Morgan Pitelka. Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability. University of Hawaii Press, 2016. Winner of the 2016 Book Prize from the Southeastern Conference of the Association of Asian Studies. 

Spectacular Accumulation is based on a decade of research into the documentary and material evidence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan, focusing on the ways in which elite samurai used art, swords, and other forms of material culture in politics and social relations.

The book examines:

• The acquisition and exchange of material objects and the acquisition and exchange of hostages

• The display of material culture at social and cultural rituals such as tea ceremonies, banquets, and celebrations of battlefield victories

• The exchange of gifts as a means of maintaining warrior social relations

• The practice of falconry, including the exchange of live falcons and acquisition of land for hunting

• Social rituals and war, such as head examination ceremonies

• The deification of Tokugawa Ieyasu using material culture

• The modern afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu and his material culture in museums

Tokugawa Ieyasu lived from 1543-1616.


In his lifetime, he witnessed and was involved in violent civil wars in Japan, the arrival of European merchants and Jesuits, the emergence of powerful warlords who began to reunify the country, an unprovoked and deadly invasion of Korea, and the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan in relative peace until the mid-nineteenth century.


TIMELINE


1469-1510 – Sakai served as the gateway for official missions to Ming China (significant mercantile activity)

1490 – Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa’s death

1511 – The first documentary reference to the Manual of the Attendant of the Shogunal Collection (Kundaikan sochoki)

1533 – Gathering Records of Tennojiya (Tennonjiya kaiki); tea diary 

1543 – Tokugawa Ieyasu is born

1543 – Europeans arrive in Japan

1547 – Ieyasu is sent as a hostage to the Imagawa clan

1548 – Gathering Records of Matsuya (Matsuya kaiki); tea diary

1549 – Warlord Miyoshi Masanaga’s death

1552 – Warriors actively exchange hostages to buttress military positions

1557 – Imagawa Yoshimoto arranges for Ieyasu to marry the daughter of Sekiguchi Yoshimoto

1558 – Oda Nobunaga consolidates his hold on the Oda house

1558 – Ieyasu travels with Yoshimoto and his forces in an assault on a castle on the outskirts of a neighboring domain, controlled by the Oda

1559 – Ieyasu’s wife gives birth to their first child, a son named Takechiyo

1560 – Nobunaga eliminates Imagawa Yoshimoto at the Battle of Okehazama

1560 – Ieyasu reclaims his birthright as a warlord

1563 – Ieyasu sanctions the betrothal of his first son Takechiyo to Nobunaga’s daughter Tokuhime

1567 – A group of warrior leaders from Mino defects to the side of Nobunaga, and “asked him to accept hostages from them” as proof of their sincere intentions

1568 – Nobunaga marches toward Kyoto with the intent of installing the scheming Ashikaga Yoshiaki as shogun

1569-1570 – Nobunaga’s Hunt for Famous Objects (meibutsu gari)

1571 – Nobunaga’s assault on the temple complex of Enryakuji

1573 – Nobunaga enters Kyoto with a large army and surrounds Ashikaga Yoshiaki’s caste at Nijo, exiling the shogun

1575 – Nobunaga passes the headship of the Oda house to his son, Oda Nobutada 

1577-1578 – After being criticized by Nobunaga, Toyotomi (Hashiba) Hideyoshi lays siege to Kozuki Castle. As a reward, Hideyoshi receives a famous tea kettle.

1579 – Nobunaga orders the execution of more than six hundred hostages taken from the warlord Araki Yoshishige

1579 – Tokuhima writes a letter to her father, Nobunaga, that her husband and mother- in-law were engaged in serious scheming against the Oda cause

1579 – Nobuyasu commits ritual suicide

1582 – Nobunaga and Ieyasu defeat one of the most significant warlord families to resist the Oda lord: the Takeda

1582 – Nobunaga assassinated

1583 – Hideyoshi defeats the armies of Shibata Katsuie, a major rival

1584 – Battles of Komaki and Nagakute: Hideyoshi unable to pin down Ieyasu despite his advantageous circumstances

