Dan Snow's History Hit - How Did Three Samurai Warlords Unite Japan?

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Today, we dive into the chaotic final act of Japan’s Warring States period, and hear about the three warlords who brought it to an end. Oda Nobunaga, the ruthless innovator who shattered the status quo on the battlefield. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the peasant-born schemer who climbed from the lowest social ranks to the very top of Japan's hierarchy. And Tokugawa Ieyasu, the patient survivor who outlasted them all and built a shogunate that would rule Japan for over 250 years.Joining us for this is Chris Harding, a cultural historian of Japan, India and East-West connections, based at the University of Edinburgh.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi folks, welcome to the show. For more than a century, Japan had been at war with itself. Samurai trampled paddy fields, towns burned, populations were put to the sword. It began with a power struggle in the capital, an emperor without control, a shogunate torn apart by interneissine struggle. Now armies criss-cross a land of smoking ruins to a soundtrack of weeping survivors. This was the Sengoku Jedi, Japan's warring state period. And out of that chaos rose three warlords, each driven by their vision for United Japan.

This is a story of how these three very different men ended a century of civil war and the battles, the betrayals and their brutal decisions that built the foundations of modern Japan. Joining us today, I'm very pleased to serve with Chris Harding. He's a cultural historian of Japan, India and East-West Connections. He's joined us many times before for the podcast, and he's going to take us through the lives of these three pivotal figures in Japanese history. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The Thomas bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black quaint unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift-off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Good to see you, Chris. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having you. Tell me about Japan in around 1400, before this great crisis. What do we mean when we talk about Japan? How united and powerful is it? So I suppose at this point, around 1400, the most important part of Japan is Kyoto. You've got the emperor there, but his day-to-day job is really just saying prayers, performing these rituals for the good of the country. Person in charge is the shogun, also based in Kyoto. This is the Ashikaga shoguner, it's called. They've been around, for a while, but across the 1400s, their power over Japan is starting to crumble.

Okay, but in 1400 or so, it's still one reasonably coherent kingdom. Yeah, so it's divided into provinces and the Ashikaga shogunate ruling most of those from Kyoto with a kind of reasonably iron fist. Okay, and do we need to get rid of our kind of European mindset? But when you say provinces, are we talking sort of feudal lords and castles that sort of fall out with each other and are kind of really, really powerful of their own little regions? Is Europe a decent sort of parallel? Yeah, it's not bad. I think probably the difference is that Japan isn't yet in the era of fabulous castles.

We kind of get to that, I suppose, a little bit later in time. Ideally, in terms of the shogunate, they rule from Kyoto, and they send out a kind of warrior constable figure to rule over the different provinces. So they're supposed to report back to Kyoto, and Kyoto is where the real power is supposed to be. Okay, so what goes wrong in the 1400s? So we think what happens around the 1460s is there is a dispute over who the next shogun is going to be. So you've always got this kind of tension, I think, between the shoguns in Kyoto on the one hand and these warrior constables out in the provinces who are supposed to report back to Kyoto. In reality, they're trying to build up their own power bases. And so you get quite powerful families, including a family called the Yamana and a family called the Hosokawa. And they have a disagreement which turns into a very bloody war about who's going to be in charge, basically, of the next shogun.

So they're kind of a war to control the throne, if you like. So the shogun controls the emperor, but not. Now these families want to control the show. Exactly. So it's kind of puppets on strings in this kind of weird series. And so these two families disagree and then they start duking it out. And basically between about 1467, 1477, half of Kyoto goes up in flames. It's like 30,000 houses are burned to the ground. And more and more warrior constables from all around Japan start getting drawn into what begins as a squabble between two families. And so you end up with a massive war called the Onin War, which lasts for ten.

10 years, 67 to 77, but actually it represents really the end of the Ashikaga Shogunate. They never managed to gain control of Japan again, and you get this kind of progressive descent into chaos over the decades that follow. And I guess when you've got chaos, you've got these powerful families sort of shoring up their power base in all these different regions. It becomes quite hard to impose any order on that. Absolutely. So I suppose in Japan, the real source of wealth is going to be something like rice.

So out in the countryside, you've got these different provinces where, the families have been trying to build up their own power basis for a while. And when Kyoto is this kind of center of power just really seems to disappear. I mean, half of it literally disappears. But as a center of power, it's basically over. And so instead, I suppose you could say Japan turns into a sort of patchwork quilt of about 120 different domains, all at war with each other. They're kind of fighting or intermarrying or spying with one another, really just vying

to slightly grow their own little domain. And meanwhile, before we talk about some of the great war laws that emerged, just remind ourselves that the emperor is sitting there just saying his prayers and doing his thing, but it's just a pawn in the hands of these various warlords, see? Yeah, do you know what? You've got a now and again, I think, feel a bit sorry for the emperess in Japan. If you go back long enough, they kind of had a heyday around 900,000, they were in charge and they were wealthy, and people respected them and did what they said. Really, after that, it all starts to go wrong.

There are stories actually around this time of emperors who died, and then they couldn't be given a funeral because their families didn't have any money to bury them with. Imperial temples and shrines and palaces are falling into disrepair. So it's not a very happy time, I think, to be an emperor in Japan, really for the next few hundred years. So the real power is out in these domains. They're increasingly fighting it out between each other. And what I suppose starts to happen is you get three or four families who do well enough that they become major players. And this is where you get into this really interesting period, really beginning around the middle of the 16th century,

where bit by bit things begin to come together again. And is that what people want for things to come together again? Is this idea, oh, what a shame, we're all disunited, but what we need to is unify again? Does that unifying idea drive those warlords? It's a good question. I think for the warlords, it does. For ordinary people, most people in this period

would not have described themselves as Japanese. They would have said, I come from this village. Maybe I come from this domain. That might be kind of the extent of it. So I don't think there's a memory for most Japanese of saying, we used to be a united country, we need to get that way again. For most Japanese, the emperor, they will vaguely know that he exists and that maybe he's divinely descended, you know, descended from the gods. But there's no sense of connection with the emperor either.

