Tokugawa Tsunenari

Who is Tokugawa Tsunenari?

Tokugawa Tsunenari is the present head of the main Tokugawa house. Members of his Tokugawa clan ruled Japan as Shoguns from 1603 to 1867. His great-grandfather by his birth family was the famed Matsudaira Katamori of Aizu. Tsunenari was active for many years in the shipping company Nippon Yūsen, and at present is the head of the nonprofit Tokugawa Foundation.

His son, Iehiro Tokugawa, is a University of Michigan-educated translator.

In 2007, Tsunenari published a book entitled Edo no idenshi, released in English in 2009 as The Edo Inheritance, which seeks to counter the common belief among Japanese that the Edo period was like a dark age, when Japan, cut off from the world, fell behind. On the contrary, he argues, the roughly 250 years of peace and relative prosperity saw great economic reforms, the growth of a sophisticated urban culture, and the development of the most urbanized society on the planet.