Intrigue, Treachery and Betrayal at the Japanese Court - by Lesley Downer

The neglected wife - Lady Tsukiyama

In 1578 a scandal ripped through the princedom of Mikawa, domain of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu was 36 at the time and had recently snapped up the neighbouring domain of Totomi, so his power was growing - but it was as nothing compared to that of his neighbour, the fiery warlord Oda Nobunaga (whom I'll call Oda to keep things clear).

This is the story of the terrible fate of Ieyasu’s first wife.

The great lord - Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto

Wives of the Warlords III
Lady Tsukiyama’s Treachery 
Like all women of high class in those days Lady Tsukiyama had been married to Ieyasu in a political marriage to cement the alliance between the Houses of Imagawa and Tokugawa. She was just 15 and he was 14. At the time Ieyasu was a hostage in the House of Imagawa. She however was the niece of the great Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto himself. Perhaps she thought she’d been demeaned by being married off to a miserable hostage.

After Ieyasu was released they lived in Okazaki Castle, the capital of Mikawa. She bore him a son and heir, Nobuyasu, and a daughter. But after 13 years of marriage, when Ieyasu took over the neighbouring territory of Totomi in 1570 and moved to Hamamatsu Castle, he left her in Okazaki and surrounded himself with concubines (nineteen, to be precise).

Just three years had passed since Ieyasu and his powerful neighbour and ally, Oda, had inflicted a massive defeat on Lord Takeda Katsuyori at the Battle of Nagashino. Katsuyori retreated to his snowbound castle in the northern land of Kai and plotted to wrest back control of Japan.

Using a Chinese doctor as her conduit, so the story goes, Lady Tsukiyama smuggled a letter or letters - some say as many as twelve - to Katsuyori asking for help. She begged him to have her husband and Oda killed, take her son Nobuyasu under his protection, make him lord of the old Tokugawa territory, and find her a new husband from among his generals. In exchange she would betray her husband and Oda - perhaps send a signal to Katsuyori at a time when Ieyasu would be at his most vulnerable, when he was planning to be away from the castle.

The enemy: Takeda Katsuyori

Katsuyori, so the story goes, replied. He promised to give Nobuyasu one of Oda’s provinces (which by then he would have captured) and to marry Lady Tsukiyama to one of his generals who was a widower. Delighted with this answer, Lady Tsukiyama prepared to flee the castle for Katsuyori’s camp.

A case of fake news ...? 
Sharp eyes will have noticed some holes in this story.

For a start, why would Lady Tsukiyama want to take such an extraordinarily foolhardy course which risked punishment by death if it was discovered? Was she jealous of all those concubines, angry at being left behind in Okazaki Castle, or was it just general bad temper? And how precisely did she plan to betray her husband given that they lived in different castles, nearly 70 kilometres apart, a long day’s walk on foot (which was how people travelled in those days)? It’s said that Lady Tsukiyama wrote the letters in order to secure a future for her son. But he was Ieyasu’s recognised heir. He already had a future.

In fact the story only became widely known and accepted as fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after all the protagonists were dead and the truth could never be discovered.

So how did the story come to light?

The Daughter-in-Law’s Revenge

Lady Tsukiyama's son, Nobuyasu

Lady Tsukiyama doted on her son, Nobuyasu. He had been engaged to Oda’s daughter, Princess Toku, when they were both 4 years old. They were married 4 years later to seal the alliance between their fathers. But even though it was a political marriage they’d grown to love each other. All three - Lady Tsukiyama and her son and daughter-in-law - lived together in Okazaki Castle.

In due course Princess Toku had two daughters but no son. Lady Tsukiyama was clearly not fond of Princess Toku; maybe she thought she’d supplanted her in her son’s affections. She urged Nobuyasu to take a concubine so as to produce a son and ensure the succession. She even found one for him and presented her to him.

Princess Toku was incandescent.