1585 – Hideyoshi’s tea gathering at Daitokuji

1585 – Hideyoshi attains the rank of imperial chancellor (kanpaku)

1586 – Hideyoshi attains the rank of great minister of state (daijo daijin)

1586 – Hideyoshi publicly rewards Ishikawa Kazumasa for his defection from Ieyasu 

1586 – Ieyasu submits to Hideyoshi

1587 – Hideyoshi announces a massive, mandatory tea gathering (Grand Kitano Tea Gathering)

1589 – Hideyoshi begins his assaults on Hojo territory

1590 – Hojo Ujinao submits to Hideyoshi

1592 – Japan’s attack on Korea, beginning of the Imjin War

1593 – Korean Admiral Yi Sun Shin defeats Japanese naval vessels with his turtle ships 

1596 – The enormous Tensho Earthquake destroys Fushimi Castle and damages Kyoto 

1597 – Japanese troops resume hostilities in Korea in the second phase of the Imjin War 

1598 – Toyotomi Hideyoshi dies, troops withdraw from Korea

1600 – Ieyasu and the various pro-Tokugawa forces are victorious at the Battle of Sekigahara

1601 – Ieyasu orders the provinces of eastern Japan to conduct land surveys (kenchi

1602 – Ieyasu orders the construction of a library in Edo Castle

1603 – Ieyasu appointed to the post of shogun by Emperor Go-Yozei

1605 – Ieyasu retired from the post of shogun and his adult son, Hidetada, is installed in the position

1612 – Ieyasu hunts more than seventy birds while traveling between Nagoya and Sunpu, and sends all of them to Hideyori and the emperor

1612 – Ieyasu issues a short set of regulations for the court which notably includes the prohibition of falconry by courtiers

1613 – Regulations Governing Court Approval of Purple Robes issued

1614 – Ieyasu leads an army toward the first confrontation with Toyotomi Hideyori in Osaka Castle

1615 – Ieyasu destroys Osaka Castle and extinguishes the threat of the Toyotomi house 

1616 – Ieyasu dies on 4/17

1616 – Ieyasu's body is interred at Kunozan, a mountain near Sunpu, and he is deified as Tosho Daigongen in the first Toshosha. Soon he is transferred to a larger Toshosha at Mt. Nikko

1622 – Annual festivals marking the death of Ieyasu begin

1623 – Hidetada retires as shogun, and Ieyasu’s grandson, Iemitsu, is appointed ruler 

1634-1636 – The shrine at Nikko is expanded into a massive shrine complex, the Toshogu; smaller structures for the worship of Tosho Daigongen spread across Japan 

1636 – Ietmitsu's commissioned text, Origin of the Shrine That Illuminates the East (Toshosha engi) is completed

1640 – Ceremonial dedication of Origins of the Great Avatar Who Illuminates the East 

1641 – Iemitsu orders Ota Sukemune to manage the massive project of compiling the genealogies of all warrior households

1643 – Genealogies of the Houses of the Kan’ei Period is completed

1651 – Iemitsu dies

1868 – Fall of the Tokugawa government

1889 – 300th anniversary of Edo's founding celebrated in Ueno Park, Tokyo

1934 – Establishment of Nikko National Park

1935 – Tokugawa Art Museum founded by Marquis Tokugawa Yoshichika, Nagoya

1937 – Emperor Hirohito visits the Tokugawa Art Museum

1942-1944 – Yoshichika serves as civil governor of occupied Malaya and honorary president of Singapore's Raffles Museum and Botanical Gardens

1983 – The Shogun Age exhibition opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, later traveling to Dallas, Munich, Paris, and Montreal

1999 – Nikko is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site

2005 – Shogun exhibition opens at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, U.K.

