ordered the Kaminogō captives executed; the 700 villagers massacred at Horikawa Castle in 1569 were his responsibility; Osaka 1615 was a war of elimination against a twenty-one-year-old heir whose main offence was surviving. He was not a kind man. But kindness was not the qualification for finishing the Sengoku, and the Sengoku had to be finished. If you are travelling anywhere on the Tōkaidō corridor between Aichi and Shizuoka, go and walk the Okazaki honmaru and the Hamamatsu outer wall and the plum garden at Sunpu. If you have one day in Tochigi, take it at Nikkō — and do not stop at the Yōmeimon. Climb the 207 steps to the pagoda at the top. The crowds fall away above the main complex. Up there, under the cedars, it is just the bronze pagoda and the silence, and you can see for yourself why the system he built lasted so long. If you have followed this far, the companion reads are on the men who fought beside him and against him — Honda Tadakatsu who was the right arm at Mikatagahara and every battle after, Hideyoshi who made him wait thirteen years, Tsunayoshi his great-grandson who inherited the stable realm and never had to fight a battle, and sankin-kōtai the alternate-attendance policy that kept the daimyō pinned to his capital for the next 250 years.