Two Sisters
Oda had secretly installed two young sisters in Okazaki Castle to protect and spy for his daughter, Princess Toku. The older served as one of Lady Tsukiyama’s maids, the younger as one of Princess Toku’s. According to the story, the older maid was rifling through Lady Tsukiyama’s appurtenances when she found the incriminating letters to Katsuyori. It does seem a little odd, however, for her to have found them if they had already been sent.

The older maid told her sister who told Princess Toku. Princess Toku, no doubt bursting with glee, wrote to her father, Oda, revealing everything. According to one version of the story she forwarded the incriminating letters to him. One account says there were twelve, another that she added a list of twelve crimes committed by Nobuyasu and her mother-in-law against her.

The Messenger 

Warlord of warlords:
Oda Nobunaga by Giovanni Nicolao

The messenger who carried the letter to Oda was one of Ieyasu’s most trusted vassals, Sakai Tadatsugu. When Oda read the letter he could hardly believe it. He interrogated the messenger, asking him if he knew anything about these crimes. Sakai said the letters were genuine and confirmed ten out of the twelve crimes listed. Oda, Princess Toku's father, had to conclude that the accusations must be true if Sakai confirmed them. And that meant that Ieyasu’s son Nobuyasu really had been plotting against him.

It seems Nobuyasu had a terrible temper and had fallen out with Sakai over a woman, so Sakai bore him a grudge. Perhaps Sakai didn’t realise what the full implication of confirming Princess Toku’s allegations would be - and perhaps Princess Toku didn’t either.

The Terrible Consequences
On the 4th day of the 8th month of 1578 Oda sent Sakai Tadatsugu with a message for Ieyasu that his son Nobuyasu was not fit to be the governor of any province. If he was not eliminated now, Oda warned, he would do great harm in the future. He ordered Ieyasu to execute his own son forthwith.

Ieyasu was devastated. But he couldn’t afford to go against Oda's orders. Their alliance was all-important. Poor Nobuyasu, who was only 20, vehemently denied all the allegations. But Oda insisted. In the end Ieyasu had to order Nobuyasu to commit seppuku - to kill himself by cutting open his own belly.

Ieyasu said, ‘I have been looking forward to having him succeed me. It is a disgrace and a pity to let him die so young. But having this formidable enemy, Katsuyori, we cannot do without Oda’s help.’

Okazaki Castle

Nobuyasu’s retainers were devastated. Several offered to die in the young man’s place. But Oda  would not be mollified.

The only thing we know for sure, that is preserved in the historical record, is that Oda commanded Nobuyasu’s death and Ieyasu had to obey. It’s said that Ieyasu loved and trusted his son and ordered his death with the greatest of grief and remorse. But at this point ensuring the survival of the Tokugawa clan was more important than saving his son’s life.

Nobuyasu committed suicide on the 15th day of the 10th month of 1579 at the age of twenty. Ieyasu often spoke of his grief over his son’s death.

As for Lady Tsukiyama, in the end she was just collateral damage. Oda did not order her death and neither did Ieyasu. After all, she was just a woman. But Ieyasu’s retainers understood what they had to do. On the 29th day of the 8th month of 1579, a month before her beloved son’s death, she was killed by either one or two retainers, according to one account. Another version is that she drowned herself, yet another that she committed suicide by slashing her own throat.

It seems totally obvious that Lady Tsukiyama didn’t write any letters. Princess Toku made the whole thing up in order to spite her mother-in-law. But the consequence was that she accidentally brought about her own husband’s death and robbed Ieyasu of his first son and heir.

As for Ieyasu, he fathered another heir and went on to found a dynasty of shoguns that was to last for the next 250 years.


Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of love, death, plots and subterfuge in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A Samurai in Seville - by Lesley Downer

Hasekura in Rome. Portrait by Claude 
Deruet (1588-1660), with his galleon, 
the Date Maru, behind.

