Utsunomiya Domain

Utsunomiya Domain (宇都宮藩, Utsunomiya-han^?) was a feudal domain under the Tokugawa shogunate of Edo period Japan, located in Shimotsuke Province (modern-day ), Japan. It was centered on Utsunomiya Castle in what is now part of the city of . Utsunomiya was ruled by numerous daimyo clans during its history.

Utsunomiya has been ruled by the Utsunomiya clan, one of the eight major samurai bands of the northern Kantō region and a cadet branch of the Fujiwara clan since the Kamakura period. For assisting Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590 Battle of Odawara, Utsunomiya Kunitsuna had been confirmed as a 187,613 koku daimyo. However, in 1597 the Utsunomiya were stripped of their holdings when Hideyoshi’s spies revealed that their actual income was more than double what he had authorized. The area then briefly came under the Gamo clan of Aizu, but after the Battle of Sekigahara and the creation of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu regarded the location as strategically important due to its position at the junction of the Ōshū Kaidō and the Nikkō Kaidō.