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Updated: May 15, 2025
He allowed himself to fall completely under the sway of his immediate attendants, and, among these, Tanuma Okitsugu succeeded in monopolizing the evil opportunity thus offered. During nearly ten years the reforms effected by Yoshimune steadily ceased to be operative, and when Ieshige resigned in 1760, the country had fallen into many of the bad customs of the Genroku era.
These two men became thenceforth the central figures in an era of maladministration and corruption. So powerful and all-reaching was their influence that people were wont to say, "Even a bird on the wing could not escape the Tanuma."
THE misgovernment of Tanuma and his son was not the only calamity that befell the country during the closing years of the tenth shogun, Ieharu's, administration. The land was also visited by famine and pestilence of unparallelled dimensions. The evil period began in 1783 and lasted almost without intermission for four years.
Such administrative measures presented a vivid contrast with the corrupt oppression practised by the Tanuma family, and it is recorded that men and women kneeled on the road as Sadanobu passed and blessed him with tears.
Tanuma Okitsugu was wont to say that human life was not so precious as gold and silver; that by the liberality of a man's gifts his sincerity might truly be gauged, and that the best solace for the trouble of conducting State affairs was for their administrator to find his house always full of presents.
One of his first acts was to appoint Tanuma Okitsugu to be prime minister, bestowing on him a fief of fifty-seven thousand koku in the province of Totomi, and ordering him to construct a fortress there. At the same time Okitsugu's son, Okitomo, received the rank of Yamato no Kami and the office of junior minister.
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