So for ordinary Japanese people, I think what they probably want is to be able to live peacefully, to stop having members of their family recruited to armies. So stop having armies basically trampling through their fields when they're trying to grow crops. They just want peace. What the warlords want, especially the big ones, I think, is to try to capture Kyoto. That's where the emperor still is. And he's a source of legitimacy, even though he hasn't got much power and not much cash either. So if you can capture Kyoto, it still means a great deal. The Ashikaga Shogans are still there, poor little things with no real power.

But again, if you can capture the city, you've got the shogunate and you've got the emperor sort of under your command. So I think that's probably the big prize. As ever, normal people just want peace. Yeah, they just want to get on their lives. Well, the lunatics who have power over us are fighting it out. Yes. And the rest of us bleed and pay for it. Okay, so tell me about these families, such a motor, the unifiers.

We've got a couple of warlords that, one after the other. Tell me about the first warlord. So the first warlord, Oda Nobunaga, he's probably, for Japanese people, he's probably the best known, maybe not best-loved figure in their history. So he's born in 1534, in quite a small province, O'Wadi province, not one of the big players at the time. And he's the kind of son who I think probably embarrasses his father. He gets this nickname.

Very relatable. The great fool of Awadi province. So he dresses badly. He likes to wrestle in the mud with commoners, even though he's of quite high samurai status. He wanders around town sort of stuffing his face with rice cakes, etc. I think the senior people around his father in Awadi province really worry what happens when our lord dies and this great fool takes over.

And unfortunately, that theory gets tested. quite soon. 1551, his father dies. And still he seems a bit mad. The son Nobunaga, so at his father's funeral, he storms in, takes a handful of incense, throws it at the altar, and then wanders out again. He also has, we think, we think this is a true story, the Buddhist priests who prayed for his father's recovery unsuccessfully, gathered into a Buddhist temple, surrounded by people with rifles, matchlocks, and shot to death. So he's a very, very strange person, really hard to know. This comes to us from actually a loyal biographer of his. So this is the kind of varnished version

of what this man was really like. But actually, very quickly, over the course of the 1550s, he turns out to be quite a good leader, quite a strategic thinker. So he mops up, as is often the way, he's got members of his family who might be his rival,

so he mops them up. Straight, get rid of them. He takes care of them. And I think what really changes it in terms of his reputation, in 1560, he wins this famous battle, Okaazama,

against a much larger force. There's a very, very power. powerful warlords called Imagawa Yoshimoto. He wants to go through Odonobanagas province to get to Kyoto, you know, this big prize. You'd have thought it'd be quite easy because Odenobanaga is this young man, not very well experienced, not many troops. But actually, Odenobanaga at dawn, surprises his enemy in the rain, defeats him, kills Imagawa. And suddenly this guy, this strange young man from a very small family, looks like being a major player. And that's where I think his kind rise to become this great warlord begins.

It's so funny, it's a bit of digression here. you're talking to me, I'm so much more familiar with the medieval European stuff, as I said earlier. Should we be really cautious coming from our European standpoint, think that's a bit like the Plantagenet's, you know, you seize the throne, deal with your annoying nephew, secure your own and then you start fighting outsides. Is what strikes you about Japanese history while we're on the subject, quickly diversion? Is it useful to think about these similarities, or is that dangerous, do you think? No, I think it's good. I think so much depends on blood and on family. So that's consistent across this vast distance.

I think that's true. And I think there's a willingness to deal rather brutally, even with members of your own family, you know, if it comes to it. And I don't know about in the European context, but in Japan, another thing that really strikes me is the taking of other people's family members as hostages. Yes. So women and children, as a kind of guarantee, right, of good behavior. And Aldo Nobunaga, one of the things that always gets me about him is that he's pretty pitiless.

If someone crosses him and he's got their children somewhere, in a castle, he will march them out in public and burn them at the stake or nail them to a cross or have them shot. Whatever it takes, there's no line of bloodletting, including women and children, that he won't cross. And I don't know how bloody Europe is. I think Japan would at least rival Europe for sheer bloodiness in this period. Well, that reminds because King Stephen had William the Marshall as a boy and led him to the gallows and William Marshall was apparently quite sweet. And King Stephen went, oh, I'm not going to kill him. Can't do that. It's a nice lad.

See, I don't see much of that in Japan. Well, but then King Stephen, you know, didn't thrive, right? He ended up, anyway, never mind. We don't have to go to that. But so, yeah, maybe he should have been a bit more like the Japanese. Okay, so he, the great fool is telling out not to be such a fool. He's doing well. He is.

And I suppose across the 1560s, then he builds up his power, battle after battle. And one of the great things for him is in this area of warfare, you've got, of course, samurai on horseback, bows and arrows. You've also got what they call Ashley Garu foot soldiers. Peasants fighting for loot. Generally. Yes. So again, Samurai are sort of high-status knights with all the kit on horseback. Right.

