Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the warlord who completed the political reunification of Japan in 1590. Born a commoner, he rose through the service of Oda Nobunaga, took over Nobunaga's conquests after his murder in 1582, and ruled the country as imperial regent. His land surveys, sword hunt and freezing of social classes shaped Japanese society for nearly three centuries, while his invasions of Korea in the 1590s caused enormous destruction and ended in failure.

Hideyoshi was born in 1537, traditionally in the village of Nakamura in Owari province, now part of Nagoya. His father was a peasant who may have served as a foot soldier, and he had no family name; his early life is known mostly through later stories, some of them flattering legends. As a young man he entered the service of Nobunaga, lord of Owari, reputedly starting as a sandal-bearer, and took the name Kinoshita Tōkichirō.

He rose through ability, energy and skill at winning over enemies by negotiation. He fought in Nobunaga's campaigns of the 1560s, and after the defeat of the Asai family in 1573 was given his first domain, centred on Nagahama on Lake Biwa, and took the name Hashiba Hideyoshi. From 1577 he commanded the long campaign against the powerful Mōri clan in western Honshu, besieging castles by starvation and, at Takamatsu in 1582, by diverting a river to flood the fortress.

Hideyoshi was at Takamatsu in June 1582 when news came that Nobunaga had been killed by his general Akechi Mitsuhide at Honnō-ji in Kyoto. He quickly made peace with the Mōri, marched back east and defeated Mitsuhide at Yamazaki within two weeks. This gave him the leading voice in deciding the Oda succession. In 1583 he defeated his main rival among Nobunaga's generals, Shibata Katsuie, at Shizugatake, and began building Osaka Castle on the site of the Ishiyama Hongan-ji temple.

His campaigns of 1584 against Tokugawa Ieyasu at Komaki and Nagakute ended in stalemate, and the two reached a settlement under which Ieyasu became his vassal. Because he lacked the noble ancestry expected of a shogun, Hideyoshi instead took court titles: he was appointed kanpaku, imperial regent, in 1585, and in 1586 the emperor granted him the new family name Toyotomi.

Hideyoshi subdued Shikoku in 1585 and Kyushu, held by the Shimazu clan, in 1587, using armies of well over 100,000 men. In 1590 he besieged the Hōjō clan at Odawara in eastern Japan with perhaps 200,000 troops; their surrender and the submission of the northern lords completed the unification of the country, ending more than a century of the Sengoku period. He gave the Hōjō lands in the Kantō to Ieyasu, who made his base at the small castle town of Edo, the future Tokyo.

Hideyoshi's methods mixed force with compromise. He left many defeated daimyo in place as his vassals, sometimes moving them to new domains, and he staged grand displays of wealth, such as his golden tea room and the great tea ceremony held at Kitano in 1587. He was a patron of the tea master Sen no Rikyū, whom he nevertheless ordered to commit suicide in 1591 for reasons that remain unclear.

Hideyoshi's lasting reforms aimed at stability. Nationwide land surveys, known as the Taikō surveys, recorded the productivity of fields in standard units of rice, fixing tax obligations and the ranks of lords. The sword hunt of 1588 ordered peasants to give up their swords and other weapons, officially to provide metal for a great Buddha statue in Kyoto. In 1591 he forbade samurai to become farmers or merchants and peasants to leave their fields, which, together with the sword hunt, separated a hereditary warrior class from the rest of the population.

His attitude to Christianity, which had spread rapidly in Kyushu, shifted from tolerance to hostility. In 1587 he ordered the expulsion of missionaries, though the order was enforced only loosely. In 1597 he had twenty-six Christians, Japanese and European, crucified at Nagasaki.

Hideyoshi planned to conquer Ming China, and when Korea refused to let his armies pass, he invaded it. In 1592 more than 150,000 troops landed at Busan and took Seoul within three weeks and Pyongyang soon after. The tide turned as Korean guerrilla forces rose, a Ming army intervened, and the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin cut Japanese supply lines at sea. Peace talks broke down, and a second invasion in 1597 made little headway. The wars devastated the Joseon kingdom: farmland was ruined, palaces and temples burned, and tens of thousands of Koreans were killed or carried off to Japan, among them potters who founded new ceramic industries there. The Mimizuka mound in Kyoto holds the noses and ears taken from Korean and Chinese dead as trophies.

Hideyoshi's later years were dominated by the question of an heir. His first son, Tsurumatsu, died aged two in 1591, and he named his nephew Hidetsugu as successor and passed him the office of regent, keeping power himself as taikō, retired regent. After the birth of a second son, Hideyori, in 1593, Hidetsugu fell from favour; in 1595 he was ordered to commit suicide, and some thirty of his wives, concubines and children were executed in Kyoto.

Hideyoshi died at Fushimi Castle on 18 September 1598, leaving Hideyori, aged five, in the care of a council of five great lords led by Ieyasu. The troops in Korea were withdrawn. Within two years Ieyasu had defeated the Toyotomi loyalists at Sekigahara, and in 1615 he destroyed Hideyori and his mother at Osaka, founding the Tokugawa shogunate.

Hideyoshi is remembered in Japan as the most remarkable self-made man in its history, a commoner who became master of the country. His class system, land registers and disarmament of the countryside were taken over by the Tokugawa and lasted until the 1870s. In Korea he is remembered above all as an invader responsible for one of the worst catastrophes in the country's history, and the memory of the Imjin War still colours relations between the two countries.