Marriage Pattern of the Hino (Kuge Family)
This section examines the marriage pattern of court nobles, and as a source of material, it will introduce the case of the Hino, which continued to produce seishitsu (legal wives) of shoguns during the Muromachi period.
Kamakura period
- Marriage with the Fujiwara -
1185~1333
According to the genealogy of Hino in the Kamakura period, their daughters were all married to the Fujiwara, and most of these men had risen to the high positions in the daijōkan (Department of state), including of chūnagon (medium-ranked councillor), dainagon (chief councillor of state), and udaijin (minister of the right). On the other hand, the women who married into the Hino were from the Takashina, Fujiwara, Minamoto, Taira, and Kamo, indicating that they did not marry to a specific family, but to a wide range of others.[1]
Muromachi period
- Marriage with the Fujiwara and the Shogunal house -
1336~1466
In the Muromachi period, the majority of their daughters married into the Fujiwara family and the shogunal house. It can be said that the marriages of their daughters were almost limited to the Fujiwara and shogun families, and what is particularly characteristic of the Hino in the Muromachi period is their daughters had become seishitsu of shogun for generations.[2]The fact that Yoshimitsu's wife Yasuko (Kitayama-in), Yoshimochi's wife Nariko, Yoshitsuko's wife Eiko, Yoshitsuko's sister Shigeko (Kanchi-in), Tomiko, Yoshimasa's wife, Yoshimi's wife (Myōon-in), Yoshinori's wife (Shōun-in), and Yoshizumi's wife (Anyō-in) were all daughters of the Hino shows clearly that the Hino had a dominance over seishitsu of shogun.[3]
Sengoku period
- Marriage mainly with the kuge and priest families,
rarely with the Fujiwara, the Shogunal house -
1466~1578
The circumstances of the Hino's marriages during Sengoku period were basically unchanged from the previous generation in that their daughters dominantly became seishitsu of shoguns, but their marriage sphere was expanding, with their partners not limited to the Fujiwara. As for marriages to warrior families, in the Kamakura period, sons of the Hino married daughters of the Taira or Minamoto family, but except for the daughter of Hino Uchimitsu who became a concubine of the warlord Yusa Naganori, there is no evidence of marriages between their daughters and warrior families.[4]This means that after the Muromachi period, except for the shogun family, almost none of their daughters were married to warrior families. In other words, the marriage with the shogun family was undertaken for the purpose of strengthening the political position of the Hino, and was a special measure with political intentions.[5] The general trend of kugesociety was to maintain marital relationships between kuge or between kuge and priest families from the Muromachi period onward, and it is believed that this trend continued until the Sengoku period.[6]
[1] Tabata 2016, p. 38.
[2] Tabata 2016, p. 39.
[3] Tabata 2016, p. 41
[4] Tabata 2016, p. 42.
[5] Tabata 2018, p. 209.
[6] Kurushima 2004, p. 234.
[7] Tabata 1971, p. 69.
[8] Tabata 2016, p. 45.
[9] Tabata 2018, p. 211.
[10] Tabata 2016, p. 41.
[11] Kurushima 2004, p. 232.