Yes. Okay. And then these peasants are so lowly that at the beginning you wouldn't even give them armour because they're expendable. Yeah. You can pick up some new ones later on. And so Nobunaga picks up more and more foot soldiers in particular. So his army is growing.

By 1568, he's ready to do the thing everyone wants to do, which is March on Kyoto. And sorry, these foot soldiers, you mentioned matchlock muskets earlier. It's very interesting. Yeah. We're in the gunpowder age. Is there a technological edge to what he's doing? Is he just got more money? he's just hiring more soldiers doing right things?

Or is he arming them a bit differently? Is he got a sort of qualitative advantage over his enemies? I think Nobunaga's important because he's one of the warlords who is the quickest to take up the use of these archibuses, I suppose. So the Portuguese, just a very brief digression, the Portuguese arrive in Japan. They're spreading themselves around Asia in the middle of the 16th century. They arrive in Japan at the end of the 1540s.

They bring these weapons. And the Japanese very quickly are adapting them, making their own. By the end of the century, they're making tens of thousands per year. And Nobunaga is one of those who gets onto this quite quickly. So gunpowder, pioneered in East Asia, travels along to Europe that is then sailed back to Asia by the Portuguese and reintroduce. There's now an indigenous sort of culture of innovation and building in Japan. Yes, absolutely. It's funny, isn't it? And there used to be a myth, I think, that the samurai wouldn't use these weapons because they were too good. You know, you can learn to use one of these weapons in a few minutes, right? To learn to

use a bone arrow or a sword. Well, it's a kind of a lifetime task. So there's a myth that they didn't want to use them. But actually, O'Donobanaki himself trained on them. So the samurai did use them, but it was often these peasants who were given them. And if you were going to get yourself a new kit of armour in this period, one of the most valuable kinds of armour with the breastplate would be one with a dent in it, because you know that it can start the bullet. You know, you don't have to trust the word of an armour. You can see with your own eyes, yes, this piece of armour is going to keep me safe. So he's good at that. Nobunaga is, I think, famous for beginning to use these weapons very well. And at a later battle, we'll get onto it, but he uses

these weapons in a particularly innovative way. So he marches on Kyoto, 1568. The 68, exactly. Yeah. And he gets an excuse to do it because a young pretender, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, a member of the Ashikaga family, you know, this shogonal family, he wants the job of Shogun, even though it doesn't come with much real power anymore. But Nubunaga sort of does a deal with him. He says, okay, I'll put you on the shogunal throne in Kyoto. You hear this a bit in Europe, don't you? In return, I will basically be in charge. Interestingly, Nobunaga doesn't want to become Shogun himself.

I'm not really interested in titles. He's interested in pure power. He has this motto, rule the realm by force. And that's all he believes in. Famously, because the Jesuits who were in Japan in this period trying to make Christian converts, they question him about what do you believe in, which gods, etc. And Nobunaga says, I don't believe in any gods.

I don't believe in life after death. I don't believe clearly in mercy for other people. all he believes in, two things really, absolute power and his own security. So he has this small band of horse guards, he called him, this kind of elite, like his personal security force, always round him. And he's always drinking and carousing with these guys. And on one occasion, they have the skulls of their enemies lacquered in gold and silver, and they drink sake out of them. So you can just imagine the kind of personality that we're sort of talking about here.

But anyway, that's what he does and doesn't believe in. And so once he's got Kyoto and he's got this new Shogun under his thumb, he's in a really good position. But one thing about Japan, I think, in this period that really annoys Nobunaga is a real priority for him. And again, I don't know how powerful, say, the Christian church were militarily in different parts of Europe around this time. But in Japan, in the middle of the 1500s, Buddhism's been around for a thousand years. Some of the big Buddhist sects are not just very wealthy and they're great sponsors of art, etc. But they have their own mini armies, these warrior monks called Sohe. I'm not surprised. It sounds like a dangerous neighbourhood.

It really is, yeah, for your basic self-defense. But actually, often it's the Buddhist tour causing the trouble in Japan. So there's a particular sect called Tendai. If you think of the city of Kyoto, it's surrounded by mountains on many of its sides. One of the reasons it was chosen right for a capital. One of the mountains, Mount Hyia, the whole mountain is controlled by the Tendai sect. And what they'll often do now and again is they will send bands of warrior monks down the mountains. into Kyoto and they'll set fire to the temples.

Classic Buddhist. It's funny, isn't it? It's what we come to really know and love. Yeah, it's funny. Buddhism has that reputation, but clearly, you know, in this era, they're prepared to get their hands dirty and quite bloody. And so once he's got Kyoto, what Nobunaga doesn't want is this powerful Buddhist force literally overlooking him from this huge mountain, Mount Yi. So a few years later, 1571, and this is, again, this is maybe where he gets his nickname, the demon king from.

And much as I want to like this guy because of all the innovative things he did, This mountain was home to thousands of people, not just monks, but also ordinary men, women, children, just living on the mountain. And he sends a kind of demand. He says, if the Tendai Buddhist sect will stay out of these wars that are going on, because he wants to control the whole of Japan, then maybe he'll leave them alone. Tendai Buddhist sect, for whatever reason, decide not to acquiesce to that. And so Nubunaga, early autumn, I think, 1571, has the mountains surrounded, 30,000 battle-hardened men, sends them up the mountain. mountain, killing everybody in sight, beheading children, sort of shooting people. He has his snipers doing this. By the end of that period, everything on the mountain is gone. You've got maybe

