Authors: Samuel Hawley
These various practical advantages would make the musket a key weapon in the latter part of the sengoku era, when it would have a sig
nificant effect on the course of the history of Japan. Had the nation’s daimyo been confined to the traditional weapons of sword and spear and bow, the sengoku period would very likely have dragged on for much longer than it did. The introduction of the musket into Japanese warfare ensured that this did not occur. It gave a significant advantage to those daimyo who embraced it, doomed their less foresighted rivals, and ultimately hastened the advent of national unification.
One such daimyo who recognized the importance of the musket early on was Oda Nobunaga. He was a violent individual reportedly from the day he was born in 1534, biting the nipples of every wet nurse employed to suckle him. Upon his father’s death in 1551, Nobunaga inherited a small, ill-defined domain in
Owari Province on central Honshu, near the present-day city of Nagoya, plus a few tenuous alliances with neighboring daimyo that soon fell apart. Almost from the start the twenty-year-old warlord found his diminutive domain under attack. For the next several years Nobunaga managed to keep the predators at bay while he moved against rival factions of his own Oda house to bring all of Owari Province under his sway. Then he turned his attention outward.
His first great victory came in 1560. Imagawa Yoshimoto, a much more powerful daimyo than Nobunaga with territory stretching across three provinces to the east, had long had his eye on Oda land. In 1554 and again in 1558 he sent small forces into Owari that Nobunaga man
aged to beat back. In 1560 Imagawa returned to finish the job, this time at the head of a forty thousand-man army. Nobunaga, with just two thousand men under his command, wisely chose not to meet this superior force in the traditional way. Instead he ambushed the invaders during a blinding downpour, when they were totally off guard and unable to see how small his army was. The strategy succeeded. The Imagawa army was put to flight, and Imagawa Yoshimoto himself was killed.
The tide was now turning for Oda Nobunaga. In 1564 he took com
plete control of former Imagawa holdings in the provinces of Mikawa, Totomi, and Suruga after Imagawa Yoshimoto’s heir fled to a monastery. The Saito family fell in 1567, and with it the province of Mino to the north. Then came parts of Omi, Ise, and Iga. In 1568 Nobunaga entered Kyoto, deposed the puppet Ashikaga shogun supported by his rivals, and installed his own, Ashikaga Yoshiaki. When Yoshiaki rebelled against his benefactor’s heavy hand and tried to form an alliance against him, Nobunaga drove him into exile and brought the Ashikaga shogunate to an end. In the 1570s Kawachi Province fell to him, then the rest of Omi. Then Setsu. Kai. Echizen. Noto. Hida. Etchu. Shinano. Wakasa. By 1582, when he was assassinated by one of his own vassals, Oda Nobunaga controlled all or portions of thirty-one of Japan’s sixty-six provinces and roughly one-third of its land mass.
Why was Oda Nobunaga such a successful conqueror? Because he was unconventional. To begin with, he did not rely on traditional samurai armies, mounted on costly horses, wielding expensive swords and wearing fancy lacquered armor. Instead he based his army upon the lowly
ashigaru
, the foot soldier. They could be easily recruited from the peasantry, they were cheap to arm, and they were easy to train. Second, Nobunaga’s forces were highly mobile. By improving roads, building bridges, and installing troop-ferrying ships on Lake Biwa, Nobunaga was able to move his armies around central Honshu with a speed that confounded his enemies. He also embraced the new technology of the musket. He started with an arsenal of five hundred weapons in the early 1550s. By 1575 he had ten thousand, enough to rival any daimyo. He gained this technological upper hand by capturing the two main centers of firearms production on Honshu, Sakai in 1569 and Kunitomo in 1570. After that most of the muskets produced outside Kyushu and its offshore island of Tanegashima came to him, along with the lion’s share of the gunpowder. The advantage of possessing all these muskets would become glaringly apparent in the celebrated Battle of Nagashino in 1575, when three thousand of Nobunaga’s musketeers effectively destroyed the army of Takeda Katsuyori with withering volley fire from behind the protection of a wooden palisade. When the battle was over, ten thousand of Takeda’s men—sixty-seven percent of his entire army—lay dead in the field, and with them many of the traditional notions of warfare in Japan.
