Narrow Road To The Deep North 37

   
    ‘Once Lord Ieyasu gained nothing in a battle, but in a later 
     judgement it was said, ‘Ieyasu is a general of great courage. Of 
     his retainers who died in battle, not one of them died with his 
     back turned. They all died facing the enemy lines.’ Since a 
     warrior’s daily frame of mind is manifested even after death, it 
     is something that can bring shame to him.
       Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure- The Book of the Samurai, 
                                                               1716

What Nobunaga was to force and Hideyoshi was to persuasion, Ieyasu was to patience. Wait until it sings. It was timing that made him the most powerful man in Japan; just as much what he hadn’t done that set up a dynasty that would last for two and a half centuries.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in Okazaki Castle, on last day of January 1543. Some of his patience may have come from his eleven half-brothers and sisters, and some from his nine years of captivity as an Oda and then an Imagawa clan hostage.
In 1557, at the age of sixteen he married his first wife. The Imagawa kept her and released him, provided he agreed to fight against the Oda. He served at the Siege of Terabe and, later that year, successfully delivered supplies to a border fort in a bold night attack.
After Oda Nobunaga's surprise lethal assault on Yoshimoto Imagawa at the Battle of Okehazama, Ieyasu switched his allegiance, secretly because his wife and infant son, Nobuyasu, were still being held hostage.
Ieyasu openly broke with the Imagawa in 1561, after capturing the fortress of Kaminojo, and trading its ruler’s captured family to get his own back. Two years later he married Nobuyasu to Nobunaga's daughter Tokuhime.
For the next few years Ieyasu reformed Mikawa, pacified the bellicose Monto group of monks at the Battle of Azukizaka (and pulled down their temples). He gained invaluable tactical skill with gunpowder, and strengthened key vassals like Hattori Hanzō and Honda Tadakatsu and the three other Four Heavenly Kings of Tokugawa, by awarding them land and castles.