His father gave him up twice — once by sending him into captivity, and once by refusing to get him back.

Matsudaira Hirotada was not a powerful man. He controlled a piece of 三河国 (Mikawa no Kuni), Mikawa Province, in what is now Aichi Prefecture — a narrow strip of territory between the Imagawa clan to the east and the Oda to the west, both of them capable of swallowing him whole. His wife, 於大の方 (Odai-no-kata), had already been sent back to her family when the boy was barely two years old: her relatives had allied with the Oda, making her politically dangerous to keep. The child was born at 岡崎城 (Okazaki-jo) on the twenty-sixth day of the twelfth month of Tenbun 11 — December 26, 1542 by the traditional Japanese calendar. His name was Matsudaira Takechiyo.

When Takechiyo was perhaps four or five, Hirotada made his arrangement with the Imagawa: send the boy to 駿府 (Sunpu) as a 人質 (hitojichi) — a hostage, literally a "person-pledge" — and receive soldiers in return. The escort set out from 岡崎 (Okazaki). On the road, Oda Nobuhide's men intercepted the party and took the child.

Nobuhide sent a message to Hirotada: surrender the boy voluntarily and recognize Oda authority, or Takechiyo would be executed.

Hirotada refused. His reasoning — whether spoken in exactly the words later chronicles give him or not — was this: his only leverage was his credibility with the Imagawa. The moment he capitulated to Nobuhide's threat, every ally he had would know he was a man who could be moved by personal pressure. He would lose both child and domain. A hostage whose lord refused to break was still worth something alive; a hostage whose lord had capitulated was worth nothing.

The gamble held. Nobuhide kept the boy alive, held at 本証寺 (Honshoji) temple in Nagoya, in Oda territory, for approximately three years. The conditions are poorly documented, but not described as cruel.

In 1549, Hirotada died — illness, possibly poison, the sources disagree. Takechiyo was six or seven years old. 太原雪斎 (Taigen Sessai), the brilliant Zen monk who served as the Imagawa's chief strategist and diplomat, negotiated the child's transfer to 駿府 (Sunpu). The boy arrived in the Imagawa household as a fatherless child with no patron of his own.

He would stay eleven years.

The conditions were reasonable. He was raised alongside Imagawa sons, treated as a ward, given the education appropriate to a daimyo's heir. His intellectual mentor was Taigen Sessai himself — a man who combined the Zen tradition of careful reading with the Sengoku tradition of ruthless strategic thought. Takechiyo studied the Chinese classics: the Four Books and Five Classics, Sun Tzu's 兵法 (Heiho), the 六韜 (Rikuto, Six Military Strategies). He began field duty at fourteen. At twelve, 今川義元 (Imagawa Yoshimoto) himself presided over Takechiyo's 元服 (genpuku) ceremony — the samurai coming-of-age. The boy was renamed Matsudaira Jirosaburō Motonobu.

He also discovered falconry. The sport would stay with him for the rest of his life — patient, precise, demanding that the handler understand both the hawk's nature and the terrain below. He was reportedly still hawking in his seventies.

The Imagawa years ended without warning on an afternoon in 1560. At a mountain pass called 桶狭間 (Okehazama), Oda Nobunaga — the son of the man who had taken Takechiyo — launched a surprise charge against Imagawa Yoshimoto's enormous army during a violent rainstorm. Yoshimoto was killed. The Imagawa clan collapsed. Takechiyo, commanding Imagawa forces in the field, rode back to 岡崎城 (Okazaki-jō). The Imagawa troops had abandoned it. He walked through the gates of his birthplace, which he had not seen since infancy.

He was eighteen years old. He had been a 人質 (hitojichi) for approximately fourteen years — more than his entire living memory.

What followed was forty-three more years of calibrated patience. He allied with Nobunaga because Nobunaga was the strongest available power. He survived Nobunaga's assassination in 1582. He endured the dominance of 豊臣秀吉 (Toyotomi Hideyoshi), who had more wealth and soldiers and who humiliated him more than once. He waited. In 1600, the Battle of 関ヶ原 (Sekigahara) decided Japan's future. In 1603, the Emperor appointed Tokugawa Ieyasu 征夷大将軍 (Seii Taishogun) — Shogun. He was sixty years old.

He had outlived 織田信長 (Oda Nobunaga), dead 1582. 豊臣秀吉 (Toyotomi Hideyoshi), dead 1598. 武田信玄 (Takeda Shingen), dead 1573. 上杉謙信 (Uesugi Kenshin), dead 1578. Every rival of his generation was gone.

A saying attributed to him: 「人の一生は重荷を負うて遠き道を行くがごとし」 (Hito no issho wa omoni wo oute toki michi wo yuku ga gotoshi) — "Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy burden." It reads differently when you know where the journey began: on a road in Mikawa, with a child stolen from his escort while his father chose not to rescue him.

The 徳川幕府 (Tokugawa Bakufu) Ieyasu founded governed Japan for 265 years. Fifteen shoguns followed him. The Tokugawa peace shaped kabuki theater, 浮世絵 (ukiyo-e) woodblock prints, Confucian social hierarchy, and the transformation of the samurai class from warriors into bureaucrats. It traces back to a boy whose first lesson in power was that he had none — and that patience was the only weapon left to someone in that position.