was a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese daimyo

Daimyo

is a generic term referring to the powerful territorial lords in pre-modern Japan who ruled most of the country from their vast, hereditary land holdings...

 of the early Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

 who ruled the Tatebayashi Domain

Tatebayashi Domain

The ' was a Japanese domain of the Edo period, located in Kōzuke Province .-List of lords:*Sakakibara clan #Yasumasa#Yasukatsu#Tadatsugu*Matsudaira clan...

. His court title was Tōtōmi no kami. Yasukatsu was the third son of Sakakibara Yasumasa

Sakakibara Yasumasa

was a Japanese daimyo of the late Sengoku period through early Edo period, who served the Tokugawa clan. As one of the Tokugawa family's foremost military commanders, he was considered one of its "Four Guardian Kings"...

, who was one of the four chief generals of Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu

 was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan , which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara  in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but...

. As Yasumasa's eldest son Tadamasa was given in adoption to the Osuga family, and the second son Tadanaga died young, Yaskatsu inherited his father's fief and became lord of Tatebayashi, which was rated at 100,000 koku

Koku

The is a Japanese unit of volume, equal to ten cubic shaku. In this definition, 3.5937 koku equal one cubic metre, i.e. 1 koku is approximately 278.3 litres. The koku was originally defined as a quantity of rice, historically defined as enough rice to feed one person for one year...

in size. He took part in the winter Siege of Osaka

Siege of Osaka

The was a series of battles undertaken by the Tokugawa shogunate against the Toyotomi clan, and ending in that clan's destruction. Divided into two stages , and lasting from 1614 to 1615, the siege put an end to the last major armed opposition to the shogunate's establishment...

, assisting the hard-pressed forces of Satake Yoshinobu

Satake Yoshinobu

was a Japanese daimyo of the Azuchi-Momoyama period through early Edo period. The eldest son of Satake Yoshishige, he was the first generation lord of the Kubota Domain...

. In the summer siege the following year, he was defeated in Sanada Yukimura

Sanada Yukimura

was a Japanese samurai, second son of the Sengoku period daimyo Sanada Masayuki . His proper name was Sanada Nobushige , named after Takeda Shingen's younger brother Takeda Nobushige, who was a brave and respected warrior. He and his father were known as being excellent military tacticians...

's counterattack. Soon after the siege, Yasukatsu died at 26 of a bad case of hemorrhoids. After Yasukatsu's death his son Tadatsugu succeeded him; Tadatsugu's only son Katsumasa became a hatamoto

Hatamoto

A was a samurai in the direct service of the Tokugawa shogunate of feudal Japan. While all three of the shogunates in Japanese history had official retainers, in the two preceding ones, they were referred to as gokenin. However, in the Edo period, hatamoto were the upper vassals of the Tokugawa...

.

Both Yasukatsu and his father Yasumasa are playable characters from the Eastern Army in the original Kessen

Kessen

is a PlayStation 2 launch title produced by Koei and published by Electronic Arts. This was the first DVD-ROM format game for the PS2. It was initially the only real-time wargame game available for the PlayStation 2....

.