The Toyotomi Regime

A man with a dozen names

formationDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

The man who would eventually rule Japan more completely than any figure since Yoritomo began life without even a settled name. His mother, believing she had conceived by the sun itself, called him Hiyoshi - "good sun." Others called him Ko-chiku, "small boy," and later Saru-matsu, "monkey-pine" - a nickname that would follow him, transformed into open insult, for the rest of his career. He enlisted as a common soldier under yet another assumed name, and only built the name history would remember him by, Hashiba, as an adult general, joining two syllables borrowed from two of his own subordinate commanders.

Kōdai-ji, Kyoto · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kanō Mitsunobu · Public domain

Nobunaga's death answered within days

Hideyoshi was already one of Nobunaga's most capable generals, fighting Mōri's forces in the west, when news reached him that his own lord had been murdered by a treacherous captain, Akechi, in 1582. Rather than continue his western campaign, Hideyoshi made rapid terms with Mōri, marched his army back to Kyoto, and destroyed Akechi within days - so quickly that a native proverb still records the usurper's reign in three words: Akechi ruled three days.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A field of rivals, and one who moved faster than the rest

Nobunaga's death had left his own territory divided among sons, generals and rival claimants, none of whom could immediately settle who would inherit his unfinished project of unification. Hideyoshi, having already avenged his lord in the most visible and popular way possible, held every advantage in the scramble that followed. When Nobunaga's third son and his chief general, Shibata, tried to resist Hideyoshi's own rising authority, Hideyoshi marched into Mino, defeated them, and pursued Shibata into Echizen, where the defeated general burned his own castle around himself, his family, and his retainers rather than surrender. The mocking nickname "monkey" that had followed Hideyoshi since childhood would soon apply, with equal derision, to a man sitting in an office no one of his birth had ever been permitted to hold.

A crowned monkey

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

In 1586, Hideyoshi attained the rank of Kuambaku - imperial regent, the highest civil office a subject of Japan could hold. It was an office that, for centuries, no one outside the Fujiwara family had ever filled. His enemies, unable to challenge the appointment itself, mocked it instead, calling him Saru Kuanja - crowned monkey - reviving, in contempt, the same nickname that had followed him since a childhood no one had expected to end anywhere near the imperial court.

A name granted rather than inherited

Because Hideyoshi held no family name that carried any weight at court, the emperor granted him one by patent: Toyotomi, the name by which he and his descendants would be known in history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi - soldier, general, regent - now governed a country whose highest civilian rank he held entirely on the strength of ability no inherited title could have supplied.

Mitsui Bunko, Tokyo · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

Retirement that changed nothing but the title

In 1591 Hideyoshi resigned the regency to his own son and took instead the title of taikō - a style properly meaning any regent's father, but applied so consistently to Hideyoshi alone that "the taikō," used without further qualification, meant him and no one else in Japanese or foreign accounts of the period. The resignation changed his formal rank without loosening his actual grip on the country in the slightest; Hideyoshi remained, in substance, the same ruler under a different name, exactly as adaptable to circumstance as every earlier alias he had answered to.

A soldier's banner grown into an empire's

Hideyoshi's own battle standard told the story of his rise in a single image: a single gourd at his first campaign, with another gourd added after every subsequent victory, until the cluster became an imposing sheaf carried aloft, in gilded replica, at the head of his marching columns. Wherever that banner moved, contemporaries said, victory followed it - a fitting emblem for a man who had built, gourd by gourd and name by name, an authority no inherited claim could ever have assembled as quickly.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

Iron for a temple

peakDrafted from Yamagata, A History of Japan During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542-1651) (1903)

Hideyoshi's most lasting achievements were not fought for. Between 1586 and 1596 his Minister of Agriculture, Nagatsuka Masaiye, carried out a survey of the whole empire's land - the measure every later koku assessment of a daimyo's fief, and every later Tokugawa tax register, would be built on. It gave the regime, for the first time since the Ōnin War had broken the old provincial administration, an actual figure for what the country's farmland was worth and who held it.

Hideyoshi and Kiyomasa Memorial Museum, Nagoya · Yamagata, A History of Japan During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542-1651) (1903) · KKPCW · CC BY-SA 4.0

A disarmament dressed as an offering

The companion measure was announced as an act of piety. Around 1587 or 1588 Hideyoshi ordered every farmer, mechanic and commoner in the country to surrender his sword and any other weapon to a collection point, to be melted down for the ironwork of a colossal new Buddha he was having built in Kyoto.

The Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis, writing at the time and no admirer of Hideyoshi's, saw the mechanism plainly and set it down in a letter of his own:

He is astutely planning to possess himself of all the iron in Japan, having ordered that all the mechanics and common people should leave off wearing swords and carrying any other sort of weapons... and bring them to a place indicated for the purpose to be converted into the iron work necessary in the temple. Thus the populace is disarmed, and he the more secure in his arbitrary dominion... Now he is depriving the people of their arms under the pretext of devotion to Religion.

