Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in 1543 as Matsudaira Takechiyo, heir of a small house in Mikawa, squeezed between the Oda of Owari and the Imagawa of Suruga. As a child he was a hostage, for a long stretch in Imagawa hands. That was the ordinary fate of a minor heir in the Sengoku period, and it was a thorough education in other people's promises. After Imagawa Yoshimoto was killed at Okehazama in 1560, he made himself independent and allied with Oda Nobunaga. He fought in Nobunaga's wars, including the battle of Nagashino in 1575. When Nobunaga was killed in 1582, Ieyasu survived the first scramble, then submitted, carefully, to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the general who carried Nobunaga's conquest of Japan through to a single regime.

Hideyoshi moved him off his ancestral ground and gave him the Kantō plain, with a castle town at Edo. The grant looked like a reward and worked as a removal from the capital. It became the base of everything afterward. Hideyoshi died in 1598, leaving a child heir, Hideyori, and a council of regents who did not intend to share power for long. Ieyasu was the strongest of them. On 21 October 1600, at Sekigahara on the Nakasendō between Kyoto and Edo, his eastern coalition defeated the western army associated with Ishida Mitsunari. The afternoon turned when Kobayakawa Hideaki, brought to the field on the western side, joined Ieyasu instead. The battle made Ieyasu the first man in Japan. It did not yet make his house safe.

In 1603 the emperor named him shogun. He resigned the title in 1605 in favor of his son Hidetada and kept the real authority, a pattern the Tokugawa house would repeat. The Toyotomi name was still alive. Hideyori held Osaka Castle, and plenty of lords remembered his father. Ieyasu destroyed that remnant in two campaigns, the winter siege of 1614 and the summer campaign of 1615. Hideyori died. The last serious alternative to Tokugawa rule died with him. Ieyasu himself died in 1616. He was deified as Tōshō Daigongen, and the great shrine at Nikkō, built up by his successors, became the center of that cult. The shogunate he founded governed until 1868.

He is the third of the Japanese unifiers, and the one who kept what the others had seized. Nobunaga broke the old order and died in a vassal's coup. Hideyoshi, of humble birth, climbed to rule of the country and spent his last years on a disastrous invasion of Korea. Ieyasu fought both men when he had to, served both when he had to, and outlived them. The shirt shows a traditional formal portrait and prints the three verbs across it in Japanese. In his case the conquest looked, for long stretches, like waiting.