A Brief History of Japan by Jonathan Clements

Author:Jonathan Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-4-8053-1389-3
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Barely ten years separate the birth dates of the three generals who would finally end the constant warring in Japan. It is hence entirely feasible, although rather unlikely, that all three of them might have been present one day in a garden or an orchard and noticed a hototogisu, or lesser cuckoo.

When the cuckoo fails to sing, it’s Oda Nobunaga, the tyrant of Japanese history, who speaks first. A violent man who saw his first battle at age thirteen, he had supported the last Ashikaga shōgun only to overthrow him when he outlived his usefulness. It was Nobunaga who declared war on the fighting monks of Mount Hiei when they threatened his Kyōto power base, and ruthlessly conquered half of Japan by the time he was assassinated by one of his own generals. It is hence Nobunaga, the force of nature who lives only for war, who is heard to decree that the cuckoo must die.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98) speaks next. A new-made man who had risen swiftly through Nobunaga’s ranks as a foot soldier and a specialist in siege warfare, his nickname in his younger days had been the Monkey, for his simian face. Nobody would dare call him that in later life, as he avenged Nobunaga’s death and carried his campaigns to the edge of Japan and beyond. It was Hideyoshi who would unite all of Japan in his campaigns of conquest, and who would begin the efforts to demilitarize the nation with his Sword Hunts, confiscating weapons from peasants who would surely no longer need them. It was Hideyoshi who organized a census in 1590, confident that all Japan was his and that the time had come to turn a machine of military conquest into one of national government. Under Hideyoshi’s rule, the value of any lord’s holdings was determined in rice—the tonnage it was expected to generate in a given harvest—a portion of which had to be paid to him. As his reign proceeded, he tore down castles in pacified areas, issued new coins, and proclaimed his ownership of the land’s silver and gold mines, as well as strict controls over foreign trade. Faced with a huge faction of idle samurai, it was Hideyoshi who cunningly shipped some 158,000 of them abroad—for it was Hideyoshi who proclaimed Japan’s new frontier in Korea, declaring that his forces would cross the Korea Strait, seize control of the entire peninsula, and then, ultimately, march on China.

It was a ludicrous and unlikely enterprise, but one into which the samurai threw themselves with gusto in 1592. Historians are still divided as to whether Hideyoshi had gone insane and wanted to proclaim himself the ruler of the world, or whether his grand scheme was the ultimate in political calculation, pushing the deadly energies of the samurai class into a foreign war that would keep them busy for years. Unlike the Kamakura shōgunate, which had failed to reward its warriors with new lands, Hideyoshi offered them the rest of the world, and packed them off to die fighting for it.

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