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Abstract
In the forested mountains ninety miles north of Tokyo, elaborate processions venerating the deified founder of the Tokugawa government have been held at the sprawling shrine complex of Tōshōgū for over four centuries. My project situates the Tōshōgū shrines and their attendant faith as the central ideological undertaking of the early Tokugawa administration and explores how this initially exclusive politico-religious program was gradually co-opted by non-elites over the course of the early modern period. Drawing on illustrated narrative scrolls, domain histories, gazetteers, and hagiographies, this study examines the contradictions inherent in Tokugawa modes of power production and the spaces they created that enabled a proto-public sphere to emerge within the realm of festival.
This dissertation argues that the rapid spread of a network of Tōshōgū shrines and their festivals was driven by a desire to reproduce the elite culture of the mainline Tokugawa. The three Gosanke branch houses were among the first to establish satellite shrines and annual festivals, doing so to craft microcosms of authority that mirrored mainline precedent. Yet the very act of reproducing mainline elite culture in geographical and ideological peripheries generated unintended slippages. Over the 250 years following the first shogun’s death and deification, these branch-family festivals shifted from elite affairs to public spectacles in which townspeople played increasingly active roles. By the end of the Tokugawa period, the name Tōshōgū—by this time synonymous with the Tokugawa clan itself—appeared in commoner parodies, signaling a surprising co-option of symbols once closely guarded by the ruling house.