3,000 Buddhist temples have been looted. They've been burned to the ground. Everyone's dead. And the Chronicle of Nobunaga, one of our sources for this period, says not even a badger or a fox moved on the mountain anymore. So completely heartless. But for Nobunaga, who doesn't believe in anything, what you cannot have is these religious groups wading into politics. he's probably most famous for basically destroying Japan's Buddhist establishment. That is astonishing. So the demon king, but you know, you get this with the manga, where we get this in every print. Is there a sense he's justifying it thinking actually that monstrous barbarism eventually makes easier to achieve peace because people are less

like to oppose me? I mean, there's a demonstrative effect to that. That's true. There's a reason behind it, isn't there? I think also one of his biographers at the time, who was a kind of loyal retainer of his, seemed to hint that Nobunaga might have believed in destiny, sort of not like in a sort of 21st century woo-woo type way, but the idea that there is some kind of force-controlling events and that Nobunaga maybe is an instrument of definitely. Sure, that's what they always say about. Yeah, that's true. Well, I suppose if you're him, you know, from a teenager onwards, you start to win battle

after battle against the odds. You start to think, actually, I might be quite a pivotal figure. No, in my country's history. So I think he has that view, but he also has a view that absolutely no one can stand in his way. There's a lovely set of orders he gives to a Chicago-Yoshe. That's that guy who he promotes has installed a shogun right in Kyoto 1568. He's basically lecturing him.

He's saying, you've been doing this when you should have done that. Do this, do the other thing. Negotiate with me more. Consult me more. This laundry list of complaints against the shogun in Kyoto. And then at the end he says, that is all. So this really high-handed way that he treats the shogun in Kyoto, I think really reveals a lot about Nobunaga's personality. And it gets him into trouble.

So we've just been talking about 1571, this great. bloody victory of the Buddhists, right, on Mount Hia. Just a couple of years later, the Shogun in Kyoto has, I think, had enough of Nobunaga. There's still a sense amongst some in Japan that Nobunaga is from a fairly small middling family. He's not got the right blood. He doesn't really deserve the kind of successes, right, that he's been having. And so the Shogun says, 1573, I've had enough of this guy. He starts negotiating with some of the warlords who are still left and they remain enemies of Nobunaga. And he tries to get them. all together to basically do away with Nobunaga. It's probably 1573. It's the moment when

Nobunaga is in the most trouble. He's got a lot of powerful enemies, including someone called Takeda Shingengen, and they do start to club together. He gets really lucky. Maybe it's destiny. He gets really lucky. He is touched by destiny. Yeah. Takeda Shingen falls ill, either ill or perhaps wounded by a bullet, we don't know, but he dies, and his army just go home. They've lost their leader, so they kind of upsticks and head back to their home province. And after that, opposition to Nobunaga starts to crumble away. And the rest of that decade, the 1570s, it's victory after victory. And it might be worth, because you were asking about firearms,

one of his big victories worth talking about 1575, Battle of Nagashino, it's called. Some people might have heard of it. It's often remembered as the big revolutionary gunpowder battle, right? The story goes that Nobunaga sets his archibisias in ranks behind palisades, Because it takes a while, right, to reload, get ready again. He has them firing in ranks. And this, it said, mows down the cavalry of his enemies. And it's this incredibly innovative use of gunpowder.

That's probably true to some extent. But there are other things going on. Like we think that the weather's not on the side of his enemy, heavy rain, their cavalry struggles a bit. And they fail to encircle nobunaga. So there are the reasons why. But nevertheless, he starts to acquire this reputation, which he's had really ever since, of being someone who is just a cut above in terms of strategic thinking,

in terms of what he's willing to get his people to do, and in terms of this extraordinary use of firearms. So Nagashina 1575, I think it's quite a big moment. And really after that, he's almost unchallenged. He's just mopping up enemy after enemy. And what's his relationship up with the shogun who was working against him? So the shogun, yeah, poor old Ashkaga Yoshiaki, this short-lived uprising he tries to initiate against Nobunaga because it completely fails.

What you can't do is kill him. It's funny where the lines sometimes get drawn because he's of that blood, of that family. So instead he gets sent out into exile. Apparently he ends his life just as a kind of wandering hermit with no money, no cash, no supporters. And for Nobunaga, that's perfect. You cross him.

That's what you get. But does the shogunate endure? So that Yoshiyaki becomes the last Chicago Shogun. So this grand shogunate that's been around in Japan since the 14th century ends with one man. completely defeated, wandering around penniless. And he's effectively unified Japan now? Pretty much.

Yeah. So Nominaga, he's done it. He's won the Game of Thrones. Yeah. He has it. If you think about a kind of map of Japan, most of this action is taking place in the main island of Japan. We call it Honshu.

So it's this crescent-shaped island. It's home to what we now think of as Tokyo, Osaka, obviously Kyoto, etc. So much of the central part of Honshu, which is where all the big warlords, most of the big warlords, anyway, are Odonabunaga has taken it. He's in charge of it. What happens next is, sadly, for him, he's just about to head west. There are still some fairly powerful wallaws to the west,

and he wants to try and take care of them if he can. But yeah, one summer's night, June 1582, he's in this temple in Kyoto, Honodji, which he's in quite often, it's well defended, he knows it quite well. He's sitting there at night with some of his men, and they hear footsteps, They hear a kind of commotion outside, and they think there must be just a bit of local trouble happening in the town, nothing more than that. But then suddenly these men come crashing in. One of his generals, Akechimitsu Hide, has decided to go against Nobunaga. And whether Nobunaga was naive or not, he'd been quite rude to this general. Let's just sort of back up a bit and think about this guy, Akechimitsihide.

