Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) was a warlord and statesman of the late Sengoku and early Edo period and the first shogun of the Edo shogunate. He became seii-taishogun in 1603 and completed the unification of Japan through the Battle of Sekigahara (1600) and the Sieges of Osaka (1614-15). After his death in 1616 he was buried on Mount Kuno in Suruga by his testament, then deified through the Sanno Ichijitsu Shinto procedure overseen by the Tendai prelate Tenkai as Tosho Daigongen and reinterred at Nikko in 1617. The official record is the Tokugawa Jikki (Tosho-gu Goshikki) compiled in the early nineteenth century, with supporting works such as the Sogyoki, Ochiboshu and Mikawa Monogatari. Tenkai's Tosho Daigongen Engi and Hayashi Razan's memorials document the deification process. His father was Matsudaira Hirotada and his mother was Odai-no-kata; his sons Hidetada, Yoshinao, Yorinobu and Yorifusa founded the Tokugawa main line and the three branch houses. Nikko Tosho-gu in Tochigi and Kunozan Tosho-gu in Shizuoka are the chief seats; about five hundred Tosho-gu shrines once stood across Japan.