Imagawa Yoshimoto

Who They Were

Imagawa Yoshimoto (今川義元, いまがわ よしもと) was a samurai and daimyō — a feudal lord — of the Sengoku period, the century and a half of near-constant civil war that ran from the middle of the fifteenth century into the early seventeenth. He was born in 1519 in Suruga Province, the region that corresponds to the central part of modern Shizuoka Prefecture, and he ruled from there for most of his adult life. His career ended on 12 June 1560, when he was killed at Okehazama by the forces of Oda Nobunaga.

The Imagawa house was one of the great warrior families of the Tōkaidō, the eastern coastal road that linked the capital region with the provinces to the east. Yoshimoto was counted among the three daimyō who dominated that road, and contemporary reputation gave him the epithet Kaidō-ichi no Yumitori (海道一の弓取り), "the number one archer of the Tōkaidō" — a phrase that meant not merely a bowman but a warrior of the first rank.

Life and Career

Yoshimoto was born in 1519, in the sixteenth year of the Eishō era (永正), to Imagawa Ujichika, the head of the Imagawa house. His mother was Jukei-ni. He was born into the Muromachi period, the age of the Ashikaga shogunate in Kyoto, but the political order of that period had already largely collapsed; the Sengoku period, the era of "the country at war", was the world he actually inhabited.

He married Jōkei-in and Sekiguchi-fujin, and had children including Imagawa Ujizane, who succeeded him as head of the family, along with Chōtoku Ichigetsu and Reishō-in. His father Ujichika had preceded him as lord of Suruga, and Ujizane followed him — three generations of the same house in the same seat of power.

Yoshimoto's military career is remembered through three engagements: the Battle of Azukizaka, the Battle of Fox Bridge, and the Battle of Okehazama. The first two belong to his years of consolidation and expansion in the Tōkaidō region, as he built the Imagawa domain into one of the strongest in eastern Japan. In 1560 he marched west toward Kyoto, the imperial capital and the symbolic prize of any daimyō with ambitions beyond his own province. He never reached it.

On 12 June 1560, at a place called Dengakuhazama in the village of Okehazama, in what is now the city of Toyoake in Aichi Prefecture, his army was surprised and shattered by Oda Nobunaga, then a far less powerful lord. Yoshimoto was killed in the fighting. He was forty-one years old by Western reckoning, having lived from 1519 to 1560.

Why They Matter

Yoshimoto's death at Okehazama is one of the decisive turning points of Japanese history. He was the stronger party; Nobunaga was the upstart. The battle is remembered as a textbook case of a small force destroying a larger one through surprise and speed, and it removed from the board the man who stood between Nobunaga and the road to Kyoto.

The consequences ran in both directions. For the Imagawa, Yoshimoto's death triggered a rapid collapse of the domain they had spent decades assembling; leadership passed to his son Ujizane, and the house never recovered its former reach. For Nobunaga, the victory opened the path that would eventually carry him to national dominance and make him the first of the three "unifiers" of Japan.

Yoshimoto therefore occupies an unusual position in the historical record: a daimyō of the first rank whose fame rests as much on his defeat as on his achievements. The epithet "number one archer of the Tōkaidō" survives precisely because the man who held it was cut down by a rival who had not yet earned any such title.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 今川義元. It is read in kana as いまがわ よしもと, and in romaji as Imagawa Yoshimoto. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese; the given name follows.

今川 (いまがわ, Imagawa) — the surname, two characters:

• 今 (read ima here) means "now", "the present". On its own it is a common everyday word.
• 川 (read gawa here) means "river". Note the sound change: the character is normally read kawa, but after a preceding element it voices to -gawa, a very common pattern in Japanese place names and surnames. So 今川 is literally something like "the present river" or "the river now" — a name of the same type as countless Japanese surnames drawn from landscape features.

義元 (よしもと, Yoshimoto) — the given name, two characters:

• 義 (read yoshi here) means "righteousness", "justice", "duty". It was an extremely common element in samurai given names, because it carried a moral claim appropriate to a warrior's self-image. It also appears in the names of many other Sengoku figures.
• 元 (read moto here) means "origin", "source", "beginning", and by extension "foundation" or "head". It too was a frequent name element among warriors of the period.

Two features of the name are worth noting for learners. First, the readings here are kun'yomi — native Japanese readings — rather than the Sino-Japanese on'yomi. The character 今 would be read kon in many compounds, and 川 would be sen; in this name they are read ima and gawa. Second, the given name 義元 is a two-character name of a type that became standard among samurai from the medieval period onward, and the same combination of characters appears in the names of other historical figures — so recognising the elements 義 and 元 separately is more useful than memorising the whole as a single block.

Legacy

The Imagawa domain did not long outlast its most famous lord. Ujizane inherited the headship, but the house's power contracted sharply after 1560, and the Imagawa ceased to be a major force in the politics of the era. What survived was the reputation of Yoshimoto himself.

His name is bound to Okehazama. The battle is taught as the moment Oda Nobunaga announced himself as a figure of national consequence, and Yoshimoto appears in that story as the formidable opponent whose fall made the rise possible. The epithet Kaidō-ichi no Yumitori is repeated in accounts of the period precisely because it sharpens the contrast: the finest warrior of the Tōkaidō, killed in a surprise attack by a lord from a minor province.

For students of Japanese, Yoshimoto's name is also a useful specimen. It contains a landscape surname, a moral-quality character, and an origin character — three of the most common building blocks in Japanese personal names — and it demonstrates the voicing rule that turns kawa into -gawa inside a compound.