A couple of reasons why this might be happening. One more likely is that he reprimanded this general publicly. humiliated him on a few occasions in front of his men and in front of other generals. And pride being what it is in any place in time, male pride particularly, maybe he's got something against Nobunaga after that. The other story, which is more immediately a very, very good reason to go against him, is that perhaps Nobunaga had taken this general's mother as a hostage and then had her executed. So that would be a fairly straightforward reason for Aka Chimizhiira to do what he did. But we think that mother story may be sort of a bit of an urban myth from a later generation.

Whatever the reason, Archichimitsihira leads thousands of men crashing into this temple. And Nobunaga yells out, treason, top of his voice, takes up his bow and arrow, starts fighting. His men are getting involved. They're massively outnumbered. He moves to his sphere after that. It gets to be more close quarters fighting. But it's clear it's not going to happen. After everything he's done, something as simple as kind of personal security seems to have failed him.

So he retires to this side room and he performs Sepuku ritual. suicide. And that's the end of Oda Nobunaga, far too early for many of his great fans. How old approximately would he say? So he's born in what, 34, let's do the math, this is 82, so what would be that? My goodness, 48. Is that the right? It was a young man. He's just hitting his peak. I think so, yeah, he seemed to be sort of in fine health. Well, you could have had a few, yeah, you could have had some more time. Yeah, he could have another sort of 10, 15 years and he would have got further into the west of Japan. But to his enemies, the idea that Odonobanaga would die in a burning temple,

if you think about what he did to the Buddhists on Mount Hia, then it's sort of... Huberous. It's hubris, and it's justice working itself out. There was a lovely legend that actually built up on the basis that his body was never discovered. And so perhaps he was there behind the scenes or stalking his enemies, but who knows?

But we think that was the end in a big fiery death. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit. The best is yet. to come. Stick with us. And then, are we back to square one? Is there a vacuum with all the warlords pile in again, or is there a success that emerges quite quickly that can retain that sort of patrimony? It's a great question. There's a lovely phrase in Japan, a lot of schoolchildren learn. And it goes something like this.

Nobunaga pounded the rice, Hideyoshi baked the cake, Tokugawa Iayasu ate it. And so these three guys that we're talking about, one after the other, each builds on what the other achieved. So the person to benefit from everything that Nobunaga did was a really lowly guy called Hideyoshi. He starts out life as a peasant. Funnily enough, his name means great good fortune, something like that. And it really turns out to be true of how this man's life pans out. Starts off as a peasant, carries Nobunaga's sandals for him. That's his whole job at the beginning.

And Nobunaga calls him little monkey. Now and again, he calls him bald rat. Apparently Hideyoshi was quite short of hair. I think sometimes he actually, with the equivalent of a... pen drew fake hair on the top of his head to try and make up for things. But he catches Nobunaga's eye. I think there's a kind of man after his own heart, someone who is, he knows his times strategically on the battlefield. He's a good negotiator. He's a good persuader. He can often avoid a battle, this is Hideyoshi. He can often avoid a battle just by persuading someone, offering

them the thing that he knows they want. Very, very smart. So he rises up to become a big trusted general of Nobunaga. And when Nobunaga dies, as you can can imagine, there's a big ruckus amongst his generals for who's going to basically take hold of everything that Nobunaga's built up. And within less than two weeks, Hideyoshi has force-marched his army from where they were a long way away, taken on the traitor, Akechimitsu-Hide, defeated him, cut off Akechimitsu-Hide's head, and he said to have taken the head back to Honnoggi Temple in Kyoto when Nobunaga died and presented it to his spirit there, saying, I've done my job. Having done that, within a few short weeks and months, he takes care of all these other pretenders to Nobunaga's legacy,

including some of his sons. Again, probably a parallel, I think, with Europe in this point, you know, when someone dies, their sons would be expected to sort of inherit, and there'd be a big and bloody period of competition between them. Nobunaga had 11 sons. You can only imagine how potentially, you know, confusing it was, but Hideyoshi quite quickly takes care of the first two. And by doing that, he establishes himself as the natural heir of Nobunaga. And so for the next few years, is Hideyoshi is building himself up more and more. And he's someone worth getting to know another extraordinary personality. Must have been quite the balancing act, presenting yourself as the air

for those Nobunana loyalists, but also while trying to nobble his sons. Like pulling that off was quite impressive. It's a good point. Yeah, I think it was. I think one thing that shows that was on Hideyoshi's mind a lot is that very soon after he manages to get this new status for himself, he goes to Kyoto and he has himself given this rank of an imperial courtier. He gets this quite senior actually imperial rank in the end. So whereas Nobunaga was all about raw power, didn't need ranks. Hideyoshi, I think as a peasant who then takes over someone else's legacy, has to have that aristocratic rank, gets himself a surname, Toy or Tommy. So he needs those kind of bells and whistles, really, to present himself as being a serious contender. But I think also

there's just a sense that, as I say, what Nobunaga saw in him, he often reminds me a little bit. There's a loose parallel between, I think, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, when we think about Hideyoshi and Nobunaga. So you've got two quite lowly people who rise up by knowing what's required and knowing what their master wants and providing it for them. You know, and for a while, of course, that works for Cromwell and then not so much later on in his relationship with Henry VIII. With Hideyoshi, he consistently produces what Nobunaga wants. And so when he's taken over that legacy, I think a lot of other senior generals in Japan realize this guy has what it takes. They throw in their lot with him.