No such edict, Fróis added, had ever been seen or attempted in Japan before - not because earlier rulers lacked the will, but because none had held enough uncontested authority over the whole country to attempt disarming its farmers at all.

What the two measures did together

Separately, a land register and a sword collection were administrative housekeeping. Together they did something neither could alone: the survey told the regime exactly what every parcel of farmland in the country was worth and who was responsible for its taxes, while the sword hunt made sure the people who worked that land had no weapon left to resist the assessment with. A peasantry that had spent a century arming itself in a country with no functioning central government was, within a decade, both counted and disarmed by one that had one again.

The distinction the survey drew between who held a sword and who held a hoe hardened, over the following years, into something closer to a caste line than an administrative convenience - the same separation of warrior and farmer that the Tokugawa order would spend the next two and a half centuries formally enforcing. Hideyoshi did not invent the idea of an armed samurai class set apart from an unarmed peasantry. He was the first ruler with the reach to make it a fact on the ground everywhere at once, using the same instrument in both directions: one survey to know what the country was worth, one collection to make sure only his own soldiers could take it by force.

A speech to a dead man's statue

contractionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Conquering Korea, and China beyond it, had been Hideyoshi's ambition since boyhood. Serving under Nobunaga, he had once asked for a year's revenue from Kyushu and a supply of weapons, offering to provide his own ships and provisions and subdue Korea himself, then use a conquered Korean army to take China and unite all three countries as one. Nobunaga laughed at the proposal. Hideyoshi did not forget it.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A conversation with a statue

While travelling through the Kantō region, Hideyoshi visited Kamakura and stood before an effigy of Yoritomo preserved in a shrine there. Rubbing and patting its back, he addressed the four-century-dead founder of Japan's first shogunate directly: "You are my friend. You took all the power under Heaven. You and I, only, have been able to do this - but you were of a famous family, and not like me, sprung from peasants. I intend, at last, to conquer all the earth, and even China. What think you of that?" His own stated philosophy was blunter still: the earth is the earth's earth, a doctrine that left him little patience for anyone else's claim to land he wanted for himself.

Demands dressed as diplomacy

With Ashikaga power long collapsed, Korea had stopped sending tribute to Japan generations earlier, and Chinese emigrants brought Hideyoshi word of disorganisation inside China itself that only sharpened his appetite. He sent two embassies demanding Korea resume paying tribute, the second one succeeding, and warned China's own emperor, through intermediary tribute-bearers from the Ryūkyūs, that refusal to receive his demands would bring invasion.

An ambition the country could not actually sustain

The invasion Hideyoshi finally launched drained Japan's own resources for years, devastated Korean towns and countryside without provocation the Koreans themselves had given, and achieved none of the continental conquest he had once described to a dead general's statue as his destiny alongside Yoritomo's own. Chinese reinforcements eventually forced the Japanese army into retreat, and only Hideyoshi's own death in 1598 finally ended a war his country had never wanted and could not sustain for his own ambition's sake.

A persimmon and a closed road

endDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Hideyoshi died on 15 September 1598, having spent his final arrangements trying to guarantee a future he would not live to oversee. He married his six-year-old son Hideyori to Ieyasu's own granddaughter and appointed five senior ministers as the boy's guardians, hoping the marriage tie would bind Japan's most powerful remaining vassal to his heir's cause rather than against it.

A settlement that assumed too much loyalty

The arrangement rested on a wager: that Ieyasu, the one man capable of overturning everything Hideyoshi had built, would honour a family connection and a guardian's oath over his own ambition. The wager held for less than two years. As the coalition of regents meant to protect Hideyori's inheritance fractured into factions, Ieyasu moved to secure the whole country for himself rather than merely to protect a share of it for someone else's son.

A general who answered his own diviners

When Ieyasu marched west from Edo on 1 October 1600 to confront the coalition still fighting in Hideyori's name, his own diviners warned him the road west was inauspicious. He answered that he would open it by knocking. Along the march, someone offered him a persimmon; as it fell into his hand he remarked that Ogaki - a fortress on his route - had just fallen into his hand the same way, then distributed the fruit to his own attendants as a good omen. It was the gesture of a commander who had already decided the campaign's outcome before the armies met.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kanō Tan'yū · Public domain

One purpose against many

At Sekigahara, Ieyasu's disciplined force of a single mind faced a coalition army nearly twice its size but split among commanders with competing interests and no shared strategy. The imbalance proved decisive. Ieyasu's victory did not immediately end the Toyotomi house - Hideyori remained in Osaka Castle for another fifteen years - but it destroyed the coalition that had fought to preserve his father's own settlement, and left the country's actual mastery in the hands of a man who would formally claim the shogunal title in his own right three years later.

Gifu City Museum of History · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain