Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Japanese politician and military leader

• Born: February 6, 1537
• Birthplace: Nakamura, Owari Province (now in Aichi Prefecture), Japan
• Died: September 18, 1598
• Place of death: Fushimi, Yamashiro Prefecture, Japan

Hideyoshi was one of the pivotal figures in the unification of Japan out of a welter of competing feudal domains at the end of the sixteenth century. As an astute general and canny power broker and lawgiver, Hideyoshi was to go a long way toward establishing the political foundations that brought Japan from the Middle Ages into its early modern period.

Early Life

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (toh-yoh-toh-mee hee-deh-yoh-shee) was born to a father who was a retired foot soldier in the service of Oda Nobuhide, the father of General Oda Nobunaga , who was to be Hideyoshi’s overlord during the early phases of his military career. Legends surrounding Hideyoshi’s birth recount that his mother dreamed that a ray of sunshine entered her womb and he was thus conceived. Hideyoshi perhaps himself perpetrated this fable to embellish his otherwise humble beginnings.

The only picture extant of Hideyoshi shows a deeply lined, narrow, ascetic face with cold haughty eyes and a sour mouth set atop a squat body. Singularly ugly, he was later jokingly referred to by Oda as a bald rat or a monkey.

Hideyoshi came of age in the latter part of Japan’s Warring States period, during which local lords jockeyed constantly for advantage with growing armies of samurai and musket-wielding foot soldiers. The Ashikaga family of shoguns maintained only nominal sovereignty over this patchwork of local power centers, able to exert influence only through shifting military alliances. It is small wonder, therefore, that Hideyoshi chose a military career. A family tradition, it was also virtually the only means of advancement for those of humble birth.

Life’s Work

In 1558, Hideyoshi, having already served in the army of another lord, presented himself to Oda Nobunaga, a fast-rising military star who was master of Hideyoshi’s home area. Oda quickly took a liking to Hideyoshi, whose military talents began to bloom as Oda began the campaigns that were to conquer the heartland of Japan around the ancient imperial capital of Kyōto. Through military conquest, Oda was to set in motion the process of pacification of contending power blocs known in Japanese history as the unification. Fundamentally more ruthless than Hideyoshi in his approach to military matters, Oda moved to defeat feudal coalitions in central Japan and also besieged and laid waste to armed Buddhist monasteries with a cruelty reminiscent of Mongol conqueror and ruler Genghis Khan (between 1155 and 1162-1227).

As Hideyoshi demonstrated his military talents, his position in Oda’s command structure rose. It was Hideyoshi who, in 1566-1567, secured a victory over Saitō Tatsuoki at Inabayama by constructing at night a fortress facing the enemy. Hideyoshi was rewarded with lands seized from Oda’s enemies. In these lands, Hideyoshi exercised an enlightened administrative policy of easing taxation in order to encourage economic development.

In 1575, Oda, with Hideyoshi leading one of two wings of his army, pushed westward to challenge the formidable Mōri clan. Hideyoshi here made siege craft his specialty by taking the massive and strategic Himeji Castle and two other fortresses by imaginative engineering (including flooding) and by clever psychological warfare. In 1582, Oda was treacherously assassinated. Hideyoshi hastily made peace with the Mōri clan, then returned to confront and defeat Oda’s murderer. At the council of vassals, Hideyoshi successfully presented himself as Oda’s avenger and overrode opposition to sponsor the infant grandson of Oda as heir. He thus became, at age forty-five, the master of five provinces and primary councillor at the head of the mightiest military coalition yet seen in Japan.

Hideyoshi had now inherited the mission of completing unification, and he embarked on a carrot-and-stick strategy of combining massive attacks on those who actively opposed him with generous land rewards to win over potential rivals as well as keep faithful supporters. In 1582, he defeated the Shibata family, who had opposed him within the coalition, then used Shibata lands to reward his supporters. By 1584, he came to an uneasy settlement with Tokugawa Ieyasu (who was later to complete the unification after Hideyoshi’s death). In 1587, he undertook a difficult campaign to subdue the southern island of Kyūshū. The defeated were treated generously, but loyal supporters were placed strategically, in the center, and his erstwhile opponents, the Mōri, were given generous tracts in the north.