And then they continue this process of steadily expanding this realm that Nobunaga has started to put together. And I suppose one of the big things that Hideyoshi achieves in doing that, somewhere that Nobunaga never went. Again, if we think about the kind of archipelago of Japan, a crescent-shaped archipelago, Honshu being the main island we just talked about. There's a big island to the south called Kushu. Nobunaga had never got there. It's a really interesting island in this period, actually, because the giant.

Jesuits and also Portuguese traders, this is where they've made their base of operations, several ports around this island, including, of course, Nagasaki, which everyone knows. Bizarly, the Jesuits actually own Nagasaki. One of the warlords in Kushu converts to Christianity, and he says, look, I'll give you this port, quite a small port, but the Jesuits develop it. And with Portuguese trade coming in between Japan and India, Japan and China, also all the way between Japan and Europe, actually, really lucrative trade. With all that trade, Nagasaki grows up, becomes this big base for the Jesuits.

Hideyoshi, if we think about Nobunaga's big enemy being the Buddhists and he wiped out their power. For Hideyoshi, his big enemy was Christianity. What he couldn't stand once he started to hear about it was the idea that on this island of Kyushu, Jesuits have lots of power. You've got lots of feudal lords who become Christians, who therefore maybe their loyalty is owed more towards Rome or maybe Portugal or Spain. unacceptable. He also hears that Buddhist temples and Shintosh shrines have been destroyed by Christians as part of, you know, pushing their own new religion. He also hears a rumor that Japanese women are being enslaved by Christians. This is a little bit more shaky in terms of its truth.

But he's absolutely furious. And so he launches not only a war on Kyushu, and he takes Kyushu actually quite quickly, but also a war on Christianity. At first he tries to get rid of the missionaries. then he realizes that, well, maybe trade with the Portuguese is valuable enough that I should keep them around. But there are stories and, you know, true stories now and again of him crucifying Christians, including famously crucifying 26 so-called martyrs on a hill overlooking Nagasaki, just to remind them of who the power is and that Christians, if they want to survive in Japan, need to acknowledge Hideyoshi. Because the interesting thing about him is where Nobunaga is really bloody, Hideyoshi, and to some extent it's quite touching and interesting and romantic, but in other ways it's terrifying. There are no limits to his vision of power. And I wonder, we're talking now about the 1580s and the 1590s. I wonder who would be an equivalent figure in Europe.

But he has Japan, most of it by this point, but next he wants Korea. Then he wants to treat the Korean Peninsula sort of like China's driveway and head. into China, take China. He's heard of India from the missionaries, so he wants to take India. Right. Then he writes threatening letters to the Spanish in the Philippines, says, either you show me some respect or I'm going to come from Manila. There's just this kind of megalomaniac tendency in him that builds up, becomes paranoia in later life and we'll get to that. But this extraordinary man who, having had this amount of success early on, doesn't want to put any limits on how far he might go. It's amazing. So before we look at what happens beyond the waves,

How does he change Japan itself? Because he makes domestic, quite important domestic reforms. Yeah, he does. And I think this is a thread through Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and then our final person will get on to you later, Tokugawa, EAS. They all build on one another. So Nobunaga and Hideoshi together, they do a few important things.

One of the things they start to do is to reform. And this was a kind of part of history that never gets me that excited, but it is important nevertheless. They try and work out how much tax different villages in Japan ought to be paying. Once you've worked that out and you work out how to collect the money, then you have a significant tax base for fighting further wars, building up a bit of infrastructure. So they do that.

Well, that all matters. It does, exactly. It might not be the most gamers, but yeah, building a big war chests, regularizing taxation, all that stuff. Yes, you need it. And if you've got economic historians out there, that's literally their bread and butter. Yeah.

We shan't be rude about it. So they do that. Hideyoshi also launches what's called a sword hunt. So he thinks basically in the new Japan that he's building, only samurai should bear arms. So peasants who in the past, you know, we said they used to fight as foot soldiers, their firearms are taken away, their swords are taken away, anything that's sharp and pointy is taken away. So they no longer can bear arms. I think that's quite important just for starting to temper some of the chaos that Japan has been subject to in this period. So they do that. They also, started by Hideyoshi actually, they launch a kind of, you could basically call it a hostage system whereby rival feudal lords. If officially and on paper they're now your allies. You can require them to send members of their family to reside with you so, you know, as a kind of guarantee of good behavior. So he starts to do that.

I think the last thing he does, which also is really important, is he tries to establish a class system in Japan, more or less setting it in stone. So that if you're born into samurai class, that's fine. That's who you'll be. If you're born a peasant, you'll stay in your village. You'll have very little chance for social or geographical mobility. Ironically, you're not going to his background. Exactly. But isn't it often the case, I suppose, that someone who's a social climber then kicks away the ladder. It's kind of, I think, that he's one of those people.

He sort of does that. And the other thing he does is he has a very, very low view of the peasantry, which then carries on, I think, through the Tochaggard period. He has these phrases like, squeeze them like seeds in terms of their tax money, right? Or peasants should be suspended between life and death. In terms of whatever their yield is, they can keep roughly a third, and then they give roughly two-thirds away. And if you're more or less on the poverty line already

in terms of producing enough to feed your family, then that's extraordinarily serious. And later on it becomes a really big issue for Japan. So he's taking away their weapons, he's taken away their sort of ability to aspire to progress, to sort of build their own following. And he's taking away all their surplus value.

They're just battery packs for his state. Exactly. He's really hammering. I suppose what they get in return is that the risk, exactly, the risk of having samurai charge to cross your rice paddy on their horses is now more or less gone. And he's also got this status with the imperial family. And he starts building these fantastic castles.

