She was named
Akechi Tama or Tamako at birth; Garasha, the name by which she is known in history, is based upon her Catholic
baptismal name, Gracia. She married
Hosokawa Tadaoki at the age of sixteen; the couple had five or six children. In the Sixth Month of 1582, her father
Akechi Mitsuhide betrayed and killed his lord,
Oda Nobunaga, making the teenage Tama a traitor's daughter. Not wishing to divorce her, Tadaoki sent her to the hamlet of Midono in the mountains of the Tango Peninsula (now in
Kyoto Prefecture), where she remained hidden until 1584, until
Toyotomi Hideyoshi requested that Tadaoki bring Tama to the Hosokawa mansion in
Osaka, where she remained in confinement. Tama's maid, Kiyohara Kayo, baptized Maria, was from a
Catholic family, and her husband repeated to her conversations with his Christian friend
Takayama Ukon. In the spring of 1587 Tama managed to secretly visit the Osaka church; a few months later, when she heard that Toyotomi Hideyoshi had issued a
proclamation against Christianity, she was determined to be baptized immediately. As she could not leave the house, she was baptized by her maid and received the Christian name "Gracia". She is said to have studied both Latin and Portuguese and to have read and become fascinated with
Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. In 1595, Tadaoki's life was in danger because of his friendship with
Toyotomi Hidetsugu, and he told Gracia that if he should die she must kill herself. When she wrote asking the priests about the plan, they informed her that suicide was a
grave sin. However, the danger passed. The death of Hideyoshi in 1598 left a power vacuum with two rival factions forming:
Tokugawa Ieyasu in the east and
Ishida Mitsunari in the west. When Ieyasu went to the east in 1600 leading a large army, including Tadaoki, his rival Ishida took over the impregnable
castle in Osaka, the city where the families of many of Hideyoshi's generals resided. Ishida devised a plan to take the family members hostage, thus forcing the rival generals either to ally with him or at least not to attack him. However, when Ishida attempted to take Gracia hostage, the family retainer
Ogasawara Shōsai killed her and then committed
seppuku after lighting the mansion on fire. The outrage over her death was so great that Ishida was forced to abandon his plans. Most Japanese accounts state that it was Gracia's idea to order Ogasawara to kill her. However, these accounts were written many decades after the actual death of Gracia. The original Jesuit account written shortly after her death instead states Tadaoki had commanded the servants of his household to kill Gracia if her honor were ever in danger. The servants had seen the attempted kidnapping as such, and acted on this order. A Catholic priest,
Gnecchi-Soldo Organtino, had Gracia's remains gathered from the Hosokawa mansion and buried them in a cemetery in
Sakai. Later, her remains were moved to Sōzenji, a temple in Osaka. Gracia also shares a grave with Tadaoki at
Kōtō-in, a sub-temple of
Daitoku-ji. Gracia is an ancestor of former prime minister
Morihiro Hosokawa. ==In historical fiction==