The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

by Samuel Hawley

  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.”[10] Little is known of his family background and early life. Biographies 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,[11] a scrawny version, perhaps, of his diminutive European counterpart, 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.”[12] Still, there must have been something remarkable 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.

  Figure 1: Hideyoshi’s Japan

  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.[13]

  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 campaigns. 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.

  The Battle of Yamazaki was a watershed. It marked the passing of the reins of power from Oda Nobunaga to Hideyoshi, who would then go on to drive Japan so very much farther. It would change the course of the history of that country and in turn affect all of East Asia. In the centuries to come a new word recognizing the seminal influence of those two hours in 1582 would be added to the modern Japanese lexicon: tennozan, a decisive victory, military or political, that settles an important issue once and for all.

  While impeccably loyal to Nobunaga during his master’s lifetime, Hideyoshi always remained his own man. He was never as eager as Nobunaga to throw his soldiers into battle if an easier victory could be had in some other way—through guile, through patience, through appeasement. It was a difference that would become more apparent following Nobunaga’s violent demise. After consolidating his hol
d on the former Oda domain in 1583, Hideyoshi cast aside Nobunaga’s strategy of national unification through annihilation, of crushing rivals one by one and dividing up their land among his own loyal retainers. He was willing to forget past rivalries and leave daimyo in place as long as they recognized his overriding authority. As he wrote to Date Masamune prior to that daimyo’s capitulation, “I do not enquire closely into the past of those who surrender to me. That is the law of heaven and I follow the same rule.”[14] It was a fundamental change that would greatly shorten the unification process. Rival daimyo now had a choice. They could fight Hideyoshi’s increasingly formidable armies and risk losing everything, including their lives. Or they could swear allegiance to him and in exchange keep most if not all of their lands and their positions as regional daimyo. There were other obligations, of course. Taxes had to be paid. Surveys had to be conducted to determine the exact value of fiefs in terms of the number of koku of rice they could annually produce.[15] Troops had to be contributed to the ongoing unification campaign. Family members had to be sent as hostages to Kyoto as an added assurance of loyalty, a common practice during this period. But these were not onerous burdens, certainly not when compared with the financial and human cost of continued war. Nor were they extracted without compensation; Hideyoshi was a generous hegemon. Daimyo joining him in his ongoing campaign of national unification were rewarded for their service with bigger fiefdoms, bigger incomes, and even occasional gifts of gold and silver and costly presents.

  Hideyoshi, then, was promising the daimyo of Japan security, stability, peace, and wealth, and all at the relatively modest price of acknowledging him as the nation’s ultimate lord and master. For many it was an offer they could not refuse. Certainly not every daimyo bowed before Hideyoshi without a fight. But those who did resist did not hold out for long or with nearly the ferocity that Nobunaga would have encountered, for the attractions of capitulation were now so much greater.

  The year 1584 saw Hideyoshi in a standoff with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the short, pudgy, wily daimyo of Mikawa and Totomi Provinces to the east of Kyoto. They engaged in two limited engagements early that year, but there seems to have been a feeling of mutual respect between the two men, for neither would launch a full-scale assault against the other. Instead they waited. Eventually the pragmatic Tokugawa gave in to the clearly more powerful Hideyoshi. He swore allegiance to him in 1586 and was allowed in return to keep all of his holdings. To seal the alliance, Ieyasu gave Hideyoshi his second son for adoption, and Hideyoshi gave Ieyasu his mother as a hostage and his half-sister in marriage. (She was already married but Hideyoshi had her divorced.)

  Chosokabe Motochika proved a more stubborn foe. He had recently made himself lord of all four provinces on Shikoku, the smallest of the three main islands comprising the Japanese archipelago (after Kyushu and Honshu; Hokkaido would not enter the Japanese polity for another three hundred years). As was becoming his practice, Hideyoshi sent a letter to Shikoku calling for its submission, but Chosokabe treated it with contempt. Hideyoshi therefore prepared to invade. With his step-brother Hidenaga and nephew Hidetsugu leading the way, Hideyoshi’s growing army of 150,000 men crossed the Inland Sea in 1585 and bulldozed the stubborn daimyo into submission within a month. Chosokabe wisely chose to surrender before his situation became completely hopeless and was allowed a fief of one province as a reward. The rest of the island Hideyoshi divided among his followers. He was now greater than his predecessor Oda Nobunaga, possessing fully one-half of Japan—and the richest and most populous half at that.

  Next it was Kyushu’s turn. Shimazu Yoshihisa was the dominant lord here. He possessed most of the territory on the island, and he had a formidable army and plenty of muskets manufactured in Kyushu’s own burgeoning arms-production centers. He consequently saw no reason to answer a peremptory call to surrender from an upstart daimyo on far-away Honshu. The Shimazu family, after all, had been a power on Kyushu for fourteen generations, while this Hideyoshi by all accounts was nothing more than a peasant. Hideyoshi responded with unprecedented force. Hidenaga led the way at the beginning of 1587 with an advance army of sixty thousand. Within two weeks two more generals arrived, bringing the number to ninety thousand. Then Hideyoshi himself landed with his main army, swelling the total force facing the Shimazu to an astounding quarter million men. Shimazu Yoshihisa surrendered four months later, shaving his head and adopting a monk’s name to show that the fight had left him. Like Chosokabe on Shikoku, he chose to sue for peace rather than fight to the end and was duly rewarded with territory on the southern end of the island valued at half a million koku.