So this sense of display of his own legitimacy, I think he's quite good. He's made Japan great again. He has, yes, that's a lovely way of putting it. Okay, so he's done all that domestically. Does he start acting out his grandiose ambitions? Does he sail beyond the seas? Yes, exactly. He does.

I think if that had just remained a fantasy in his own mind and he'd focused on Japan, I think the Koreans in particular would have thanked him for it. Instead, he sends across a huge army from Kusuf, this southern island, across to the southern part of Korea in 1592. I don't want to open up a whole not can of what I'm saying. Is this the first time we see Japan's for an extent beyond the archipelago? Or is there a deep history of Korea or has it often been a tilt yard for Japanese ambitions? Yeah, it's a good question. Funnily enough, if you go back far enough many, many centuries, the traffic has often been the other way. so that China and Korea are sending across techniques of working iron, rice agriculture, etc. And wars on the Korean Peninsula and wars within Japan often spill over. So there's quite a bit of a history. The straight, of course, between the Green Peninsula and Japan is very thin.

And we've talked in the past about the old Mongols trying to get across Japan as well. So, okay, so often it's been the other way. But for Japan to try and build Asian empire on the mainland? That's fairly new for this level of ambition. And certainly the level of success, actually, that they enjoy early on. So Hideyoshi himself doesn't go. Nobunaga used to lead from the front. Hideyoshi tends not to do that, which is probably wise in this case.

So they send across all these samurai to southern part of the Korean Peninsula. They then fight their way up from Pisan through Seoul up to Pyongyang, all these names with modern residents. They're there at this time. They get almost all the way to the border with China in a very bloody series of battles, but within a year they're there. And then kind of like, you know, that beginning of the old Dad's Army, credits on the TV where they got the arrows working their way up, the arrows start to then work

their way down. So the Chinese... It's 1950 all over again. I mean, you don't want to look for these obvious parallels, but it's shocking, isn't it? It's exactly the same as well. It's a very similar story. No, no, it really is. It really is a very good parallel. So having done that well, they're chased down again. Chinese are there, Korean guerrillas, also the Korean Navy to give them their due. They have these amazing ships, which have an iron ceiling, so you can't fire arrows at them. spikes around the side so you can't board them. And they also have a dragon's head, I think, at the prow of the ship, which spews smoke so that you can't really see them coming. So for their time, you know, they're quite innovative. So for all these sorts of reasons, Hiliu's forces are then

pushed right the way back down the Korean Peninsula. And this war and then another one, again, he tries again in Korea a few years later, again in the 1590s. But those two conflicts together are possibly the bloodiest war in the whole of the 16th century anywhere in the world. So it's up to a million people when you count on both sides who die to achieve literally nothing except for lasting, deep lasting animosity between Korea and Japan. And it's hard to see why Hideyoshi was so fixated on it. Apart from, and again, it's always a bit dodgy to speculate about what happens to someone's mind at such a great distance of time, right?

But he seems to descend into a kind of paranoia. And I suppose one thing that stands out for me for him in this period is a famous tea ceremony master called Senorikyu. He's probably the most famous tea master in the whole of Japanese history. He serves Nobunaga. Later he serves Hideyoshi. And Hideyoshi falls out with him so badly, I think because of Hideyoshi's paranoia, that not only does he have Senorikyu take his own life, he then has a wooden statue of Senorikyu,

nailed to a cross and paraded through Kyoto as a sign of Hideoshi's displeasure. So he seems to be a man, and he's quite old by this point towards the end of the 1590s. He seems to be a man who is slightly losing his mind. The glory days are over, and he's descending into a kind of, at best, paranoia, and at worst, at a broader kind of madness. Right, and it's a story as old as time.

And he achieves nothing in Korea. Nothing at all. Okay. No. And there's a sense, he dies in 1598, while things are unresolved in Korea, but still very clearly going against him. And a lot of people in Japan of samurai rank,

they will leave a death poem when they're sort of on their deathbed. And his death poem is remarkable. I'll give it to you in a sec. There's one word in there which he uses Naniwa, which means Osaka, and it stands for this great city that he's helped to build in a castle. And the poem goes something like this. My life came as due.

It vanishes like due. All of Osaka is dream after dream. It's beautiful. all of Naniwa is dream after dream. So the sense at the end that he has this Buddhist-inspired sense of the impermanence of everything that he's achieved. Shakespeare would write in The Tempest only years apart, you know, our little lives are rounded with asleep,

all that we inherit shall dissolve. Beautiful. And like this insubtential pageant faded. I mean, it's exactly the same, isn't it? It's fascinating. And if you want to get a sense of impermanence, to be someone like Hilioshi, to build up so much and to realize that you're going to hang into none of it.

Yeah. There's a romance there. know how he's able at the end, despite everything, to come up with something so beautiful. But he signs off in 1598. And then, of course, you know, if you think Nobunaga leaves behind quite a big prize, Hideyoshi is leaving behind an enormous prize. Basically, the whole of Japan, pacified, weapon's taken away, stable. So who gets heard of that? Well, that's the question. I was going about to ask you. Well, that's the big question. Who gets it? So who gets it? So. Has he got any sons? He does have a son, actually, Hideyori. And his,

His hope is, when I set this up, you all you know how it's going to go. His hope is his son's too young to take power. So he sets up a council. Yeah, there's always a problem anywhere in the world. And what he does, I suppose, like elsewhere, is he sets up a council of elders, five elders, men on whom he thinks he can rely to sort of take care of the realm until Hideiori is ready to come and take his father's place. And, yeah, once I've told you that, you sort of know that it's not going to entirely work out. One of those elders is a man called Tokugawa Iyeyasu, who goes back quite a long way. He's an early ally of Nobunaga, then he's an ally of Hideyoshi.

