Kamei Koremasa

Who They Were

Kamei Koremasa (亀井茲政, かめい これまさ) was a Japanese daimyō — a hereditary feudal lord — of the early Edo period. He was born in 1617, the third year of the Genna era (元和, げんな), and died on 6 February 1681. His life spanned the first half of a period of more than two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, an era in which the country was governed from Edo (modern Tokyo) by the Tokugawa shogunate and divided among some 250 to 300 daimyō domains.

Koremasa ruled the Tsuwano Domain, a territory in the west of the country. He belonged to the Kamei family, a samurai house, and he was the son of Kamei Masanori. His own son, Kamei Korechika, succeeded him, and the family line continued through further generations.

Life and Career

Koremasa was born in 1617 into the Kamei house. His father, Kamei Masanori, was the previous head of the family, and Koremasa inherited that position in the course of the Edo period's early decades, when the Tokugawa order established by Tokugawa Ieyasu was still being consolidated into the stable system of domain government that would define the next two centuries.

As a daimyō, Koremasa held both land and governmental authority over his domain. Daimyō of this era were not merely landowners; they administered justice, collected rice revenues, maintained retainers, and answered to the shogunate for the conduct of their territories. The position carried obligations of military service and attendance at the shogunal court, and it placed the holder within a carefully ranked hierarchy of lords.

Koremasa is recorded as having assisted in the construction of a part of Kōdaiji Temple (高台寺, こうだいじ) in Kyoto. Kōdaiji is a temple in the city's Higashiyama district, founded in memory of Toyotomi Hideyoshi by his widow, and its construction drew contributions from lords across the country. A daimyō's participation in such a project was both a religious act and a public statement of standing, tying the Kamei name to one of the most prominent building projects of the age.

He died on 6 February 1681. His son, Kamei Korechika, followed him as head of the house.

Why They Matter

Koremasa belongs to the generation of daimyō who inherited, rather than fought for, their domains. His grandfather's generation had lived through the wars of unification; his own generation administered the peace. The Kamei house's continuity across this transition — from a warlord family of the Sengoku period into a settled Edo-period domain lordship — is the pattern that shaped Japanese provincial life for the following two centuries.

His contribution to Kōdaiji Temple places him within the cultural geography of Kyoto in the early seventeenth century. The temple was a major undertaking, and the involvement of regional lords in its construction shows how the new political order channelled the resources of the warrior class into religious and monumental architecture rather than into warfare.

For students of Japanese, the Kamei house is also a useful example of how domain families preserved identity across generations: the family name, the hereditary title, and the succession from father to son were the machinery by which power was transmitted in Edo Japan.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 亀井茲政. It is read in kana as かめい これまさ, and rendered in romaji as Kamei Koremasa. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese; the given name follows.

亀井 (かめい, Kamei) — the family name, made of two kanji:

• 亀 (かめ, kame) — "turtle" or "tortoise." The turtle is a traditional emblem of longevity and endurance in East Asia, and it appears frequently in warrior-family names and crests.
• 井 (い, i) — "well," as in a water well. In place names and surnames it often refers to a settlement built around a well.

Together, 亀井 is a surname of great antiquity, originally associated with a place. It is not read as the sum of its parts; the two kanji function as a single unit pronounced Kamei.

茲政 (これまさ, Koremasa) — the given name, also of two kanji:

• 茲 (これ, kore) — a formal, literary character. It carries senses of "here," "this," and by extension "to cultivate" or "to increase." It is rare in modern given names but was used in warrior names of the Edo period, where a stock of dignified, classical characters was drawn on for boys' names.
• 政 (まさ, masa) — "government," "administration," "rule," or "politics." This kanji was extremely common in the names of daimyō and samurai, precisely because it evoked the business of governing that defined their class. The same character appears in 政権 (seiken, political power) and 政治 (seiji, politics).

The reading Koremasa is a nanori reading — a name-specific pronunciation that cannot be reliably predicted from the kanji alone. This is why Japanese personal names are so often accompanied by furigana, the small kana printed beside the characters to show how they are read.

Koremasa's childhood name was Dairiki (大力). In Edo-period warrior families, a boy received a childhood name (yōmyō, 幼名) at birth and later exchanged it for an adult name in a coming-of-age ceremony, so the same person could appear in documents under two entirely different names.

Legacy

Koremasa's direct legacy was the continuation of the Kamei house as lords of Tsuwano Domain. His son, Kamei Korechika, succeeded him in 1681, and the succession passed in turn to Kamei Masanori, named for his grandfather. The repetition of names across the generations was itself a form of legacy: it bound each new head of the family to his predecessors and asserted that the house, not the individual, was the enduring thing.

His part in the building of Kōdaiji Temple in Kyoto outlasted him in stone and timber, a physical trace of a daimyō's involvement in the religious architecture of the old capital. For a lord whose career was otherwise the ordinary administrative work of an Edo-period domain, that contribution is what carries his name forward.