  The provinces of eastern Honshu were the next to fall to Hideyoshi. The major campaign here was against Hojo Ujimasa, who held nine provinces centering on the present-day city of Tokyo, then a fishing village known as Edo. Once again the might of Hideyoshi’s new Japan was mobilized to bring this recalcitrant daimyo to heel. The onslaught quickly drove Hojo into siege in his castle at Odawara, a formidable structure of wide moats and thick stone ramparts and soaring keeps. Hideyoshi did not need to employ any labor-intensive siege-breaking strategies this time; no earthen dikes and diverted rivers were required now. He simply encircled the castle with his own line of moats and walls—placing the enemy “in a birdcage” as Hideyoshi called it[16]—and then settled his army down to wait in as much comfort as he could arrange. Merchants were invited to the camp, concubines were sent for, entertainers were brought in, buskers performed, tea ceremonies were held, and on the whole boredom and discontent were kept successfully at bay. The castle fell after four months, in September of 1590. The northern hinterland provinces of Dewa and Mutsu were easily subdued the following year, and with that the unification of Japan was complete.

  Unlike Chosokabe and Shimazu on the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu to the south, Hojo Ujimasa held out too long against Hideyoshi to merit any sort of clemency or concession. He was ordered to kill himself upon the fall of Odawara Castle. Eight of his nine provinces were given to Tokugawa Ieyasu as a reward for his help in the campaign. This greatly increased the value of Tokugawa’s fiefdom, making him the richest of Hideyoshi’s vassals. It also brought him more firmly under control, removing him from his traditional base in Mikawa and Totomi, where he commanded deep loyalties. This was a strategy Hideyoshi had come to rely upon heavily and one that he would use again and again in the years to come. By shifting his vassals from one fiefdom to another, he severed any bonds they had forged with the local population, particularly their ties with their own circle of vassals. By moving them to richer fiefdoms, he ensured that they went willingly. In this way Hideyoshi himself remained the only constant before the eyes of the Japanese people, the only target for their undivided loyalty.

  Throughout his rise to power Hideyoshi made great efforts to cast off his peasant origins and acquire higher social status. His first and most pressing task had been to acquire a suitable family name to add to the single one he had been allotted at birth. He started in the 1560s by borrowing the surname Kinoshita, “Under the Shade of the Tree,” from his wife’s side of the family. In 1573 he discarded this in favor of Hashiba, a combination of syllables from the names of two admired lieutenants in Nobunaga’s service. After succeeding Nobunaga in 1582, he looked about for something more regal, and eventually laid claim to the exalted Fujiwara name by being formally adopted by one of his socially eminent vassals. Finally, with national hegemony in his grasp, even this was not enough. He needed a new surname of his own, one to legitimate his house and his heirs for what he hoped would be decades of unchallenged family rule. He became Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi “The Bountiful Minister.”

  Hideyoshi also needed a title. He initially entertained the thought of becoming shogun, and applied to the former shogun Yoshiaki in 1585 to adopt him so that he could claim this appellation. Yoshiaki refused, stating that Hideyoshi’s lowly birth disqualified him from such a position. Yoshiaki was then residing under the protection of the Mori clan on the island of Kyushu
, which had not yet been conquered, so there was little Hideyoshi could do about the rebuff. Instead he settled for kampaku, “imperial regent,” a formerly lofty court position that had lost much of its importance over the preceding three centuries. He had the emperor remove the existing kampaku from office and assumed the role himself in 1585. Hideyoshi retained the title for six years, then passed it on to his nephew and just-named heir, Hidetsugu, in January of 1592. After that, and until his death, he was known as taiko, “retired imperial regent.”

  As Hideyoshi strove to acquire an impressive family name and lofty title, he also worked hard to develop the refined tastes of the upper class. From his lord Oda Nobunaga he acquired a taste for the tea ceremony. He would in time become a skilled practitioner of the art, with an unsurpassed collection of fine serving bowls and utensils and two portable tearooms that he carried with him in his travels around the country. He became reasonably adept at composing poems in renga, “linked verse,” sessions, a popular leisure-time activity in which participants improvised short poems in turn, responding to or continuing the thought in the previous verse until one hundred or more “links” had been created. Hideyoshi also became involved in noh theater, first as a benefactor and later as the star in specially commissioned plays dramatizing his many exploits, for example The Conquest of Akechi and The Conquest of Hojo.[17]

  By 1591, then, Hideyoshi, son of the peasant Yaemon from the village of Nakamura, was the supreme ruler of all Japan. His word was law from the balmy southern tip of Kyushu to Honshu’s snowy northern forests, from the lowest beggar to Emperor Go-Yozei himself. He had become progenitor of the powerful and illustrious house of Toyotomi, a noh artist, a dab hand at renga, and something of a national patriarch for the art of tea. It was, in short, the most astonishing political and social rise in the nation’s history, the ultimate expression of gekokuji.