Imagawa Ujizane

Who They Were

Imagawa Ujizane (今川氏真, いまがわ うじざね) was a Japanese daimyō — a regional military lord — of the Sengoku period, the long era of civil war that ran from the fifteenth into the seventeenth century. He was born in 1538 in Shizuoka, the son of Imagawa Yoshimoto, one of the most powerful warlords of central Japan, and of Yoshimoto's wife Jōkei-in. As the tenth head of the Imagawa clan, Ujizane inherited a domain that stretched across the provinces of Suruga, Tōtōmi and Mikawa, and he held it during the years when the clan's fortunes collapsed.

He was also a writer, and the courtly arts mattered to him as much as warfare. His life spanned the Muromachi period, which ran from 1336 to 1573, and reached into the early Edo period. He died in Edo on 27 January 1615, having outlived by half a century the domain he was born to rule.

Life and Career

Ujizane was born in the seventh year of the Tenbun era (天文), a nengō — an era name used to count years — that corresponds to 1538. His father Yoshimoto was then at the height of his power, and the Imagawa house was a dominant force on the Tōkaidō, the great eastern road that connected the capital region to the provinces beyond the mountains.

Yoshimoto was killed in 1560, and Ujizane succeeded him as head of the clan. The position was far weaker than it had been. The neighbouring Takeda and Tokugawa houses pressed on the Imagawa borders, and Ujizane's hold on his father's territories eroded through the 1560s. The Siege of Kakegawa, in which he was a participant, was one of the engagements that marked the end of Imagawa power as an independent force.

By the late 1560s Ujizane had lost his lands. He became a dependent of other lords, moving between patrons as the political map of Japan was redrawn. In his later years he settled in Edo, the city that would become Tokyo, under the protection of the Tokugawa shogunate. He died there on 27 January 1615.

His children included Imagawa Norimochi, Shinagawa Takahisa, Chōzon and Nishio Yasunobu. His wife was Hayakawa-dono.

Why They Matter

Ujizane's importance lies less in what he achieved than in what his career reveals about the Sengoku period. The Imagawa domain he inherited was one of the great success stories of sixteenth-century Japan; its collapse within a decade of Yoshimoto's death shows how quickly a house built on a single leader's prestige could come apart. Ujizane's reign is a case study in the fragility of daimyō power when a strong founder is followed by a less commanding heir.

He is also a reminder that the Sengoku period was not only a story of conquest. Ujizane was a poet and a man of letters, and his identity as a writer outlasted his identity as a lord. The fact that he survived the loss of his domain and died peacefully in Edo, decades after his political power ended, is itself a piece of the period's history: not every defeated daimyō was killed, and some found new lives as cultural figures under the new order.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 今川氏真 and read いまがわ うじざね (Imagawa Ujizane). It breaks into two parts: a family name, 今川, and a given name, 氏真.

今川 (いまがわ, Imagawa) — the clan name.

• 今 (いま, ima) — "now," "the present." A common element in place names and surnames.
• 川 (かわ, kawa) — "river." When it follows another element in a compound, the initial k often voices to g, giving がわ (gawa) rather than kawa. So 今川 is literally "the river of the present," or "Now River" — a place name that the family took as its surname.

氏真 (うじざね, Ujizane) — the given name.

• 氏 (うじ, uji) — "clan," "family," "lineage." It also functions as a respectful term for a person of rank. In names of this period it was a common element, often granted to a son by a senior figure as a mark of patronage.
• 真 (ざね, zane) — "true," "genuine," "real." The character is normally read しん (shin) or ま (ma) in modern Japanese, but in pre-modern personal names it frequently appears as ざね (zane). This is a reading that survives almost exclusively in historical names, which is why the name looks unfamiliar even to fluent speakers.

The pattern of taking one element from a senior figure's name and pairing it with a second element was standard practice among warrior families. The result is a name that encodes both lineage and political relationship — a small piece of family history compressed into two characters.

Legacy

Ujizane's descendants carried the Imagawa name forward. His son Imagawa Norimochi and his son Shinagawa Takahisa continued the line, and the family's association with the Tokugawa order gave it a place in the Edo-period world even after its territorial power was gone.

His memory in Japanese culture is bound up with the arts as much as with war. He is remembered as a daimyō who wrote, and as the last head of an Imagawa clan that had once been among the most feared houses in the land. The Siege of Kakegawa, in which he took part, remains one of the events by which his career is dated. He died in Edo on 27 January 1615, and the year of his death, 1615, is also the year of the Siege of Osaka, the campaign that closed the Sengoku period for good. Ujizane's life thus brackets the age of civil war almost exactly: born into its height, dead as it ended.