One haunting image that lingers in the mind after seeing the exhibition "Legacy of the Tokugawa — The Glories and Treasures of the Last Samurai Dynasty" at the Tokyo National Museum is a carved-wood statue of Ieyasu (1543-1616), the first of the Tokugawa shoguns, now the deity of the Shiba Tosho-gu shrine next to Tokyo Tower.

As Japanese artisans had long mastered the art of portrait sculpture, we can assume that it is true to life. The warlord is seated in a full court costume tinted with sober colors, looking straight ahead with the cool, penetrating expression of a man you most definitely would not want to cross.

Quite a few did during his lifetime, and they all met their ultimate fate — either in war, at the hands of executioners or by ritual seppuku on his orders. Their list is long, and it was by vanquishing them all that Ieyasu achieved total control over a country that had endured centuries of internecine wars. The statue was carved in 1601 and, according to one of his descendants, served as an alter-ego with which Ieyasu argued and debated on strategy and policy for the last decade and a half of his life — it even accompanied him into the field of battle.