- Born: 1603
- Died: 1661
- Sons: Matsudaira Yorishige (1622-1695), Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628-1670)
- Titles: Saemon no kami
- Japanese: 徳川頼房 (Tokugawa Yorifusa)
Tokugawa Yorifusa was the eleventh son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and was the first head of the Mito Tokugawa clan, one of the gosanke.
His mother was Oman no Kata. He was given a 100,000 koku fief at Shimotzuma in Hitachi province as a child (1603), and in 1621 was transferred to Mito han, worth 350,000 koku. As a young man he was tutored by Nakayama Bizen no kami Nobuyoshi (1576-1642), a member of a former Hôjô retainer family. Yorifusa is sometimes said to have been considered the most clever of Ieyasu's last three sons, and a number of anecdotes involving the three of them and Ieyasu survive. Yorifusa's Mito domain line became the third of the gosanke, a lineage which two centuries later provided the 15th and final Tokugawa shôgun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu.
References
- Initial text from Sengoku Biographical Dictionary (Samurai-Archives.com) FWSeal & CEWest, 2005