Nikkō and Beyond: A Study of Early Tokugawa Mausoleum Architecture

Abstract

Japanese architectural art history has traditionally characterized Nikkō Tōshōgū, the well-known mausoleum of the first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu (1542-1616), as unique in terms of its overwhelming elaborate ornamental and architectural features. First built in 1617, and rebuilt by the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651) for his grandfather Ieyasu, it has primarily been framed as an example through which Iemitsu enhanced and legitimated his own political rule. What has been largely overseen is that architecturally Nikkō Tōshōgū in fact stands not alone, but instead triggered the development of an architectural typology of Edo period (1615-1868) religious architecture with similar aesthetics that began to spread all over the Japanese archipelago from the seventeenth century onward. During the Edo period (1603-1868) not only hundreds of smaller Tōshōgū were erected in the domains all over Japan to worship Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, but the numerous mausolea of the succeeding shoguns and their wives exhibited the same stylistic traits, were made by the same carpenter families, and served similar political and religious ends. Constructed with newly developed carpentry techniques under a new building system, the impact of the mausolea building typology in fact reached far beyond the confines of the Tokugawa familial mausolea and official Tokugawa government control. They influenced regional shrine and temple construction that was sponsored by the warlords in the domains, or financed on a local level by the townspeople. Despite the Tokugawa mausolea’s significance as representative elite architecture of early modern Japan, comparable to the imperial and royal tombs of China and Korea, and their role in transforming and systemizing the building culture as a whole in early modern Japan, currently they only occupy a marginal place of a few descriptive pages in our art history textbooks. In this dissertation, I explore this neglected sphere of early Edo period architecture, visual culture, and religion by focusing on Nikkō Tōshōgū and the mausolea of the successive Tokugawa shoguns and their wives. I trace their origins and attempt to propose new ways of understanding their architectural qualities, circumstances of construction, and political and religious context based on secondary, as well as primary sources. Through this examination, it is hoped to reframe their historical understanding and resituate them into their original context in Japan, and more broadly East Asia.