A History of Japanese Names: 3
(first published in The Japan Times, Oct. 11, 2009)
Here’s a beguiling irony: Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), architect of Tokugawa Japan’s rigid class structure and author in 1587 of a firm ban (not firmly enforced, however) on surnames for commoners, was himself born without a surname.
“Toyotomi,” the name under which his memory survives, was the last of several surnames he more or less arbitrarily gave himself. He took it (or rather had the powerless Emperor confer it upon him) a mere two years before he issued the ban. Its meaning is Rich Abundance.
Similarly spurious is the appropriation by Matsudaira Takechiyo (1542-1616), a.k.a. Matsudaira Jirosaburo Motonobu, a.k.a. Matsudaira Kurandonosuke Motoyasu---such name changes are by no means unusual---of the Tokugawa surname in 1567. History knows him as Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Hideyoshi as a child (he wasn’t called Hideyoshi then) was a waif, a peasant wanderer in search of adventure. At age 11 he strayed into the Oda clan, lords of Awari Province (roughly modern Aichi Prefecture). He served as “sandal-bearer” to the clan head, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582)---the only one of the three great unifiers (Oda, Toyotomi and Tokugawa) to die with the surname he was born to.
Not that Nobunaga’s name didn’t go through its share of permutations in between. In 1549, writes Herbert Plutschow in “Japan’s Name Culture,” he called himself Fujiwara no Nobunaga; subsequently, in battle against the Ashikaga shogunate, which was of Minamoto stock, he took the name of the Minamoto’s historic rival clan, Taira---claiming thereby (not very convincingly, say scholars) imperial ancestry.
Hideyoshi’s rise from the lowliest origins to supreme power is unique in hierarchy-obsessed Japan. Along the way he tried various surnames on for size---Kinoshita, Hashiba, Taira. Determining that none did him justice, in 1585 he chose Toyotomi out of thin air. The divine descent he was claiming for himself at this stage called for a name with no antecedents.
Hideyoshi’s personal name---the one we know him by---has an interesting history too, as Plutschow tells it. In 1569, under the name Kinoshita Tokichiro, he distinguished himself in battle and was flattered to hear Nobunaga compare him to the warrior Asahina Yoshihide. Tokichiro promptly took the name Yoshihide. But the shogun’s name was Ashikaga no Yoshiteru, and appropriating a name starting with “Yoshi” was offensively presumptuous, if not taboo. He therefore reversed the order and became Hideyoshi.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, last of the three unifiers, was the son of Matsudaira Hirotada, daimyo of Mikawa province (roughly modern Aichi Prefecture). Plutschow traces the name Tokugawa to a high-ranking 13th-century samurai who ruled an area called Tokugawa in today’s Tochigi Prefecture. Claiming it for himself, Matsudaira, like Nobunaga, was in effect claiming imperial descent.
“It was on the basis of this falsified genealogy that the title of shogun was transferred to him in 1603,” writes Plutschow. “However, recent scholarship has revealed that Ieyasu submitted a falsified genealogy to the emperor.”
There’s not much anyone can do about it now.