2007 – Dai Tokugawa ten opens at the Tokyo National Museum

2016 – 400th anniversary of the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu: A Brief Biography


Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the most famous warriors in Japanese history, was born in 1543 into a society in the throes of civil war and an elite warrior family in difficult circumstances. His father, ruler of the northern part of Mikawa Province, was only sixteen and his mother only fourteen. His talented grandfather, who had helped establish the family name and had built Okazaki Castle, had been assassinated before he reached the age of twenty five. As a result of the constant battles between rival warlords and the practice of exchanging family members as guarantees of loyalty, this young samurai’s life was not likely to be stable. Premature death and separation from one’s loved ones were in fact common experiences for many warriors in this period. His own father was engaged in a string of campaigns against more powerful warlords that surrounded and threatened his territory. As a gesture of conciliation, Ieyasu’s father sent him, at the age of five, as a hostage to a neighboring warlord.


In transit, however, he was kidnapped by yet another rival warlord, and two years into his life in that domain learned that his father had died. Later that year he was transferred to Sumpu castle where he became a hostage of the Imagawa until the age of eighteen. Young samurai hostages such as Ieyasu were rarely treated as prisoners. In fact, at Sumpu Ieyasu received a full education in the military and cultural practices of the samurai; he learned to love the outdoors and the practice of falconry in particular; he was married at the age of fifteen to a relative of his captor; and he was sent on his first sortie at the age of sixteen. But even when he seized his independence as head of his natal family at the age of eighteen, defeated an uprising at the age of twenty-two, and unified Mikawa and took the name “Tokugawa” at the age of twenty-four, his successes were related to the ongoing collapse of the old system of warrior authority.


Contrast these early experiences of insecurity with Ieyasu’s later life. In 1590 Ieyasu became ruler of the largest territory in all of Japan, the eastern provinces formerly controlled by the Hôjô, and he set up his new headquarters in the village of Edo. Ten years later, he defeated at Sekigahara a powerful but ultimately disjointed assortment of warlords opposed to his preeminent national position and was rewarded in 1603 with court appointment to the post of Shogun, allowing him to establish a new warrior government for Japan. In an act of confidence and to guarantee succession, he stepped down from the position of Shogun in 1605 and passed it on to his accomplished son Hidetada. Ieyasu then spent his remaining years doting on his children and grandchildren and advising his son in Edo and from his retirement residence in Sumpu, where he had lived all those years before as a hostage. Ieyasu’s life as a child and young man had been characterized by violence and insecurity, but his retirement included a range of experiences that had long been appreciated by warlords and that now could be pursued with vigor because of his security and status, such as regular banqueting, hunting for sport, leisure travel, and patronage of the Noh theater. Like the struggles of his early career, these were still deeply political acts: alliances could be struck over tea, land could be confiscated in the name of hunting rights, and status could be displayed through the acquisition of antique paintings or powerful Noh masks. But the methods of confrontation had changed.


When Ieyasu died in 1616, he was surrounded by friends, family, and vassals, relatively secure in the knowledge that he had pacified the armies that had wreaked havoc on the country for over a century. His successors would struggle to perpetuate this Pax Tokugawa, but Ieyasu’s part, at least, was done. Though it would be artificial to name one event or date as the tipping point in the transition from a society at war to a society at peace, it seems clear that Ieyasu began his life in volatility, and ended it in stability.


Excerpted from Morgan Pitelka, "The Early Modern Warrior," Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal v. 16 (2008), p. 33-42.

My other publications related to Spectacular Accumulation:

  • “The Life and Afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616),” in Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao, eds., The Tokugawa World (Routledge, 2021).
  • “Name and Fame: Material Objects as Authority, Security, and Legacy” in Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto, ed.,What is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2019)
  • “Warriors, Tea, and Art in Premodern Japan.” Samurai: Beyond the Sword. Ed. Birgitta Augustin. Detroit Institute of Arts, 2014.
  • “The Tokugawa Storehouse: Ieyasu’s Encounters with Things.” Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800. Ed. Paula Findlen. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
  • Art, Agency, and Networks in the Career of Tokugawa Ieyasu.” Blackwell Companion to Asian Art. Ed. Deborah Hutton and Rebecca Brown. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
  • The Empire of Things: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Material Legacy and Cultural Profile.” Japanese Studies (May, 2009).