LITMIR.BIZ

      The quarrel between Oda Nobunaga and Akechi Mitsuhide.

      This situation of chaos persisted until a succession of “super-daimyō” managed to reunify the country. The first important name is that of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582). Nobunaga inherited a comparatively minor territory from his father and appeared to be heading for quick extinction when his lands were invaded by the hosts of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560. Nobunaga, however, took advantage of a lull in Yoshimoto’s advance while the latter was enjoying the traditional head-viewing ceremony in a narrow gorge called Okehazama. A fortuitous thunderstorm cloaked Nobunaga’s final movements and allowed him to take the Imagawa samurai completely by surprise. The victory at Okehazama thrust Nobunaga to the forefront of Japanese politics and samurai glory. Using a combination of superb generalship, utter ruthlessness, and a willingness to embrace new military technology such as European firearms, Nobunaga began the process of reunification of Japan.

      Oda Nobunaga was killed when Akechi Mitsuhide, one of his subordinate generals, launched a surprise night attack on him in the temple of Honnōji, in Kyoto, in 1582. Mitsuhide had taken advantage of the absence from the scene of nearly all his fellow generals—but one of them, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), hurried back from a distant campaign to vanquish Mitsuhide at the battle of Yamazaki. Basking in the honor of being the loyal avenger of his dead master, Hideyoshi hurried to establish himself in the power vacuum that Nobunaga’s death had created. In a series of brilliant campaigns, Hideyoshi either eliminated or thoroughly neutralized any potential rivals, including Nobunaga’s surviving sons and brothers. Over the next five years, Hideyoshi conducted campaigns that gave him the islands of Shikoku and Kyūshū, and when the daimyō of northern Japan pledged allegiance to him in 1591, Japan was finally reunified.

      Unfortunately for Hideyoshi, his ambitions did not stop at Japan, and in 1592 he sent tens of thousands of samurai across the sea in an invasion of Korea. This was to be the first stage of a process that would make Hideyoshi Emperor of China, but the expedition was a disaster. A second attempt was made in 1597, but when Hideyoshi died in 1598 the samurai were recalled, and Japan looked as though it was going to slip back into the chaos from which Hideyoshi had rescued it. His son and heir, Hideyori, was only five years old, but when war broke out the matter was quickly resolved at the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The victor, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), could trace his ancestry back to the Minamoto, and was therefore proclaimed shogun in 1603. The final remnants of the supporters of Toyotomi Hideyori were defeated at the siege of Osaka Castle in 1614–1615. Apart from the short-lived Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638, the Age of Warring States was over. The triumph of the Tokugawa family finally provided a period of stability. They ruled Japan with a rod of iron until the mid-nineteenth century, when the arrival of foreign voyagers and traders forced Japan to enter the modern world.