Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu

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Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (Japanese: 柳沢 吉保, December 31, 1658 – December 8, 1714) was a Japanese samurai of the Edo period. He was an official in the Tokugawa shogunate and a favourite of the fifth shōgun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. His second concubine was Ogimachi Machiko, a writer and scholar from the noble court who wrote monogatari.^[1]

Career

The Yanagisawa house traced descent to the "Kai-Genji," the branch of the Minamoto clan which had been enfeoffed with the province of Kai in the eleventh century.

Yoshiyasu served

Yanagisawa played a pivotal role in the matter of the forty-seven rōnin.^{[citation needed]}

Cultural references

Yanagisawa is the subject the diary memoir of his concubine Ōgimachi Machiko (正親町町子, 1675 - 1724), Matsukage no nikki ('In the Shelter of the Pine'), which gives a detailed account of Yoshiyasu's glory during the period 1685-1709 modelled on the Eiga Monogatari and in a writing style inspired by The Tale of Genji. More than 36 hand-copied manuscripts survive to the present day. An English translation appeared in 2021.

Yanagisawa appears as a character in most of the novels by American mystery writer Laura Joh Rowland set in Genroku-era Japan as the antagonist to the books' main character Sano Ichiro.^{[citation needed]} Rowland's chronology differs from history by having Yanagisawa exiled in disgrace in 1694 and being replaced by Sano as Tsunayoshi's chief advisor, only to return from exile later in the series.^{[citation needed]} Other details of Yanagisawa's life, however, are portrayed fairly accurately, including his relationship to the shōgun.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Samurai
• Shudō

Notes

References

• Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice. (1980). Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu: a Reappraisal. Canberra: Australian National University. OCLC 222149819
• Nussbaum, Louis Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005). Japan Encyclopedia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-674-01753-5; OCLC 48943301