was a Japanese noble lady and
aristocrat from the
Sengoku period
The was a period in History of Japan, Japanese history of near-constant civil war and social upheaval from 1467 to 1615.
The Sengoku period was initiated by the Ōnin War in 1467 which collapsed the Feudalism, feudal system of Japan under the ...
and
Edo period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characte ...
. She was the first daughter of
Date Masamune and
Megohime
was a Japanese noble lady and aristocrat from the Azuchi–Momoyama period to the early Edo period. She is the daughter and only child of Tamura Kiyoaki,Ōshima Kōichi, ''Ichinoseki Domain (Clan Stories Series)'', , page 12 the lord of Miharu ...
, as well as the wife of
Matsudaira Tadateru
was a ''daimyō'' during the Edo period of Japan. He was the sixth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was born in Edo Castle during the year of the dragon (''tatsu''), and as a child his name was Tatsuchiyo (辰千代). His mother was , a concubine of I ...
, the sixth son of
Tokugawa Ieyasu
was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was one of the three "Great Unifiers" of Japan, along with his former lord Oda Nobunaga and fello ...
. Her Buddhist name is Tenrin'in (天麟院).
Life
Irohahime was born in
Jurakudai
The Jurakudai or Jurakutei () was a palace constructed at the order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in Kyoto, Japan. Construction began in 1586, when Hideyoshi had taken the post of , and required nineteen months to complete. Its total area was almost equa ...
. She was Masamune's first conjugal child. Although the married couple would have been hopeful for a boy to take over the Date family, the baby born to them was a girl. As Masamune was expecting a son, he personally chose a masculine name. After she was born, however, the name was kept, but pronounced more femininely.
Having moved from place to place, from Jurakudai to
Fushimi, and then to
Osaka
is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of ...
, Irohahime was engaged to Ieyasu's son, Tadateru, on January 20, 1599, as part of Ieyasu's strategy for strengthening relationships with powerful
daimyō
were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast, hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and nominal ...
. In 1603, she moved from Fushimi to
Edo, and on December 24, 1606, she married Tadateru. Though the two got along, they had no children. In 1616, she divorced Tadateru when he was stripped of his position, and returned to her father, Masamune, thereafter living in Sendai.
As she lived in the Nishikan (the west annex) of the main castle in this period, she was also called Lady Nishikan (西館殿). She died on June 4, 1661, at the age of 68. Her grave is in Tenrinin Temple in
Matsushima.
Legends
*Irohahime was such a beautiful and intelligent daughter that her father was led to lament, "imagine if she had been a boy."
Date Tadamune
was an early Edo period Japanese samurai, and the 2nd '' daimyō'' of the 625,000 ''koku'' Sendai Domain in the Tōhoku region of northern Japan. He was the half-brother of Date Hidemune of Uwajima Domain.
Biography
Tadamune was born as Tor ...
, a younger brother by the same mother, also relied on her for her intelligence.
*Irohahime was allegedly a
Christian,
as her real mother Megohime had been a Christian for a time. When she divorced Tadateru, she was still in her early twenties and her father and mother, concerning about their beloved Irohahime, allegedly asked her to remarry, but she kept refusing. It is generally accepted that she refused offers of marriage throughout the rest of her life, no matter how earnestly her parents and those around her advised her to remarry because she believed in the Christian doctrine, which does not allow divorce.
*Because Irohahime was born and raised in Kyoto, her words and customs were also in the Kyoto style. When she moved to Sendai after her divorce, she had a hard time getting used to the
Tōhoku dialect as well as Tōhoku's way of living.
In popular culture
She makes an appearance in the
NHK
, also known as NHK, is a Japanese public broadcaster. NHK, which has always been known by this romanized initialism in Japanese, is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee.
NHK operates two terrestr ...
taiga drama ''
Dokuganryū Masamune'', and she is portrayed by
Sawaguchi Yasuko.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Irohahime
Women of medieval Japan
16th-century Japanese people
1594 births
1661 deaths
16th-century Japanese women
17th-century Japanese women
People of Sengoku-period Japan
People of Edo-period Japan
Date clan
Nagasawa-Matsudaira clan