On October 28 1613 a samurai called Hasekura Tsunenaga set off on an epic voyage to an unexplored and little known part of the world - the land of the Southern Barbarians. He crossed the Pacific and travelled by way of Acapulco on a succession of magnificent galleons with gilded prows and billowing sails, and arrived in Spain on October 5th 1614. There he met King Phillip III, was baptised, and eight months later went on to Rome where he had an audience with Pope Paul V. All in all he was away for seven years.

The conquistadors and Japan

This was the era of the conquistadors, little more than a century after Columbus. The Spanish now ruled much of Central and South America, had colonised the Philippines and were eying up Japan.

But the Portuguese got there first. In 1543 they were already selling matchlock rifles to the warring Japanese clan lords. Shortly afterwards, in 1549, Francis Xavier and his Jesuit missionaries arrived and started converting sections of southern Japan. The Japanese realised that the Jesuits were the thin end of the wedge and that invading armies might follow, but they felt able to hold their own.

Portuguese with big hats enjoying very early female kabuki dancing
in Japan around 1603

In those days Spanish galleons plied the Pacific carrying Mexican silver to Manila where they loaded up with spices and goods from Asia to take back to Acapulco. In 1609 one of these galleons, the San Francisco, was wrecked on the coast of Japan near the booming city of Edo, present day Tokyo. The captain survived and went on to meet the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and set up a trade treaty. The Englishman William Adams, model for James Clavell’s Shogun, had arrived 9 years earlier and become Ieyasu’s right hand man and the British East India Company had set up a factory (trading station) near Nagasaki.

Hasekura with his samurai sword as
depicted by Scipione Amati,
a German artist, in 1615

The One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu

Japan had recently come to the end of half a century of warfare and was now unified under the rule of Ieyasu but up north the formidable warlord Daté Masamune - the ‘One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu’ - had different ideas. He was interested in the Southern Barbarians and their Christianity and could see a way of using them to increase his own influence and perhaps escape from under the thumb of Ieyasu. So he decided to send a mission to the west. With Ieyasu’s approval he commissioned a splendid galleon, called the Daté Maru in Japanese and the San Juan Bautista in Spanish.

Hasekura’s adventure

Hasekura Tsunenaga was a samurai with a somewhat chequered background, but Daté decided he was the man for the job. He headed a delegation of thirty samurai plus 120 Japanese merchants, sailors and servants together with 40 Spanish and Portuguese. His brief was to negotiate trade treaties. This was Japan’s first official venture to Europe and he was the ambassador.

After three months at sea the galleon arrived at California then followed the coast to Acapulco where they stayed for two months. They were received with great splendour in Mexico City, then boarded another galleon, the San Jose, to cross the Atlantic and reached the port of Sanlùcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the river Guadalquivir, in Spain, on October 5th 1614.

Seville in the 16th century with the river full of galleons and the cathedral
rising behind: Vista de Sevilla attrib. Alonso Sanchez Coello, d 1588

And so they arrived in Seville, the jewel in Spain’s crown. "The Japanese ambassador Hasekura Rokuemon, sent by Joate [Daté] Masamune, king of Boju [Oshu], entered Seville on Wednesday 23rd October 1614," reports a contemporary Spanish text. "He was accompanied by 30 Japanese with blades, their captain of the guard, and 12 bowmen and halberdiers with painted lances and blades of ceremony."

Seville, Seville

The Alcazar gardens with cathedral behind

Seville was the greatest and most glamorous city in Spain. It was the European port of departure for the Americas and had a monopoly on all Spanish trade with the new-found continent. Day and night galleons laden with American gold and silver and treasures from the Indies plied their way up the Guadalquivir, unloading their bullion at the Royal Docks. Seville was the hub of world trade, a cosmopolitan melting pot of money seekers, where merchants from across Europe flocked to acquire goods from the New World. Much of the bullion was spent on Seville’s glorious architecture and there was a huge flowering of the arts. Velazquez was starting his career, Cervantes was working on the second part of Don Quixote.

