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1 Introduction I found information on the following incident of the Tokugawa period (1600– 1868) in the castle diary of Tahara domain, which was ruled by daimyo lords of the Miyake clan: In the autumn of 1792, the Grand Inspector of the Tokugawa government entered the Edo residence of the childless daimyo Miyake Yasukuni on a mission to certify that although Yasukuni was ill, he was of sound mind when he personally chose whom he would adopt to assume his position and inherit the domain. The Grand Inspector brought government physicians to evaluate the state of Yasukuni’s health and mental fitness. A roomful of domain doctors and Miyake clan relatives waited to witness the adoption ceremony, when the bedridden Yasukuni would imprint his personal seal on a document naming his choice of heir. The law stated that if a bedridden daimyo did not personally choose his adopted heir while in the presence of the Grand Inspector, then the Tokugawa government would terminate the lineage and confiscate the daimyo’s domain. For the Miyake who ruled the small domain of Tahara in Mikawa province, this misfortune could cause hundreds of retainers and their families to become homeless and masterless. Merchants in the domain might go bankrupt if the daimyo’s loans went unpaid, and villagers would wonder if their advance payments of taxes would be honored by whomever the Tokugawa overlord chose to install as successor. The certification staked the interests of the clan and the domain against the authority of the Tokugawa government, whose chief legal official presided over the tense ceremony to make sure that everyone present respected Tokugawa law. On this particular occasion the ceremony went smoothly, younger brother Miyake Yasutomo was certified as heir, and the Grand Inspector notified the Senior Councillors of the Tokugawa government. The Miyake clan in Edo let introduction 2 out a collective sigh of relief. The clan was safe: Yasutomo would be named the next daimyo when Yasukuni died. Miyake clan officials sent a letter by express post to chief officials of Tahara domain with the happy news. The same letter also reported the sad news that immediately following the ceremony lord Yasukuni’s illness had taken a sudden turn for the worse and, despite the best efforts of the doctors at hand, he had died that very night, surrounded by relatives who were, as the letter noted, “speechless with grief.” However, the next paragraph of the same letter stated that Yasukuni had not died that night following the ceremony; that—as all samurai in Tahara had been told many weeks earlier—he had actually died fifty-five days earlier. When I first read the castle diary and the letter recorded within, this incident and the letter itself that blithely reported in two paragraphs two conflicting versions of the lord’s death puzzled me greatly.1 After much research, I discovered that, thanks to the performance of the Tokugawa inheritance ceremony, the discrepancies in Miyake Yasukuni’s two dates of death did not matter. Nor did it matter that the Grand Inspector and government doctors knew of the earlier death and that their superiors most likely were also well aware of the situation. Ever after, all participants in the ceremony would say that they had performed it in full compliance with the law. Furthermore, all available Tokugawa sources on this event reveal nothing happening out of order with the death and the adoption and the requirements of law. Nor do they record that Yasutomo was not actually Yasukuni’s younger brother, that he was not the age he purported to be, or that, eventually, he too officially “died” long after he died. We can learn these facts only from Miyake clan documents that were intended to be read only by clan insiders. The official records produced by the Tokugawa government are “wrong” on most of the facts of Miyake Yasutomo’s adoption, as indeed I have found they are inaccurate about a large proportion of daimyo deaths, adoptions, and identities. Not only were inheritances regularly carried out in ways not according to the law, but a surprisingly large number of daimyo appearing in Tokugawa records were actually a succession of two individuals who were fit into one official identity. On such matters Tokugawa sources, such as the official history, the Tokugawa jikki, and the lineages of its retainers, such as the Kansei chōshū shokafu, are useless for modern historians. They are records that present ceremonial and seemly “facts” as if...

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