Talk:Date clan

18th century clan

Timon Screech mentions these two in a minor note:

• Date Muneyoshi (d.1751), daimyo
• Date Shigemura, daimyo successor to Muneyoshi

I noticed these names when I was looking at what Screech had to say about Hayashi Shihei (1738-1793). Shihei was a Sendai samurai who visited Nagasaki in 1777 and 1782. Shihei was also the brother of a concubine of Date Muneyoshi (d. 1751), the former daimyo whose successor was Date Shigemura in this time frame.<ref.>Screech, Timon. (2006). Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779-1822, p. 23.</ref> This passing reference is a bit too tenuous, but there you have it -- a snippet. --Ooperhoofd 08:41, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

References

Side branches

This exchange was copied from User talk:Tadakuni#Date Muneyoshi or Tamura Muneyoshi.

Tadakuni -- I have an difficult-to-resolve question about one minor part of the Date clan article. I wonder if a less specific, vaguer word would be better in the "Adopted members" section? Unfortunately, I have no suggestions to offer; and worse, this aspect of Japanese clan practices is inevitably difficult to parse. For whatever it's worth, I've put 2+2 together in this way -- and, as you can see, the sum is a bit foggy:

• "This senior branch of the Date produced a non-standard offshoot. Date Tadamune (1599-1658), a son of Masamune, produced more than one son. Tadamune's second son, Muneyoshi, revived the name of Tamura, an ancient Mutsu family name which had been relinquished by Masamune. Date Muneyoshi or Tamura Muneyoshi (1637-1678) settled himself at Ichinoseki domain (30,000 koku) in Mutsu province, where his descendants resided up through 1868. The head of this clan line was ennobled as an hereditary 'Viscount' in the Meiji period."

On the other hand, there may be no better term than the word "adopted"; and in that case, the short paragraph I've written needs to be modified. What I've added is verifiable, but this first draft text could still be a bit off.

What about incorporating the term "side branch"? This term is used in reference to Ichinoseki in Goodman's Japan and the Dutch. What do you think? -- Tenmei (talk) 15:34, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Tenmei-- I think that it might just belong in the "clan members" section, since Muneyoshi was born into the Date clan and adopted out (as opposed to vice-versa). Also, I think Tamura Muneyoshi is more suitable, since the Tamura of Ichinoseki were independent daimyo-- even though they adopted in and out from the Sendai-Date over the course of the Edo period. Also, I've heard "collateral branch" or "cadet branch" frequently used to describe relations like that of the Tamura to the main Date-- kind of like, say, the Aizu-Matsudaira to the Tokugawa, or the Sadowara-Shimazu to the Satsuma-Shimazu. -Tadakuni (talk) 15:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh wait, unless I'm misunderstanding the connotation of "adopted"...sorry. -Tadakuni (talk) 15:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

What about incorporating the term "side branch"? This term is used in reference to Ichinoseki in Goodman's Japan and the Dutch; and Goodman may have seen that John Whitney Hall used this term in a 1952 paper. --Tenmei (talk) 15:43, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Good point, certainly would sound better than "collateral," which in an age of cluster bombs may sound too awkward. Yeah, I'll go with "side branch." -Tadakuni (talk) 15:47, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

When Taira no Tokuko was adopted by Emperor Go-Shirakawa, she became the daughter of the Imperial family and she would have been, in theory, no longer the daughter of a very powerful subject of the emperor. In this case, wasn't Muneyoshi preserving a name from extinction or disuse? No ties with the Date senior branch of the clan were severed, as in the legal-fiction by which the one-time second daughter of Taira no Kiyomori was considered to have a quite different lineage as Kenreimon-in, daughter of an emperor, wife of an emperor and mother of an emperor?

For me, "adoption" is a difficult term to grasp in the pre-modern Japanese sense of the word.--Tenmei (talk) 15:58, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to copy this exchange to Talk:Date clan#Side branches. Maybe it will serve as a kind of "heads-up" for some other editor who knows something which will improve this small section of the Date clan article. --Tenmei (talk) 16:30, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

References