Gentleman in padded breeches -
Seville Cathedral

Hasekura must have enjoyed this magnificent city of golden stone, so different from the wooden and bamboo cities he knew with their towering white-plastered castles. He no doubt visited the cathedral, completed a hundred years earlier, and marvelled at the ornate carving of the spire. Such a high-ranking envoy was probably invited to the Real Alcázar, Philip III’s residence in Seville, and must have admired the gold ceiling and intricate stone fretwork of the Salón de Embajadores and the lavish gardens, so different from the gardens of Japan. He also must have enjoyed the orange trees, which perhaps reminded him of the orange groves of Shikoku, and the streets crowded with fashionable ladies in ruffs and enormous bell-shaped skirts and gentlemen in doublets, padded breeches and hose.

Homecoming

Hasekura went on to Madrid where he met King Philip III on 30 January 1615 and delivered a letter from Daté Masamune proposing a trade treaty. He was baptised on Feb 17 1615 by the king’s personal chaplain.

In all he and his colleagues spent eight months in Spain, being treated with all the honour due to visiting dignitaries.

Hasekura meets the Pope in Rome, 17th century Japanese painting

Then they sailed on. They were forced by the weather to make a three day stop in Saint Tropez, where they caused quite a sensation. From there they went on to Italy where Hasekura had an audience with Pope Paul V, just as Galileo was formulating his theory that the earth circled the sun, not the sun the earth.

In April 1616 they were back in Spain and in June 1616 left Seville for New Spain (Mexico) on the first leg of their journey home. Six samurai stayed behind and in the little town of Coria del Río, just outside Seville, seven hundred of the 25,000 inhabitants now bear the surname Japón, marking them as descendants of the expedition.

Seville orange tree

But when Hasekura and his colleagues got back to Japan after seven years away, like Urashima Taro, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, they discovered everything had changed. The retired shogun Ieyasu had died and his son, the shogun, had decided to eradicate Christianity and persecute Christians. The treaties Hasekura had worked so hard to negotiate were useless.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Old pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. New pics author's holiday snaps.

Trouble at t'Palace - by Lesley Downer

There’s a fable that every Japanese schoolchild knows. Three men are watching a nightingale, waiting to hear its beautiful song. But the nightingale stubbornly refuses to sing. What are they going to do about it? 

‘Kill it,’ says Nobunaga.

‘Make it want to sing,’ says Hideyoshi.

‘Wait,’ says Ieyasu. ‘Wait till it sings of its own accord.’

Lady No - portrait in Gifu Castle

Nobunaga, lord of the Oda clan, Hideyoshi of the Toyotomi and Ieyasu of the Tokugawa were three rival warlords who sought to unify Japan in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the country was torn apart with endless civil wars. They all lived at the same time and all knew each other.

They were all brilliant generals. Nobunaga was dashing, fearless and brutal; Hideyoshi wily, brilliant and able to argue himself out of any situation, no matter how desperate; and Ieyasu stolid, calculating and very very patient. You can guess which one won in the end.

Each of them had a formidable woman behind him - whether on his side or against him.

In those days young people of high rank were invariably married off in political marriages, either to an ally to cement an alliance or to an enemy warlord to make peace. If it was the latter, there might be a lethal shifting of alliances and you’d have to choose between your father or your husband.

Oda Nobunaga, depicted by the
Jesuit missionary Giovanni
Nicolao. Portrait commissioned 
and approved by Nobunaga

Wives of the Warlords, Part I

Lady No, the Princess of Mino

It’s probably never a good idea to marry your enemy’s daughter, especially if that enemy is the Viper of Mino. But that’s what happened to Nobunaga. In 1549 his father married him off to Kicho, Lady No’s name as a girl, when he was 14 and she was 13. The idea was to broker a shaky peace with Dosan of the Saito clan. Dosan had started life as an oil merchant, then murdered the daimyo of his province, Mino, and taken over his lands, mountaintop fortress and wife, which was why he was known as the Viper.

On their wedding day 14 year old Nobunaga declared that his bride had ‘the mind of a genius and the appearance of a goddess’. She was reputedly a prodigy in swordsmanship and the martial arts. You had to be able to take care of yourself in those days. She was basically a ‘hostage wife’ in that she lived in the Odas’ castle and could be disposed of if there was trouble.

