Wedding Furnishings (used by Princess Chiyo, Wife of

A Bride of Two and a Half, and the Most Lavish Trousseau in Japan

On the twenty-first day of the ninth month of 1639, a procession left Edo Castle carrying a bride who had not yet turned three. Chiyohime, the eldest daughter of the third Tokugawa shogun Iemitsu, was two years and six months old when she was married to Tokugawa Mitsutomo, the future second lord of the Owari Tokugawa house in Nagoya. With her traveled a wedding trousseau so extravagant that nothing made before or since in Japan has matched it.

That trousseau survives almost intact. Seventy pieces, from a full-sized lacquered book cabinet down to individual combs and incense tools, are preserved at the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, where they are collectively designated a National Treasure under the formal name Konrei Chodorui, the Wedding Trousseau used by Chiyohime, consort of Tokugawa Mitsutomo. Most visitors know the set by a shorter and more poetic name: the Hatsune Trousseau, or Hatsune no Chodo.

The name comes from The Tale of Genji. Forty-seven of the seventy pieces draw their decoration from the novel's "Hatsune" chapter, in which Lady Akashi sends a poem to her young daughter on New Year's Day, asking the warbler to let her hear its first song of the year. Hatsune means exactly that: the first song.

Three Years of Work by the Shogunate's Finest Lacquer Studio

The man responsible for the set was Koami Nagashige (1599 to 1651), tenth head of the Koami family, the hereditary maki-e lacquer artists who served the shogunate. The Koami family's own records, the Koami-ke Densho, state that Nagashige mobilized his entire workshop and that completion took some three years. A wedding date fixed by shogunal decree left no room for delay, and the documents suggest the studio worked at full stretch to deliver on time.

This documentation matters as much as the craftsmanship. Premodern Japanese decorative art is usually anonymous. Here, the maker, the date, the patron, and the circumstances of production are all known from written sources, a rarity that figured directly in the National Treasure designation of 1996.

Look closely at any one box and the reason for those three years becomes apparent. The surfaces are built up in takamaki-e, raised designs of sprinkled gold and silver powder, then enriched with kirikane (minute cut squares of gold and silver foil applied one by one), kanagai (thin sheet-metal inlay), and beads of red coral imported at great cost. Across the principal pieces, the scattered characters of Lady Akashi's poem appear in a device called ashide, reed-script writing, with the words for pine and warbler omitted because those two motifs are painted as actual pine trees and actual birds. The decoration is, in effect, a puzzle that a literate seventeenth-century viewer could read.

A second group of ten pieces takes its theme from the following Genji chapter, "Kocho" (Butterflies), and shows a palace garden with pleasure boats on a pond, their prows carved as dragon and geki waterbird heads. Thirteen further items, including textiles and metalwork, complete the seventy.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The set was first designated an Important Cultural Property in 1953 and elevated to National Treasure status on June 27, 1996. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives three principal grounds.

First, technique. The Hatsune and Kocho pieces deploy nearly the full repertoire of Edo-period maki-e at its highest level, and they did so at the very beginning of that period, setting a benchmark for everything that followed.

Second, documentation, as described above: maker, date, and commission history all verifiable in period sources.

Third, completeness. This is the oldest wedding trousseau in Japan to survive as a coherent group. Daimyo brides of the era routinely received hundreds of objects; a register compiled for Kamehime, an adopted daughter of Iemitsu who married into the Maeda family of Kaga at almost the same time, lists more than three hundred categories of goods. Nearly all such sets were later dispersed, sold, or destroyed. Chiyohime's was kept together by the Owari Tokugawa house for close to four centuries, surviving the Meiji upheavals and the 1945 air raids on Nagoya. Museum curators have called it a National Treasure of remarkable fortune.

The count of seventy, incidentally, understates the true scale. A single comb box in the set contains forty combs, six decorated with arabesque maki-e and thirty-four with pine and plum designs. Counted piece by piece, the trousseau runs into the hundreds.

What to Look For

Start with the writing. On the lid of the Hatsune inkstone box, gold characters drift among the pines like mist. Finding and reading them, or simply recognizing that the landscape contains a poem, is the experience the original makers designed. No other surviving trousseau integrates text and image this thoroughly.

Then look at scale in both directions. The set includes three full display shelves (the zushi-dana, kuro-dana, and sho-dana arrangements) loaded with dozens of fitted boxes, and at the other extreme, items as small as a toothpick holder and as unexpected as a sword rack and a go board with its bowls, every one finished to the same standard. The point was never practicality. A toddler bride needed none of it. The trousseau was a statement of shogunal authority, made to be inventoried, displayed, and remembered.

Recent conservation has added a new layer of interest. X-ray CT scanning carried out during the past decade of restoration work, partly funded by the Sumitomo Foundation, has revealed the quality of the materials and the precision of the substructures hidden beneath the lacquer. Exhibition panels at the museum increasingly draw on these findings.

A practical note on viewing: because lacquer is sensitive to light and humidity, the museum normally shows only a small selection of the trousseau at any one time, rotating pieces through its permanent collection galleries. Full showings of all seventy pieces are rare events, held roughly once a decade; the most recent ran from April to June 2025 for the museum's ninetieth anniversary, and the previous one took place in 2015. If seeing particular pieces matters to you, check the museum's exhibition schedule before traveling.

Visiting the Tokugawa Art Museum

The Tokugawa Art Museum stands in the Tokugawaen district of eastern Nagoya, on the former site of an Owari Tokugawa residence. The collection of over ten thousand objects descends directly from the family's own holdings and includes, besides the Hatsune Trousseau, the celebrated twelfth-century illustrated scrolls of The Tale of Genji, also a National Treasure. The pairing is fitting: in one building you can see the oldest great visualization of the novel and the most sumptuous decorative tribute to it.

The museum generally opens from 10:00 to 17:00 with last entry at 16:30 and closes on Mondays (or the following day when Monday is a national holiday); confirm current hours and admission on the official website. From Nagoya Station, the Meguru sightseeing loop bus stops at the museum, or take a JR Chuo Line train to Ozone Station and walk about ten minutes.

Plan time for Tokugawaen itself, the adjacent Japanese garden with its pond, waterfalls, and seasonal peonies and irises. The Hosa Library next door holds the Owari family's books and manuscripts and mounts small exhibitions. The Cultural Path (Bunka no Michi) walking route connects the area to preserved Meiji- and Taisho-era residences, ending near Nagoya Castle, whose reconstructed Honmaru Palace gives a vivid sense of the gilded interiors Chiyohime would have inhabited.