One final factor contributed to Oda Nobunga’s success: he was ruthless. In his private life he was a man of refined tastes. He was, for example, an avid practitioner of the art of tea, and considered the right to hold a private tea ceremony the greatest honor he could bestow upon a vassal. In his battles and political machinations, however, Nobunaga cast aside all niceties. Conquest was his goal, and he was prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve it. His early campaigns to unite the Oda house and win control of his home
province of Owari resulted in the deaths of a number of his own family members. In 1565 he confirmed an alliance with the Asai family by offering his sister in marriage. When this alliance crumbled six years later, family ties did not prevent Nobunaga from slaughtering his in-laws. In his 1571 campaign against the heavily armed Buddhist stronghold on Mount Hiei, countless monks were slain and the entire monastery complex, including shrines, was burnt to the ground. After his campaign in Echizen Province he wrote, “There are so many corpses in Fuchu that there is no room for more.”
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It would be wrong to depict Nobunaga’s brutality as differing in kind from that of rival daimyo. He was just better at it.
Oda Nobunaga’s ultimate goal was to bring all of Japan under his power. This was the case from at least 1567, when he began using a personal seal bearing the maxim
tenka fuchu
, “the realm subjected to military power.” His method of national unification, however, was slow and painful, for it ensured resistance at almost every step. For most of Nobunaga’s enemies, to capitulate without a fight meant losing everything, except perhaps their lives. Most chose to fight. Had Nobunaga lived, therefore, it was by no means certain that he would have succeeded in unifying the country, for a number of very formidable daimyo still stood in his way. Even if he had gone on to win ultimate hegemony over all Japan, it would likely have taken him many more years. That the task was accomplished in only nine years was due to the very different unification strategy pursued by his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
The rise of Hideyoshi exemplifies a fundamental aspect of this “nation at war” period called
gekokuji
: “the subjugation of the high by the low.” He was the son of a farmer who rose to become the most powerful man in Japan, the unifier of the nation, and the commander of the mightiest army in Asia.
Hideyoshi was born in the
village of Nakamura in the Owari domain of the Oda family in 1536 or 1537. He was named after the god Hiyoshi-maru, to whom his mother prayed prior to his birth. According to one account, he came into the world with all his teeth, and with such a wizened little simian face that he was nicknamed Sarunosuke, “Little Monkey.”
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Little is known of his family background and early life. Biog
raphies penned during his lifetime, even under his own guidance, are sketchy and often wildly fanciful; Hideyoshi in his later years was clearly more interested in acquiring noble antecedents than in preserving the facts of his humble origins. What is known with some degree of certainty is this: his father was a peasant with the single name of Yaemon—being a member of the lowest stratum of society, he did not possess a family name. Yaemon may have served for a time in Oda Nobuhide’s small army, until a battle injury forced him back to the fields. He then married and had two children: Hideyoshi and a daughter named Tomo. He died soon after, in 1543, and Hideyoshi’s mother, whose name is unknown, married a man called Chikuami who, like Yaemon, was affiliated in some minor way with the Oda house, probably as an occasional foot solider in the small Oda army. By this second marriage Hideyoshi’s mother had two more children, a daughter and a son. This son, Hidenaga, would figure prominently in Hideyoshi’s life in years to come, as would one of his sister Tomo’s sons, Hidetsugu.
In 1558 Hideyoshi, like his father and his stepfather before him, entered the service of the Oda house, then under the control of Oda Nobunaga. The young Hideyoshi could not have cut a very impressive figure. He was probably not much more than five feet tall and 110 pounds,
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a scrawny version, perhaps, of his diminutive European counter
part, five-foot-one-inch-tall Napoleon. He would have had the wiry strength typical of a peasant in a pre-industrial society or of a laborer in the third world today. And he was most definitely homely; two nicknames Nobunaga liked to use for the farmer’s son were “Monkey” and “Bald Rat.”
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Still, there must have been something re
markable about him, a useful cunning, a surprising intelligence, an unshakeable valor, a talent for organization and leadership, for within twelve years he had risen from the lowest menial position to become a general commanding three thousand men, and one of Nobunaga’s ten principal vassals.
Serving under Nobunaga could not have been easy. He was quick-tempered and rude and offensive to his vassals, and bullied them unmercifully. There must have been countless occasions when the “Monkey” Hideyoshi had to placidly smile at his master’s rough jokes and insults, and then march off through blinding rain or summer heat to carry out his every wish. Hideyoshi endured it, never uttering a word of resentment. He patiently served, bided his time, and waited for his chance.
