Tokugawa Hidetada’s Last Months

We are all familiar with the great precision of Japanese historical recordkeeping as well as with its peculiarity of recording only the official representation of events. It is not often that we have a chance to look underneath the surface of the official record. However, Dutch sources offer opportunities to do so. In this essay, I use these sources to distill a new date for Tokugawa Hidetada’s death, half a year earlier than the one given in all Japanese sources so far. Reexamination of more than six months of entries in the Tokugawa jikki through comparison with Dutch records presents an opportunity to deepen our understanding of their meanings.