Princess Yoshiko (Arisugawa-no-miya)
[吉子] spouse of Tokugawa Nariaki, the mother of last Shogun Yoshinobu.
Princess Yoshiko (吉子女王, 28 October 1804 – 27 January 1893) was the younger sister of Prince Tsunahito of the Arisugawa-no-miya cadet branch of the Imperial House of Japan. Yoshiko was married to Tokugawa Nariaki, and was mother to the 10th Lord Yoshiatsu, and the 15th and final Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu.
Personal history
Yoshiko, the twelfth and youngest daughter of Prince Taruhito of the Arisugawa-no-miya family, was born of the union of her father and the courtesan Ando Kiyoko. She was called Princess Tomi (登美宮, Tomi no miya) as a child. She later moved to Edo from Kyoto, where her husband renamed her Teihoin (貞芳院) in case she were to be widowed. Upon her death, she was given the posthumous name Madam Bummei (文明夫人, Bummei fujin). She died in 1893 at the age of 88 in Tokyo. Tokugawa Yoshiko rests at the Zuiryusan temple, the official Bodhi temple of the Mito clan in Ibaraki Prefecture.
In 1830, at the age of 27, Yoshiko was engaged to Nariaki, who was 37 but had not yet had his first wife as he had become the head of his clan just the year before. Princess Takako was said to have arranged the marriage, and Emperor Ninkō was recorded as having issued an approving comment on the political and educational pedigrees of the Mito branch of the Tokugawa clan.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Princess Yoshiko (Arisugawa-no-miya)” is [吉子] spouse of Tokugawa Nariaki, the mother of last Shogun Yoshinobu. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Princess, Yoshiko and Arisugawa-no-miya, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “[吉子] spouse of Tokugawa Nariaki, the mother of last Shogun Yoshinobu” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8944971. VIAF identifies the subject as 715145858254523022784. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1804, 1893 and 1830.
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This entry incorporates text from “Princess Yoshiko (Arisugawa-no-miya)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.