Other Oda vassals were not so stoic. Akechi Mitsuhide found Nobunaga particularly offensive, and over the years stored up a burden of resentments that would eventually drive him to rebel. Some incidents were trivial, such as when Nobunaga got drunk, seized Akechi in a headlock, and thumped his bald head like a drum. Others left lasting scars. While besieging a castle in
Tamba Province, Akechi promised that two brothers would be spared if the castle surrendered, and sent his own mother in as a hostage to guarantee his word. The castle duly surrendered. Then Nobunaga arrived and ordered the brothers burnt regardless, shattering the agreement Akechi had made. The relatives of the two men, still holding Akechi’s mother hostage, burnt her to death in revenge. Akechi received Tamba Castle as his reward. But he never forgave Nobunaga, and he never forgot.
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Hideyoshi learned a great deal during his twenty-four years within the Oda house. In his private life he strove to acquire his master’s same refined tastes in noh theater, cherry-blossom viewing, poetry writing, and the art of tea. In later years he would speak with emotion of the great honor he had felt when Nobunaga had granted him the privilege of holding his own tea ceremony. In combat, Hideyoshi learned the value of foot soldiers over mounted samurai and of muskets over bows; musket-bearing ashigaru would play a part in all of his cam
paigns. He learned to be every bit as imaginative in battle as Nobunaga. In 1582, for example, he constructed a three-kilometer-long dike to divert a nearby river into the Mori clan’s impregnable Takamatsu Castle and succeeded quite literally in flushing them out.
Hideyoshi also learned the value of a mobile army and decisive action—a lesson that would serve him well when Nobunaga was finally killed.
It came in the summer of 1582. Some weeks earlier Nobunaga had invited rival daimyo Tokugawa Ieyasu to a banquet at his Azuchi Castle to cement an alliance. He asked Akechi Mitsuhide, whose bald head he had once drummed, to make the necessary arrangements. Akechi threw himself into the work, ordering the very best dishes and organizing all sorts of lavish entertainments to please his master. Then, just as the feast was about to begin, Nobunaga ordered him to leave at once and join Hideyoshi in the siege of Takamatsu Castle. Barred from a banquet he himself had prepared at great personal expense, Akechi left in a rage and returned to his Tamba Castle, ostensibly to gather an army to help Hideyoshi. But instead of marching on to Takamatsu, he set off for Kyoto—and Nobunaga.
Akechi arrived with his men at dawn on June 21 and forced his way into
Honnoji Temple, where Nobunaga was staying. Nobunaga fought back desperately, but it was apparent the situation was hopeless. As fire began to spread through the temple, he retreated to a back room, opened his robe, and slit open his stomach. He died twitching on the floor at the age of forty-nine. The flames soon reduced his body to ashes. Akechi then marched his force against the mansion where Nobunaga’s son and heir, Nobutada, was residing. A similar scene unfolded there, with Nobutada too committing suicide.
Hideyoshi learned of Nobunaga’s death the following day. It threw him into almost manic action. This was his golden opportunity, and he meant to seize it. He quickly wound up the siege of
Takamatsu Castle—his systematic flooding of the edifice had already brought the Mori to the brink of surrender—and on June 23 began the march to Kyoto. In less than a week the battle lines were drawn. On the one side was Akechi with an army of ten thousand. On the other was Hideyoshi, backed by several barons from the vicinity of Kyoto, with twenty thousand men. They met on the plains of Yamazaki, at the foot of a mountain called Tennozan, on July 2, just eleven days after Nobunaga’s death. Akechi arrived early, under the cover of darkness and in a heavy downpour, encamping his troops on the plain and sending musketeers and archers up the slopes of the mountain so that he could command the heights. But Hideyoshi was already there; he possessed Tennozan. With the light of dawn the two armies met; Akechi’s soon fell apart, and Hideyoshi’s slaughtered. The fighting lasted two hours. Akechi attempted to retreat, but was apprehended and cut to pieces by a group of villagers and his body delivered to Hideyoshi. It was then taken to the burned-out Honnoji Temple in Kyoto to placate Nobunaga’s spirit.