Tokugawa Yoshinobu: The Shogun Who Gave It Back

Nijo Castle, Shizuoka, and the forty-five years afterwards

徳川慶喜 · 1837–1913 · last checked 2026-10-27

Tokugawa Yoshinobu became the fifteenth shogun in January 1867 and gave the office back in October. He then lived another forty-five years.

That photograph was taken the month he took the title. Run the dates of all fifteen shoguns and he is the longest-lived of them by eight years — he was seventy-six when he died in 1913, with the telephone and the railway and the Russo-Japanese War all behind him. Ieyasu, the next oldest, managed seventy-three and died in 1616.

So the interesting thing about Yoshinobu is not the ten months. It is that a man who had been the military ruler of Japan spent the next three decades in a provincial town taking photographs, and that almost nobody goes to see where.

Part 1 — Nijo Castle, and the room it did not happen in

This is the picture of the taisei hokan — the return of power — and it is in every Japanese textbook. Nijo Castle has staged the scene in its Ohiroma with figures on the tatami, and that is where visitors are taken and told it happened.

The painting is not of the Ohiroma. Its own catalogue entry, at the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery it was painted for, places it in the Kuroshoin — a smaller, darker room further into the same palace — and the scene it shows is 12 October 1867, when Yoshinobu told his own officials and the related daimyo what he intended to do.

What happened in the Ohiroma was the next day. On 13 October some fifty senior retainers of about forty domains were summoned to Nijo at noon and put the question. And here the record gets more awkward still: Tokugawa Yoshinobu ko den, his own official biography, has the senior councillor Itakura Katsukiyo presiding over that assembly rather than Yoshinobu, with six men — Goto Shojiro and Fukuoka Takachika of Tosa, Komatsu Tatewaki of Satsuma, and one each from Aki, Uwajima and Bizen — granted an audience with the shogun afterwards.

The memorial went to the court on the 14th. Assent came back on the 15th.

None of which makes Nijo less worth going to. The Ninomaru palace is the real thing — thirty-three rooms, original, Kano school paintings on the walls — and the visitor route runs through the Ohiroma and the Kuroshoin both. You can stand in the room where it was announced and then in the room where it was decided, which is better than standing in one and being told it was the other.

Check the day before you book. The Ninomaru palace shuts every Tuesday in January, July, August and December. The grounds stay open, so you can pay, walk in, and find the palace closed. January is exactly when most people will want to come.

Part 2 — Shizuoka, where he went instead

He surrendered Edo in the spring of 1868, went to Mito, and was moved to Shizuoka that summer. His first address there was not a house.

Hodai-in is a Tokugawa family temple, and the room made for him in the priests’ quarters is where the last shogun spent roughly a year under confinement. It holds the grave of Saigo-no-Tsubone as well — Ieyasu’s consort, mother of the second shogun — so the temple bookends the dynasty at both ends in one small compound eight minutes from the station.

From 1869 he was a private citizen in a provincial city, and he stayed one for twenty-eight years. He photographed, which was an expensive and difficult hobby in the 1870s and which he was good at. He painted in oils, hunted, and rode one of the first bicycles in the city.

The pond garden at Fugetsuro is the physical survival of those years, and the restaurant that owns it was registered as a national monument in 2025. Be clear about what it is, though: a working ryotei, not a public garden. The official site publishes opening hours and no admission price, and the way Japanese press describes it is guests seeing the garden while they eat. Ring first.

He left in November 1897 for Tokyo, and the reason given in the local record is wonderfully undignified for a former shogun: the land his Shizuoka house stood on was wanted for a railway station yard.

Part 3 — Mito, where he started

He was born in Mito in 1837, a son of the Mito branch, and was schooled at the domain academy before being adopted into the Hitotsubashi house. When Edo surrendered in 1868 he came back here and confined himself in the Shizendo, which still stands and which you can walk into. A man sitting out the end of his own war in his old schoolroom is as neat a thing as this route offers.

Mito is a day out of Tokyo rather than part of the Shizuoka route — about an hour and twenty on the Joban line. Kairakuen, one of the three great gardens, is twenty minutes further on and was built by his father.

Part 4 — Fact and legend

Documented, and the thing he is least forgiven for. At Toba-Fushimi in January 1868 his army was fighting and losing, and he left it. He went aboard ship at Osaka and sailed for Edo, and the men in the field learned their commander had gone when he had already gone. Whatever the taisei hokan was meant to achieve ended there, ten weeks after the court accepted it.

Documented: the Shinto funeral. He asked to be buried in the Shinto manner rather than the Buddhist, which is why his grave in the Kan’ei-ji ground at Yanaka is a round earth mound like an imperial one and not a stone pagoda like the other shoguns’ at Zojo-ji and Kan’ei-ji. The usual explanation is gratitude to the Meiji emperor, who made him a prince in 1902.

Before you plan a visit to that grave, read this. The Tokugawa plot is a large enclosure of its own inside the Yanaka cemetery, and at least one Japanese source states plainly that it is not open to the public. Plenty of visitors describe having seen it from outside. I could not establish which is true, so do not build a trip around it — the cemetery office is 03-3821-4456 and is the right place to ask.

Retold everywhere: the shogun who handed power back. He did, and the phrase flatters him. Handing the office back was a manoeuvre, and a shrewd one: with no shogunate to abolish, the domains pressing for one had nothing to push against, and the Tokugawa — the largest landholder in Japan by far — would have been the heaviest presence in whatever council came next. It was an attempt to keep the family’s power by giving up its title. It failed in under three months.

Disputed, and worth knowing before you are shown the room: whether Yoshinobu was in the Ohiroma at all on the 13th. His own official biography says the councillors put the question and he received six men afterwards. The mannequins say otherwise.

Part 5 — The route, honestly

This is not one trip, and guides that string it together are selling you a week in a car.

Shizuoka is the one that works as a weekend. Hodai-in and Fugetsuro are both within ten minutes of Shizuoka Station, and they pair naturally with Sunpu Castle Park and Kunozan from the Ieyasu route — the same city, two Tokugawa at opposite ends of the line. Shizuoka to Atami is about forty minutes on the Tokaido line, and Atami to Tokyo is fifty on the Shinkansen.

Nijo belongs to a Kyoto trip. Mito belongs to a day out of Tokyo.

Check rooms in Atami for your dates

Before you go

Nijo Castle: last entry 16:00, gates close 17:00. Eight hundred yen for the grounds, thirteen hundred with the Ninomaru palace — buy the thirteen hundred, the rooms are the reason to come. The Honmaru palace is a further thousand and needs a web booking. Ninomaru shuts on Tuesdays in January, July, August and December, and over the new year.

Kodokan in Mito: four hundred and twenty yen, 9:00 to 17:00 from late February to the end of September and to 16:30 in winter, closed 29 to 31 December. Sources disagree on whether the winter closing time ends on 10 or 19 February, so in that fortnight assume the earlier one.

Hodai-in does not publish hours; it is a working temple and the hall is open to people who come to pray. Fugetsuro is open 10:00 to 21:00 as a restaurant, and the garden goes with a meal rather than a ticket.

Atami is the easiest base on this site to book in English and the easiest to get wrong — a resort town that boomed, emptied and is filling again, so the range runs from genuinely good ryokan to tired concrete. The three below are picked from what is bookable, with the reasons given.