Post-Sekigahara Withdrawal: Ginchiyo's Last Three Years

On October 21, 1600, at Sekigahara. Tachibana Muneshige remained in Ōsaka as part of the Western Army, and after the Eastern victory was ordered stripped of holdings by Tokugawa Ieyasu.

The 130,000 koku of Yanagawa was confiscated, and Muneshige became a man in flight.

At the time, Ginchiyo was thirty-two.

Ginchiyo took a course separate from Muneshige and withdrew to Haraka in Higo Province (the modern Tamana District, Kumamoto Prefecture).

Haraka lay within Katō Kiyomasa's holdings, and Kiyomasa is said to have permitted her withdrawal out of respect for her deceased father Dōsetsu.

Muneshige, after Sekigahara, passed through Kyoto and Ōsaka and eventually sought shelter with Katō Kiyomasa.

Ginchiyo died at Haraka in October 1602 (Keichō 7). She was thirty-four. The cause is transmitted as illness.

Ryōsei-ji in Yanagawa City, Fukuoka Prefecture — built after Muneshige later achieved the Yanagawa restoration and moved her remains — still holds her grave today.

From 1603 onward, Muneshige was pardoned by the Tokugawa and summoned to Edo, and in 1620 was restored to his former holdings, the Yanagawa domain of 109,000 koku.

By that time, Ginchiyo was already gone from this world. Muneshige did not take a replacement principal wife for the rest of his life, and continued to honor Ginchiyo as the origin of the Tachibana restoration.

The relationship between Ginchiyo and Muneshige was a particular solution to the spousal relations of the warrior class of the late Sengoku.

The post-Sekigahara separation can also be read as the result of her carrying through her independence as the headship inheritor.

At Ryōsei-ji in Yanagawa City her grave is still kept, positioned as the origin of the Tachibana restoration.