At the conclusion of the Kyūshū campaign, he issued his famous eleven-point edict against Christianity, denouncing it as subversive and calling for expulsion of Jesuit missionaries. Although the edict was not enforced for some years, it was clear that Hideyoshi was interested in European contact only for trade. It is possible that he used this as a gesture in support of his hegemony, since he issued the ban on behalf of the entire nation.

Military force was not the only implement used by Hideyoshi in his creation of a national hegemony. Any combination of forces could always undo any purely military arrangement. Therefore, he started to build political power out of his military position. First, he amplified his status as military hegemon through oaths of allegiance and the requiring of hostages from nominal subordinates. In 1585, he secured an appointment from the figurehead emperor to the office of imperial regent as a means of bolstering his legitimacy as a national leader. Realizing that the most solid basis for national power was the capacity to control the right to land proprietorships, Hideyoshi undertook a systematic program of redistributing landholdings aimed at reducing the powers of some lords, placing trustworthy ones in strategic locations, and appeasing potential rivals. It was mainly the smaller lords who were moved around, but gradually the idea solidified that the lords held their land in trust and not absolutely. Acceptance of this growth of central power might have been difficult except that it was recognized that Hideyoshi was merely doing at a national level what the lords had to do locally to hold their territory. They were willing to give up some autonomy to safeguard their domains under Hideyoshi’s seal of approval. Never again after 1590 could individual lords acquire land rights not permitted by a national hegemon.

Between 1587 and 1590, Hideyoshi instituted administrative measures that were to be his most far-reaching legacies. He ordered the land survey begun by Oda to be extended and improved. Uniform units of measurement were used. For the first time, Japan’s leadership, both local and national, had an accurate plot-by-plot estimate of the productive capacity. This allowed a tax base to be determined, and it revolutionized the tax structure by allowing the lords greater access to the taxable product and standardized accounting. Once Hideyoshi determined the feudal lord’s status in relation to productive capacity, he could more easily shift the lords around, since they were tied more to status than to a particular geographic place. In 1588, he ordered a mass confiscation of all weapons from peasants. That had the double aim of reducing the likelihood of armed rebellion and of separating the warrior classes from all unarmed commoners. In 1590, an accurate population census froze the social classes into samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants and bound peasants to their land. Samurai were gradually pulled into castle garrisons and, rather than collecting their own taxes, were paid by fixed stipends.

In 1590-1591, Hideyoshi crushed his final remaining challengers in the east of Japan. Now that he was the undisputed master of Japan, he considered the conquest of Korea and China. The first Korean expedition in 1592 ended in a draw after the Japanese encountered determined resistance from the Koreans. The second, in 1597, ended with Hideyoshi’s death. Surrounded by magnificent gardens and artworks, pleading for loyalty to his heir from his coalition vassals, he died on September 18, 1598.

Significance

Hideyoshi’s military unification of Japan represents only one facet of a diverse life. In his own time, his primary impact seemed to be that he, more than any other individual, acted the role of central figure. He restored the imperial dignity, rebuilt the capital and other cities, and enforced peaceful symbols on the popular mind by parades, theatricals, and tea ceremonies for thousands of commoners. He encouraged new building and patronized new, flamboyant, and colorful artistic fashions. Ostentation became a tool of statecraft. Even the megalomania of the Korean expeditions seemed to bring personal destiny together with national destiny.

Hideyoshi’s last appeals for loyalty to his five-year-old son failed. His plans for succession were aborted by the wily Ieyasu, who asserted his supremacy in one final battle, took the title of shogun, and went on to complete Japan’s unification by taming feudalism into a stable, peaceful system for the next 250 years. He did so by making full use of the existing legal and administrative structure of census roles, frozen class structure, surveys, and tax procedures and by shifting lords around, assuring loyalty through hostages, closing off Japan from the outside, and the like. That Ieyasu built on the existing legal, political, and social foundations is proof of Hideyoshi’s enduring legacy.

