The Imjin War (4 page)

The Battle of Yamazaki was a watershed. It marked the passing of the reins of power from Oda Nobunaga to Hideyoshi, who would then go on to drive
Japan so very much farther. It would change the course of the history of that country and in turn affect all of East Asia. In the centuries to come a new word recognizing the seminal influence of those two hours in 1582 would be added to the modern Japanese lexicon:
tennozan
, a decisive victory, military or political, that settles an important issue once and for all.

While impeccably loyal to Nobunaga during his master’s lifetime, Hideyoshi always remained his own man. He was never as eager as Nobunaga to throw his soldiers into battle if an easier victory could be had in some other way—through guile, through patience, through appeasement. It was a difference that would become more apparent following Nobunaga’s violent demise. After consolidating his hold on the former Oda domain in 1583, Hideyoshi cast aside Nobunaga’s strat
egy of national unification through annihilation, of crushing rivals one by one and dividing up their land among his own loyal retainers. He was willing to forget past rivalries and leave daimyo in place as long as they recognized his overriding authority. As he wrote to Date Masamune prior to that daimyo’s capitulation, “I do not enquire closely into the past of those who surrender to me. That is the law of heaven and I follow the same rule.”
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It was a fundamental change that would greatly shorten the unification process. Rival daimyo now had a choice. They could fight Hideyoshi’s increasingly formidable armies and risk losing everything, including their lives. Or they could swear allegiance to him and in exchange keep most if not all of their lands and their positions as regional daimyo. There were other obligations, of course. Taxes had to be paid. Surveys had to be conducted to determine the exact value of fiefs in terms of the number of koku of rice they could annually produce.
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Troops had to be contributed to the ongoing unifica
tion campaign. Family members had to be sent as hostages to Kyoto as an added assurance of loyalty, a common practice during this period. But these were not onerous burdens, certainly not when compared with the financial and human cost of continued war. Nor were they extracted without compensation; Hideyoshi was a generous hegemon. Daimyo joining him in his ongoing campaign of national unification were rewarded for their service with bigger fiefdoms, bigger incomes, and even occasional gifts of gold and silver and costly presents.

Hideyoshi, then, was promising the daimyo of
Japan security, stability, peace, and wealth, and all at the relatively modest price of acknowledging him as the nation’s ultimate lord and master. For many it was an offer they could not refuse. Certainly not every daimyo bowed before Hideyoshi without a fight. But those who did resist did not hold out for long or with nearly the ferocity that Nobunaga would have encountered, for the attractions of capitulation were now so much greater.

The year 1584 saw Hideyoshi in a standoff with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the short, pudgy, wily daimyo of Mikawa and
Totomi Provinces to the east of Kyoto. They engaged in two limited engagements early that year, but there seems to have been a feeling of mutual respect between the two men, for neither would launch a full-scale assault against the other. Instead they waited. Eventually the pragmatic Tokugawa gave in to the clearly more powerful Hideyoshi. He swore allegiance to him in 1586 and was allowed in return to keep all of his holdings. To seal the alliance, Ieyasu gave Hideyoshi his second son for adoption, and Hideyoshi gave Ieyasu his mother as a hostage and his half-sister in marriage. (She was already married but Hideyoshi had her divorced.)

Chosokabe Motochika proved a more stubborn foe. He had recently made himself lord of all four provinces on Shikoku, the smallest of the three main islands comprising the Japanese archipelago (after Kyushu and Honshu;
Hokkaido would not enter the Japanese polity for another three hundred years). As was becoming his practice, Hideyoshi sent a letter to Shikoku calling for its submission, but Chosokabe treated it with contempt. Hideyoshi therefore prepared to invade. With his step-brother Hidenaga and nephew Hidetsugu leading the way, Hideyoshi’s growing army of 150,000 men crossed the Inland Sea in 1585 and bulldozed the stubborn daimyo into submission within a month. Chosokabe wisely chose to surrender before his situation became completely hopeless and was allowed a fief of one province as a reward. The rest of the island Hideyoshi divided among his followers. He was now greater than his predecessor Oda Nobunaga, possessing fully one-half of Japan—and the richest and most populous half at that.