Nobunaga dancing

The Oda clan were the lords of Owari, directly north of Mino, so naturally the two clans were deadly enemies and spent a lot of their time setting each others’ villages afire, seizing land from each other and having pitched battles. There were suspicions that Kicho, the Princess of Mino, had been planted not just in the family but in Nobunaga’s bed so that she could plot against him, spy on him or murder him, depending.

The Idiot Lord
The following year Nobunaga’s father died and he became lord. Nobunaga was known as the Idiot Lord because of his propensity to play the fool.

Lady No’s father, Saito Dosan, famously arranged a meeting with Nobunaga to size him up. He then hid in a peasant’s hut and spied on him as he was approaching the meeting place in the middle of a huge entourage. Nobunaga looked like a slovenly fool, lolling on his horse with a messy topknot, with amulets dangling from his belt and leopard and tiger skins tossed over his saddle. Dosan must have smirked to himself. There’d be no problems with this one. He was clearly an idiot.

But before the formal meeting Nobunaga said he needed time to change. When he reappeared he was transformed from a carefree youth into a stern-faced daimyo, with a perfectly oiled topknot and crisp hakama skirts.

Official portrait of Oda Nobunaga

Dosan realised that Nobunaga had decided it was to his advantage to play the fool. Given that his daughter was a hostage in Nobunaga’s castle, it’s said that from this point on he gave up all thought of invading Owari.

Daughter of the Viper

Lady No being the ‘daughter of the viper’, there were ongoing suspicions that she was at the very least passing information to her father. Once he became lord Nobunaga took to creeping out of their bedchamber in the middle of night and staying away till dawn. Eventually Lady No asked him what he was doing. Was he seeing another woman?

After much persuasion he confessed that he was in touch with two of her father’s closest retainers. They had said they would kill her father, then light a signal for him so that he could invade with a huge army and take over Mino province. He was up every night till dawn watching out for the signal.

Having confessed he swore her to secrecy but naturally she found a way to get a message to her father - proof that she was indeed in communication with him. Her father, hearing the news, had his faithful elders executed. Nobunaga’s story was of course all lies. Having lost his faithful retainers her father was much weakened.

The Saito family castle in Mino that Oda Nobunaga 
took over and renamed Gifu Castle

The Leper Lord 

The other kink in Kicho’s family was that her father and brother hated each other. Her father, possibly suffering from a guilty conscience, suspected that her brother was not his but the son of the murdered late daimyo, whose wife Dosan had married.

In the end there was a huge battle between them and Lady No’s father, Dosan, was killed. The son, Yoshitatsu, was struck down by leprosy shortly afterwards, obviously in judgement for the unnatural act of killing his own father, and was thenceforth known as the Leper Lord.

The Concubine

All of which gave Nobunaga an excellent excuse to invade, avenge his father-in-law and ‘liberate’ the land of Mino, which he did in 1567.

As for progeny, Lady No never had a child. Eight years after their marriage, Nobunaga met and fell in love with a lady called Kitsuno of the Ikoma family. He took her as his concubine and they had two sons and a daughter but then she died at the age of 29. It’s said that Nobunaga mourned her through the night and had her status upgraded to a second wife so that her children could be his heirs. His son Nobutada was given to Lady No to be raised. 

Nobunaga trying to fend off his attackers at Honnoji Temple, Kyoto

The Traitor

In 1582, when Nobunaga was 48, he was attacked by one of his own generals turned traitor. He and his son were killed and the temple where they were staying in Kyoto burnt to the ground. 

Shortly afterwards a veiled lady slipped away from Nobunaga’s castle, Azuchi Castle, in the middle of the night. Lady No was never seen again. It was said that she stayed in hiding as wars raged and died in 1612.

All this presaged a new period in Japan’s epic history - which revolves around central Japan and the very city where I used to live, Gifu! Stay tuned for more.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.