Bibliography

Beasley, W. G. The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Survey of the entirety of Japanese history. Hideyoshi is covered in the chapter on the unification of Japan. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Hideyoshi. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Clearly the primary biographical source in English on Hideyoshi’s life and a thoroughly modern treatment. Save for artistic matters, Berry is comprehensive in her coverage. Gives a complete background and then exhaustively analyzes developments in economics, military affairs, and administrative and political arrangements. Based almost entirely on Japanese sources but, surprisingly, lacks a bibliography.

Dening, Walter. The Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 3d ed. Kobe, Japan: J. L. Thompson, 1930. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1971. The first edition of this biography was published in 1888 and not much was added in later editions. A classic Victorian biography, rich with anecdotes and extensive detail about Hideyoshi’s life. Contains extensive quotes of conversations without footnote citation; while it is true that Hideyoshi left much correspondence, it is probable that most is the product of the imagination of an author overanxious to paint a vivid personal picture.

Elison, George. “Hideyoshi, the Bountiful Master.” In Warlords, Artists, and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century, edited by George Elison and Bardwell Smith. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981. This essay sheds some light on Hideyoshi’s genealogy by focusing on his search for legitimacy as a leader. Elison draws a theoretical comparison between Hideyoshi as a charismatic leader drawing legitimacy from his accomplishments and through invented mythology about a supernatural birth and miraculous deeds and Hideyoshi as one who sought traditional legitimacy by inventing a conventional pedigree and taking on court titles.

Hall, John W. Government and Local Power in Japan, 500 to 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. Reprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Hall offers many general historical comments and insights. His powers of summary are acute, so the book is valuable as an overview. His treatment of Hideyoshi in chapters 9, 10, and 11 shows the impact of some of the central decisions on this one region in western Honshu.

Hall, John W., Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura, eds. Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500-1650. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. This collection is the product of a binational conference on the Warring States and gives an overview of the whole period, focusing on historiographical questions. Hall’s chapter on Hideyoshi’s domestic policies attempts to draw out his contribution to the political scene as Japan moved out of its middle ages into its early modern condition. Hall summarizes specific measures devised by Hideyoshi, most of which were to survive as the basis for government for the next 250 years.

Kang, Etsuko Hae-jin. Diplomacy and Ideology in Japanese-Korean Relations: From the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Details Hideyoshi’s diplomatic relations and break with Korea and the Korean embassy of 1590. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

McWilliams, Wayne C. “Tototomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598: Supreme Daimyo of Japan.” In Great Leaders, Great Tyrants? Contemporary Views of World Rulers Who Made History, edited by Arnold Blumberg. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Reassessment of the political and military career of Hideyoshi from a contemporary perspective. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Murdoch, James. A History of Japan During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse, 1542-1651. Vol. 2 in A History of Japan. Maps by Isoh Yamagata. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1996. The second of a massive three-volume history. Murdoch, a Scot who spent many years teaching in Japan, is rather stilted in his prose and idiosyncratic in his approach. Still, this work is valuable. Modern works seldom offer such lavish detail. Hideyoshi is covered in chapters 8, 9, 12, and 13. Murdoch, who is ordinarily disdainful of feudalism as such, is more positive in his treatment of Hideyoshi. Although he ignores economic considerations, he offers a fuller picture of the range of administrative problems addressed by Hideyoshi.

Sansom, George B. A History of Japan, 1334-1615. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961. This is the second volume in a three-volume history of Japan that is arguably the most complete general history of premodern Japan available in English. This well-illustrated and readable work, based entirely on Japanese sources, is indispensable as a reference work. Hideyoshi’s life and career are covered in chapters 19 through 24, including a chapter on the artistic scene. Although less adequate for economic matters than more modern works, Sansom’s history as a whole comes close to striking the perfect balance between lively prose and a wealth of detail. His bibliography is annotated, his appendices pertinent, his index meticulous. This is a full-service history to which all students of pre-1867 Japan should come first.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 101 Letters of Hideyoshi: The Private Correspondence of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Edited and translated by Adriana Boscaro. Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1975. Boscaro gives an extensive introduction and then intersperses the graceful translations with editorial comment and explanation of the letters. She explains some of the problems of dealing with this kind of documentation. Contains appendices, a catalog of letters with a photoreproduction of a sample letter, and notes on people and places.