Losing Father and Cousin: The Crisis of the Ii House and the Succession

In May 1560, at Okehazama. Ii Naomori was in the camp of Imagawa Yoshimoto when Oda Nobunaga's surprise attack fell, and he was killed.

Two years later, in 1562, Ii Naochika (Naomori's cousin) — who had become the successor — was accused of treason by Imagawa Ujizane and killed.

In three years the Ii house lost two male-line heads.

Ii-no-ya is a small basin in the northern part of Tōtōmi Province, surrounded by mountains; the Ii house was the local lordly family of this land.

At the time, the Ii were positioned as retainers of the Imagawa, and their political standing within the Imagawa house was unstable.

The death of Ii Naochika endangered the very survival of the Ii house.

According to the Ii Family Records, the sole daughter of Ii Naomori had taken vows in her youth and entered a temple under the name Jirō-hōshi.

At the crisis of the Ii house, this Jirō-hōshi returned to the secular world, took the name Ii Naotora, and succeeded to the headship.

A rare case of a woman inheriting the headship of a warrior house — such is the traditional understanding.

But as noted above, the gender of this person is itself under reexamination in recent years.

Ii Toramatsu (Naochika's orphaned son), born in 1561, was placed under Naotora's protection after his father's death.

To avoid Imagawa pursuit, he was raised at a temple. In 1568, the Ii house broke from the Imagawa and entered the protection of Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Within this shift, the road opened for Toramatsu to take service with the Tokugawa.

The foundation for the restoration of the Ii house and, later, the 300,000-koku Hikone domain was built by the sequence of decisions in Ii-no-ya during this period.

The course of Naotora's succession lies between tradition and source. But that Ii Naomasa (this site's id 48) achieved Tokugawa service, and that the Ii house continued as an Edo-period fudai daimyō, is unshakable.

In Ii-no-ya, someone protected Toramatsu and chose the road of alliance with the Tokugawa.

Whether that 'someone' was the female Naotora or the male Ujitsune remains open to debate.