Next it was
Kyushu’s turn. Shimazu Yoshihisa was the dominant lord here. He possessed most of the territory on the island, and he had a formidable army and plenty of muskets manufactured in Kyushu’s own burgeoning arms-production centers. He consequently saw no reason to answer a peremptory call to surrender from an upstart daimyo on far-away Honshu. The Shimazu family, after all, had been a power on Kyushu for fourteen generations, while this Hideyoshi by all accounts was nothing more than a peasant. Hideyoshi responded with unprecedented force. Hidenaga led the way at the beginning of 1587 with an advance army of sixty thousand. Within two weeks two more generals arrived, bringing the number to ninety thousand. Then Hideyoshi himself landed with his main army, swelling the total force facing the Shimazu to an astounding quarter million men. Shimazu Yoshihisa surrendered four months later, shaving his head and adopting a monk’s name to show that the fight had left him. Like Chosokabe on Shikoku, he chose to sue for peace rather than fight to the end and was duly rewarded with territory on the southern end of the island valued at half a million koku.

The provinces of eastern
Honshu were the next to fall to Hideyoshi. The major campaign here was against Hojo Ujimasa, who held nine provinces centering on the present-day city of Tokyo, then a fishing village known as Edo. Once again the might of Hideyoshi’s new Japan was mobilized to bring this recalcitrant daimyo to heel. The onslaught quickly drove Hojo into siege in his castle at Odawara, a formidable structure of wide moats and thick stone ramparts and soaring keeps. Hideyoshi did not need to employ any labor-intensive siege-breaking strategies this time; no earthen dikes and diverted rivers were required now. He simply encircled the castle with his own line of moats and walls—placing the enemy “in a birdcage” as Hideyoshi called it
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—and then settled his army down to wait in as much comfort as he could arrange. Merchants were invited to the camp, concubines were sent for, entertainers were brought in, buskers performed, tea ceremonies were held, and on the whole boredom and discontent were kept successfully at bay. The castle fell after four months, in September of 1590. The northern hinterland provinces of Dewa and Mutsu were easily subdued the following year, and with that the unification of
Japan was complete.

Unlike Chosokabe and Shimazu on the islands of Shikoku and
Kyushu to the south, Hojo Ujimasa held out too long against Hideyoshi to merit any sort of clemency or concession. He was ordered to kill himself upon the fall of Odawara Castle. Eight of his nine provinces were given to Tokugawa Ieyasu as a reward for his help in the campaign. This greatly increased the value of Tokugawa’s fiefdom, making him the richest of Hideyoshi’s vassals. It also brought him more firmly under control, removing him from his traditional base in Mikawa and Totomi, where he commanded deep loyalties. This was a strategy Hideyoshi had come to rely upon heavily and one that he would use again and again in the years to come. By shifting his vassals from one fiefdom to another, he severed any bonds they had forged with the local population, particularly their ties with their own circle of vassals. By moving them to richer fiefdoms, he ensured that they went willingly. In this way Hideyoshi himself remained the only constant before the eyes of the Japanese people, the only target for their undivided loyalty.

 
Throughout his rise to power Hideyoshi made great efforts to cast off his peasant origins and acquire higher social status. His first and most pressing task had been to acquire a suitable family name to add to the single one he had been allotted at birth. He started in the 1560s by borrowing the surname Kinoshita, “Under the Shade of the Tree,” from his wife’s side of the family. In 1573 he discarded this in favor of Hashiba, a combination of syllables from the names of two admired lieutenants in Nobunaga’s service. After succeeding Nobunaga in 1582, he looked about for something more regal, and eventually laid claim to the exalted Fujiwara name by being formally adopted by one of his socially eminent vassals. Finally, with national hegemony in his grasp, even this was not enough. He needed a new surname of his own, one to legitimate his house and his heirs for what he hoped would be decades of unchallenged family rule. He became Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi “The Bountiful Minister.”

