Event

The “enhancement” of the genealogy of the Tokugawa family to further Ieyasu’s political aspirations is well known: Forging a link to the main line of the Seiwa Genji was not only an improvement—whatever Ieyasu’s actual ancestry may have been—but an essential step in producing a pedigree fit for a shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu, of course, was far from alone in manipulating the details of his familial history and identity—a practice that was widespread in the seventeenth century.  The regime founded by the Tokugawa, though, also played a central role other families’ recasting of their genealogies, by instructing warrior houses throughout the land to submit family trees for inspection, collation, and eventual publication.  These ambitious compilation projects ensured the preservation of copies of genealogical records that might otherwise have been lost—and in many cases these are the only documents that allow modern historians to weave continuous family narratives.   The production (or even invention) of family histories by house elders and archivists across the country was aided and abetted, often unwittingly, by the Tokugawa compilers charged with verifying the authenticity of documents submitted to their attention.  As a result, new pasts were officially sanctioned and published for a great number of families. 

In this paper I examine not the genealogies of victors eager to provide themselves with a past worthy of their present, but rather those of losers and survivors—in particular, those of eastern families like the Uesugi, Nagao, Ōishi, Iwamatsu, Yura, for most of whom the sixteenth century ended worse than it had begun. I consider how, and for which ends, each in its own fashion, the new narratives served to disguise complex and uncomfortable pasts with reassuringly and fictitiously serene ones.

* CEAS Humanities Colloquium