Toyotomi Hideyoshi: the peasant who ruled Japan

Few careers in Japanese history are as improbable as Hideyoshi's. He was born at Nakamura in Owari province, the son of a foot soldier or peasant, with no family name worth the title. He began as a servant, rose to be one of Oda Nobunaga's great generals, and within eight years of his master's murder made himself ruler of a country that had been at war with itself for more than a century. Because of his origins he could never become shogun, so he governed instead through the imperial court, as regent.²

Early life

The sources disagree even on his birth year, 1536 or 1537. His childhood name is given as Hiyoshimaru. As a boy he left home for Tōtōmi province and became a page to a retainer of the local lord, then came back to Owari and, in about 1554, at the age of eighteen, entered the service of the young Oda Nobunaga as a lowly attendant. Britannica credits his rise to a cheerful nature, tact and intelligence; he was promoted to the samurai rank and took the name Kinoshita Tōkichirō. In 1561 he married Nene, the adopted daughter of the Asano family, who as Kita no Mandokoro would become one of the most influential women of the age.³

Later legend made him an illiterate upstart. In fact he worked to educate himself, wrote poetry, performed in Nō plays and became a devoted student of the tea ceremony under the master Sen no Rikyū.⁴

Nobunaga's general

When Nobunaga began his drive on central Japan in 1568, Hideyoshi fought in many of the important battles. In 1573, after the destruction of two powerful lords of Ōmi, he was given their lands in northern Ōmi, worth about 120,000 koku of rice, and became lord of Nagahama Castle. About this time he took the name Hashiba.⁵ › Oda Nobunaga

From 1577 Nobunaga gave him the hardest assignment of all: the conquest of western Japan, held by the powerful Mōri clan. Operating from Himeji Castle in Harima, Hideyoshi worked his way west province by province, through long sieges that starved out one castle after another.⁶

Takamatsu and Yamazaki

In 1582 he reached Takamatsu Castle in Bitchū, a Mōri stronghold protected by marshes. Rather than storm it, he dammed the low ground around it and turned a river into the castle's surroundings, so that the fortress stood in a rising lake. While the water rose, word came that in June 1582 Nobunaga had been attacked at the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto by his own general, Akechi Mitsuhide, and had died.⁷

Hideyoshi signed a quick armistice with the Mōri and turned his whole army east toward Kyoto. Eleven days after Honnō-ji he met Mitsuhide's army at Yamazaki, between the hills and the river southwest of the capital, and destroyed it. The man who avenged Nobunaga had made himself the obvious claimant to Nobunaga's power.⁸

Heir to Nobunaga

At the conference of the Oda family's chief retainers at Kiyosu, Hideyoshi insisted that the succession go to Nobunaga's grandson rather than to his third son, the candidate of two powerful Oda vassals, among them the senior general Shibata Katsuie. The quarrel went to war. In 1583 Hideyoshi beat Katsuie at Shizugatake and allowed him to take his own life. In the same year he began to build Osaka Castle, the seat of a new kind of power.⁹

In 1584 he faced his most dangerous rival, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who backed Nobunaga's second son. In the campaign of Komaki and Nagakute Hideyoshi came off worse on the battlefield, but he won the peace: after a few bloody and indecisive fights, Ieyasu made an alliance with him and swore fealty, and Hideyoshi left his domain intact.¹⁰

Unifying Japan

In 1585 the court appointed him kampaku, imperial regent, and he conquered Shikoku from the Chōsokabe. In 1586 he became dajō-daijin, chief minister, and Emperor Go-Yōzei granted him a new family name: Toyotomi. In 1587 he led a huge army into Kyushu after the Shimazu of Satsuma refused his ban on private war between lords, and brought the whole island under his rule. After the Kyushu campaign he ordered the Christian missionaries to leave Japan, although trade with the Europeans kept the order loosely enforced.¹¹

The last great independent power was the Hōjō clan of the Kantō, which refused to submit. In 1590 Hideyoshi and Ieyasu mobilized a great army and navy and blockaded the Hōjō in their castle at Odawara. After a long, patient siege the Hōjō were starved into surrender, and the north of Honshu then submitted. Japan was united, eight years after Nobunaga's fall. Hideyoshi moved Ieyasu out of his home provinces into the old Hōjō lands in the east, where Ieyasu made his headquarters at a fishing village called Edo.¹²

The sword hunt and the frozen order

Hideyoshi set out to make sure no one could repeat his own rise. The sword hunt (katanagari) of 1588 ordered farmers to hand over swords, bows, spears and firearms. His land surveys measured and graded the fields of the whole country, recorded the farmer responsible for each plot and fixed what it owed, and in 1591 the lords had to submit registers and maps of their domains. An edict of the same year barred samurai from becoming townsmen or farmers and farmers from turning to trade, and a census of 1592 counted the population by class. Together these measures separated warriors from peasants for good.¹³