Hideyoshi also needed a title. He initially entertained the thought of becoming shogun, and applied to the former shogun Yoshiaki in 1585 to adopt him so that he could claim this appellation. Yoshiaki refused, stating that Hideyoshi’s lowly birth disqualified him from such a posi
tion. Yoshiaki was then residing under the protection of the Mori clan on the island of Kyushu, which had not yet been conquered, so there was little Hideyoshi could do about the rebuff. Instead he settled for
kampaku
, “imperial regent,” a formerly lofty court position that had lost much of its importance over the preceding three centuries. He had the emperor remove the existing kampaku from office and assumed the role himself in 1585. Hideyoshi retained the title for six years, then passed it on to his nephew and just-named heir, Hidetsugu, in January of 1592. After that, and until his death, he was known as
taiko
, “retired imperial regent.”

As Hideyoshi strove to acquire an impressive family name and lofty title, he also worked hard to develop the refined tastes of the upper class. From his lord Oda Nobunaga he acquired a taste for the tea cere
mony. He would in time become a skilled practitioner of the art, with an unsurpassed collection of fine serving bowls and utensils and two portable tearooms that he carried with him in his travels around the country. He became reasonably adept at composing poems in
renga
, “linked verse,” sessions, a popular leisure-time activity in which participants improvised short poems in turn, responding to or continuing the thought in the previous verse until one hundred or more “links” had been created. Hideyoshi also became involved in noh theater, first as a benefactor and later as the star in specially commissioned plays dramatizing his many exploits, for example
The Conquest of Akechi
and
The Conquest of Hojo
.
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By 1591, then, Hideyoshi, son of the peasant Yaemon from the
village of Nakamura, was the supreme ruler of all Japan. His word was law from the balmy southern tip of Kyushu to Honshu’s snowy northern forests, from the lowest beggar to Emperor Go-Yozei himself. He had become progenitor of the powerful and illustrious house of Toyotomi, a noh artist, a dab hand at renga, and something of a national patriarch for the art of tea. It was, in short, the most astonishing political and social rise in the nation’s history, the ultimate expression of gekokuji.

And yet it was not enough. Hideyoshi wanted more. From as early as 1585 he began to express a desire to conquer
China after he had finished unifying Japan. In a letter to one of his vassal daimyo in the ninth month of that year he stated, “I am going to not only unify Japan but also enter Ming China.”
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In 1586 the Jesuit priest Luis Frois recorded a conversation held at Osaka Castle in which Hideyoshi stated “that he had reached the point of subjugating all Japan...and, this done, [he would] entrust [the affairs of the country] to his brother Minodono [Hidenaga], while he himself should pass to the conquest of Korea and China.”
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In the following year, when embarking on his Kyushu campaign, Hideyoshi spoke of “slashing his way” into
Korea, China, and even India beyond after he had all of Japan securely in his grasp.
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In a letter to his wife O-Ne, written soon after the invasion of Kyushu, he wrote, “By fast ships I have dispatched [orders] to Korea to serve the throne of Japan. Should [Korea] fail to serve [our throne], I have dispatched [the message] that I will punish [that country] next year. Even China will enter my grip; I will command it during my lifetime.”
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In general the reasons troops are raised are five: to contend for fame; to contend for profit; from accumulated hatreds; from internal disorder; and from famine.
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Wu Tzu Ping Fa
(Master Wu’s Art of War)

4th century B.C.

Why was Toyotomi Hideyoshi intent on conquering
Asia—or more to the point, most of the world as it was known to him? The desire to prevent internal disorder was likely one of his motives: he needed continued conquest to maintain and strengthen his control over Japan.

By 1591 Hideyoshi’s campaign of national unification had pacified the country in three ways. First, it had brought all the formerly feuding daimyo under his control, by force if necessary. Second, it had engaged the entire country in one national goal, that of reunification. Recently subdued daimyo were in fact often put to work contributing to this very unification campaign that had just subdued them, marshaling the people and resources in their disparate domains to serve Hideyoshi’s purpose rather than their own. Third, it had kept Hideyoshi’s vassals, old and new alike, content and obedient with the promise of larger fiefs obtained through new conquests.