Tokugawa clan

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The Tokugawa clan crest

The Tokugawa clan (徳川氏, Tokugawa-shi^?) was a powerful daimyo family of Japan. Beginning with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the family founders rose to power at the end of the Sengoku period, and to the end of the Edo period they ruled Japan as shoguns. All in all, there were fifteen Tokugawa shoguns. Their dominance was so strong that some history books use the term "Tokugawa era" instead of "Edo period".

In addition, the heads of the gosanke (the three branches with fiefs in Owari, Kishū, and Mito) bore the Tokugawa surname. Additional branches became the gosankyō: the Tayasu, Hitotsubashi, and Shimizu Tokugawa clans. Many daimyo with the Matsudaira surname were descended from the Tokugawa. Examples include the Matsudaira of Fukui and Aizu. Members of the Tokugawa clan intermarried with prominent daimyo and the Imperial family.

Their family shrine is the Tōshō-gū in Nikkō.

Tokugawa's clan crest, the "triple hollyhock", has been a readily recognized icon in Japan, symbolizing in equal parts the Tokugawa clan and the last shogunate. In jidaigeki, the crest is often shown to locate the story in the Edo period. And in works set in during the Meiji restoration movement, the crest is used to show the bearer's allegeance to the shogunate -- as opposed to the royalists, who bore the Imperial throne's chrysanthemum crest.