Summary of the Sex Life of Tokugawa Iemitsu 徳川家光 (1604-1651), the Third Shōgun

According to the Tokugawa jikki, Iemitsu’s first sexual encounter as a teenager was with another lad, Sakabe Goemon. We do not know the details, but the encounter apparently angered Iemitsu, who killed Sakabe. As a teenager, Iemitsu also liked to cross dress and dance in woman’s attire and makeup. He showed no interest in women as a teenager, and the standard explanation is that his mother instilled a dislike of women in the young Iemitsu. A more reasonable explanation, however, would start with the widespread acceptance of nanshoku (male-male sexual encounters) in the warrior culture, a prominent part of the environment in which Iemitsu grew up.

Nobody seems to have criticized Iemitsu's sexual tastes, but a potential problem gradually developed: lack of an heir. At age 22, Iemitsu took a wife into his quarters, much to the relief of his immediate family. But he continued to pursue nanshoku vigorously and appears to have had little or no sexual interest in his wife. He soon sent her to live in a separate palace. Iemitsu continued to indulge in nanshoku after becoming shōgun in 1623, taking a fond interest in his page boys. As the years passed, several of these former page boys advanced rapidly in rank and stature in Iemitsu's administration. The journal of the head of the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, who traveled periodically to Edo, contains the following entry about Iemitsu's pages. Of course, it reveals the strong Christian/European antipathy toward homosexuality that prevailed in the seventeenth century--a view foreign to nearly all Japanese at the time:

On his return, the interpreter Hachizaemon (who often talks very freely) said that . . . (maybe he was not ashamed for his compatriots' predilection for this vice or possibly he despised them for it, I don't know) this was very common among the great lords, who usually care more for such bugger boys than for their women, for which reason it often happens that they have few offspring. And when the shameful objects [of such desires] reach manhood (he said) they usually are raised above all other faithful retainers and loved by their lords. . . . The councilor Hotta Kaga no kami . . . . and also Inoue Chikugo and many others (who all surrendered their bodies to the former shogun) were promoted for these same reasons to high positions. (Quoted in Reinier H. Hesselink, Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in 17th-Century Japanese Diplomacy [Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002], pp. 56-57.)

After his father Hidetada died, Iemitsu’s mother scolded him for his single-minded dalliance with the page boys, saying the Tokugawa bloodline would die out as a result. Iemitsu vowed to make an effort to have sex with women, and his mother selected a suitable mistress for him. His efforts first produced a daughter, and then eventually a son when Iemitsu was 34.

This mistress seems to have opened Iemitsu's eyes to the possible pleasures of sex with women, and the shōgun soon became interested in a 16-year-old Buddhist nun from a family of the imperial court aristocracy. This nun was laicized and came to live in the shōgunal palace. She and Iemitsu apparently had a vigorous sex life but produced no children. One theory is that Iemitsu practiced contraception because he did not want to produce a shōgun who was related by blood to the court aristocracy. He also had several other mistresses, one of whom bore the child who became the fourth shōgun and another the child who became the fifth.

(Main source: Many details above come from Nakae Katsumi 中江克己, O-Edo sei jijo: seisekatsu o tanoshimu Edo no hitobito『大江戸性事情-性生活を楽しむ江戸の人々』, Kosaidō shuppan, 廣済堂出版, 1999, pp. 182-184.)