Tokugawa Descendant Marries Vietnamese Woman
September 14th, 2007 by James
While glancing over a newspaper the other day, I came across this advertisement for the September 20th edition of Shukan Shincho:
The headline on the far right states that a male descendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu [and future head of the Tokugawa household] married a Vietnamese woman against his parents’ wishes. It would appear that the 20th generation of the proud Tokugawa bloodline will be only half-Japanese!
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Yes, that certainly would disqualify the child from becoming Shogun.
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Good for him..
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That’s just what I thought, too.
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Only for viets or foreigners with interests?
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I wasn’t being disingenuous at all. I really meant ‘good for him’ in the sense that it shouldn’t matter what other people (family included) think when it comes to who you love.
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You sure about the “direct male descendent” bit? The Tokugawa line ran out of direct heirs a few times in its history, leaving them to bring in heirs from the other Three Families (go-sanke: 御三家), and sometimes the heir was a brother or a cousin rather than a son. The last Shogun, Yoshinobu, for example, was from the Mito Tokugawa house, adopted from the Hitotsubashi family. This “Nineteenth Head” presumably refers to the ‘official’ head of the family rather than Ieyasu’s nineteenth direct bloodline generation (which probably does exist, through his other children and grandchildren who did not inherit the Shogunate). Last I heard, the Tokugawa head was working in a shipping company, so presumably this is him.
Actually, looking up Wikipedia, it might be this guy: Tokugawa Iehiro.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BE%B3%E5%B7%9D%E5%AE%B6%E5%BA%83
According to that, he’s a translator, born 1965, and worked for a while in Vietnam (and isn’t the head yet, as his father is still alive). A descendent of Ieyasu, probably, but like the Emperors, or the Kings and Queens of England, descended through rather a wiggly line….
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Thanks for clearing it up: I’ve corrected the description .
Cool. Genealogy can indeed get tricky. If you want to get even more annoyingly anal, there are some nine generations from Ieyasu to Yoshinobu, but Yoshinobu was the fifteenth head, so Iehiro is probably only the 12th generation (19th head, 12th generation), but I’ll shut up now before you kick me off the board…. (^_^)
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I think majority of Japanese have good feeling to the Vietnamese people. They are faithful hardworking people. They are selfconfident enough that they do not eternally demand apology and reparation to other countries. In addition Japanese love Aozai!
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Vietnamese people admired the Japanese people very much because of their accomplishments. Also, Japan did not cause great harm to Vietnam (okay, Japanese stayed in Vietnam for 5 years pre-Vietnam War but that’s nothing compared to the Chinese) like other East Asian countries.
Hope them all the best.
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Who says the Japanese didn’t do “great harm” in Vietnam? They came in and stuck their finger in the cake batter like every other country that wanted to colonize Vietnam.
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ha you just have to look at the royal family on britain to realize how screwed up things can get as the current head of the family has more to do with germany than british!
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and they are inbred
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Good choice, Vietnamese women are prettier on average than Japanese (IMO!!), and aren’t always as insistent on handling the family income. Anyway, I don’t think this news will surprise too many people, Japanese + Vietnamese/Cambodian marriage is getting pretty common.
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Well I am Vietnamese myself and I know that we are usually hardworking (I always overdo things and try not to be mean!!! >_<) but I always thought that a big industrial country like Japan would not even know the we existed! I always considered myself unworthy to these type of countries because we have a bad history and still trying to rebuild… Well this made me feel better….
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