A sequel to the walk out of Palaceside Building to Edo Castle (Imperial Palace) Tayasu Gate.
I wrote how fierce the feud was between Tayasu first head Munetake and his elder brother, the ninth shogun Ieshige. What became of the Tayasu house after that?
One cannot omit Munetake’s son Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829) (picture above, Chinkoku Shukoku Shrine). Yet Sadanobu was early set to be adopted into the Hisamatsu-Matsudaira of Shirakawa domain, so even when Munetake’s heir Harusato died young he was not allowed to succeed Tayasu; the house was for a time an “ake-yashiki” (empty residence), later succeeded by Narimasa from the Hitotsubashi house. (If a Gosankyo head died without an heir, the house was not, like ordinary daimyo, attainted; an empty-head “ake-yashiki” was allowed, and it often happened — see this blog November 24, 2015, “Shimizu Gate ⑥.”)
So, Matsudaira Sadanobu. Munetake’s seventh son, famed as bright from childhood; for a time he was eyed as Tayasu heir in place of frail Harusato, and eventually as successor to the tenth shogun Ieharu. But he was shunned for calling Tanuma Okitsugu — Yoshimune’s aide who wielded power under three shoguns from Yoshimune — “bribe politics,” and was “sent” to the northeast. He is said to have hated Okitsugu fiercely, yet also to have bribed Okitsugu himself to gain a place in central politics.
Sadanobu means the “Kansei Reforms” from history class. Bakufu reform while he was senior councillor, 1787–1793, counted with the Kyoho and Tempo reforms as the three great Edo reforms. After the Asama eruption and the Tenmei famine centered on the northeast, with ikki and smashings, it sought to restore a broken fisc and fallen bakufu authority; austerity was the main feature. Or rather, all three reforms shared “honor frugality” austerity — forcing people to endure, what we now call deflation — so to moderns who know Keynes it looks like a lack of ideas. Perhaps he took his grandfather Yoshimune’s Kyoho Reforms as the model.
Besides forcing thrift, extreme thought control is said to have stalled economy and culture. Above all Sadanobu was nervous and suspicious, so perhaps disliked. In the end, amid rising popular backlash, he lost a power struggle and fell after six years as senior councillor.