The Satake family’s lineage goes back to Emperor Seiwa. In 961, his grandson, Tsunemoto, was granted the family name of Minamoto (represented by a Chinese character that also reads “gen“). This is the origin of the Seiwa-Genji and the Satake family’s founder, Masayoshi Satake (1081–1147), was in the sixth generation down from Tsunemoto.
The Minamoto family gradually turned themselves into warriors and took hold of the Eastern part of Japan. In 1083, Yoshimitsu Minamoto (popularly called “Sinra-Saburo-Yoshimitsu”) joined the Gosannen War in the late eleventh century in present-day Yokote in Akita in support of his brother Yoshiie Minamoto. It should be noted that an ancestor of the Satake family made first contact with Akita hundreds of years before the foundation of the family as Satake.
A grandson of Yoshimitsu Minamoto, Masayoshi Satake, ruled the province of Hitachi and established a family with the new name of Satake in the twelfth century.