He ruled through a small circle, advised by his brother Hidenaga and by Sen no Rikyū, and drew his income from about two million koku of land under his direct control, the Iwami silver mine and the merchants of Kyoto and Osaka. In 1587 he hosted a great tea gathering at the Kitano shrine in Kyoto, which more than a thousand people attended. In 1591 he passed the office of kampaku to his nephew Hidetsugu and took the title of taikō, retired regent, keeping the real power for himself.¹⁴

The invasions of Korea

His ambitions did not stop at the sea. His real target was Ming China; Korea was to open the road. In 1592 an army of about 158,000 men in nine divisions crossed to Korea, the first division under Konishi Yukinaga landing at Busan. The Korean capital fell within about three weeks and Pyongyang soon after.¹⁵

Then the campaign stalled. At sea the Korean navy of Admiral Yi Sun-sin won victory after victory, most famously off Hansan Island, and cut the Japanese supply lines. On land, volunteer "righteous armies" rose across the country, and in early 1593 a Ming army of about 43,000 retook Pyongyang. The Japanese fell back to the south coast.¹⁶ › Battle of Hansan Island, 1592

Years of talks followed, in which the negotiators on both sides hid the truth from their masters. Hideyoshi demanded a Ming princess, renewed trade and four Korean provinces; a forged letter presented him to the Ming as a submissive vassal. In 1596 Ming envoys arrived at Osaka with a patent naming him "King of Japan." When he understood what had been done, he was furious, and in 1597 he sent a second army of about 140,000 men to take southern Korea. It too was pinned to the coast, and Yi Sun-sin, restored to command, beat a Japanese fleet with a handful of ships at Myeongnyang.¹⁷ › Battle of Myeongnyang, 1597

The war devastated Korea. Its farmland was wrecked, its palaces and archives were lost, and tens of thousands of Koreans, the Kotobank encyclopedias say 50,000 to 60,000, were carried off to Japan, among them potters who founded new Japanese wares. The Japanese armies were withdrawn only after Hideyoshi's death, and the last great sea fight, at Noryang late in 1598, cost Yi Sun-sin his life.¹⁸ › Battle of Noryang, 1598

How he made war

Hideyoshi was less a battlefield tactician than an organizer and a negotiator. He preferred to win by siege, blockade and engineering, as at Takamatsu and Odawara, rather than by costly assaults, and he moved armies with startling speed, as in the march to Yamazaki. He paired force with diplomacy: Ieyasu, whom he could not beat in the field, became an ally, and the Mōri, his old enemy, were brought to terms rather than destroyed.¹⁹

He also commanded on a scale Japan had never seen. His invasion of Korea moved well over 150,000 men by sea, raised by a levy calculated on each lord's assessed rice yield. Britannica's verdict is that the forces were entirely inadequate for so vast an undertaking, and the war showed the limits of his method: an army that could overawe Japan's lords could not conquer Korea against a navy and a Ming army it had no answer to.²⁰

Death and succession

Hideyoshi had no children with his wife, Nene, but late in life a concubine bore him a son, Hideyori. Once the heir was born, the nephew became an obstacle, and in 1595 Hideyoshi ordered Hidetsugu to kill himself.²¹

He died of illness at Fushimi Castle on the 18th day of the 8th month of Keichō 3 in the Japanese calendar, 18 September 1598 in the Western one, at the age of 62, troubled by the failure of the Korean war. His son was five. Power passed to a council of five great lords, the Five Elders, the strongest of whom was Tokugawa Ieyasu.²²

The settlement did not hold. In the autumn of 1600 Ieyasu's eastern army won the battle of Sekigahara, and in 1603 he founded the Tokugawa shogunate. Hideyori grew up in his father's great castle at Osaka, a living threat to Tokugawa legitimacy. In the winter of 1614 Ieyasu besieged it, and in the summer campaign of 1615 the castle fell; Hideyori and his mother took their own lives in the ruins, and the Toyotomi house was gone.²³ › The Battle of Sekigahara, 1600

Legacy and memory

Hideyoshi's dynasty died with his son, but his state did not. Ieyasu kept his policies of unification, and the separation of warriors from farmers, the disarmed countryside and the surveyed land became the foundations of two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace. His age gave its name to a culture: the Momoyama period, named after the peach trees on the hill of Fushimi Castle, with its gold-leaf screens, great castles and the tea of Sen no Rikyū.²⁴

In Korea he is remembered as the invader whose armies ravaged the peninsula, and the war is commemorated through the victories of Yi Sun-sin. In Japan he is remembered as the foot soldier's son who rose to rule the whole country and gave it the shape it kept for centuries. Both memories are true, and his story belongs among the other great commanders of feudal Japan.²⁵

Read more about his master, Oda Nobunaga, and his successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the war at sea in our guide to the battles of Korea, or what happened on 16 December, the day of Noryang.