What Hideyoshi did for Tokugawa Ieiyasu was he tried while he was still alive to treat him well, but keep him at a certain distance. So again, if we're thinking about the geography of Japan, if most of the action happens around Kyoto, what Hideyoshi did was to give Tokugawa some land a long way away. a place called Edo, which is now Tokyo. You listen to Dan Snow's history at this war coming up. And the clue is probably in there. The clue is probably in there, the fact that this is a big city that we've now heard of. So he's a sort of useful follower. Yeah.

Don't want to get rid of him, but a little bit worried about his ambition. So put him on the edge. Exactly that. And what that turns out to do for Tokugawa EASU is extraordinary things, because, of course, Edo is far away, but it's also surrounded by really rich and fertile land. So what Tokugawa Aya Esu does, he's very famous for being cautious and biding his time. So while Hideyoshi is off fighting this or that battle, including a disastrous war in Korea, Tokugawa is building up Edo, administering it really well, building up his forces, all the lands

around it, so that by the time Hideyoshi goes, Tokugawa Ayeyasu is in a really powerful position. He's not yet ready straight away to challenge for Hideyoshi's legacy, but over the course of a few years, he starts to do deals, he starts to negotiate, really, and takes him a couple of years, actually. So you get to a position where in sort of the autumn of 1600s, so it's only a couple of years after Hideyoshi dies, Japan really is on the brink of a massive conflict. You have the west of Japan, for the most part feudal lords are behind Hideyori, the son of Hideyoshi. Most of the east of Japan is behind Tokugawa Iyaisu, and they come to together. One of the largest land battles in history from this period are around something like 75,000, 80,000 men on both sides. They come together October 1600 at this great battle at Sekigara. And this is one of the most pivotal moments, I think, in Japanese history. They're fairly well matched. But again, Tokugawa Ie Yasu, his ability to know who to pick out, know who to negotiate with. And so someone senior on the side of the Western Army does a little bit of a

deal with them behind the scenes. And at the crucial moment, there's a sense that this guy is ready to come over as he's promised to the Tokugawa side. And IAS is watching him and it doesn't seem to be doing it. And so he has some of his men fire on the positions of the guy who's made him this great promise. That goes him into action. He turns against his own side and the war is won.

It's classic. Stan Lee's at Bosworth, Richard III, doomed. Okay, so clever, both a military commander and a diplomat. Absolutely. Yeah. And then what he does, having one. won this great battle, very cleverly. He launches probably the largest land redistribution in Japanese history. So some of his big enemies, he completely does away with them. Others, he moves around,

because a lot of these feudal lords, they have roots going back decades, sometimes centuries, in particular parts of Japan. So the level of loyalty there runs really deep, right? So guys like that, he moves them somewhere else in Japan. So he's not completely upsetting them, but he's, you know, taking away their base of power. So he shifts them around. Kyoto stays the capital, but the real base of operations is now in Edo. Does he move the emperor up to Edo? So he keeps the emperor in Kyoto, but what he does is he sends a lot of his own men to Kyoto

to keep the emperor under kind of a watchful eye. What EASU does that Nobunaga never did was he takes the title of shogun for himself. So he becomes the shogun, and for the next two and a half centuries, the Tokugawa Shogunate is in charge of the whole of Japan. And really then he builds on a lot of what Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had done. So the class system stays rigid. the rice cake. He actually eats the rice cake. Yeah. And the other thing, I suppose, part of that

eating of the rice cake, he does what Nobunaga and Hideyoshi never did, which is he passes down power to his own sons successfully. Both the others wanted to do that and they failed. He manages to do that to the point where, yeah, in the 1860s, we're still talking about his descendants in charge of Japan. Absolutely extraordinary. So it's 603. He's now the Shogun. Massive land redistribution. Has he abandoned ideas of foreign conquest? Is it just about sort of stabilising and extending his power in the Japanese archipelago itself? Why is he's so successful? I think one of the reasons he's so successful is he learns from people like Hideyoshi.

So foreign adventures are very definitely off the menu. In fact, he's probably the opposite of someone like Hideyoshi because he thinks that almost any contact with foreign powers, particularly European powers, could be a bad idea. So, you know, when he looks at the last decades of Japanese history, what does he see? he sees Christian conversions in Japan being a potential source of destabilization. He hears stories, we think, and his sons are the same way, of Christians who, when one of their

number, the Japanese Christians, when one of their number is burned at the stake called crucified for something they've done wrong, maybe for going against an edict because they build up these edicts against Christianity bit by bit. He hears these stories of other Christians gathering around the cross or gathering around the stake where people are being burned and celebrating and singing hymns. The idea in the first place that you have a religion built around a convicted and executed criminal, right, from hundreds and hundreds of years ago is bonkers as far as he's concerned. But the idea that their adherents would then celebrate people who he himself might have executed as martyrs is completely unacceptable. So Iyasu and then his sons

progressively, they stand down on Christianity, they throw the missionaries out of Japan, they ban anyone actually, even Japanese, from leaving Japan without permission on pain of being executed when they come back. I think his thinking is that Japan doesn't really need anything from Europeans and that their track record, whether it's Christians or traders, of really interfering in Japan and kind of making the chaos of this era worse is such that we can just do without them. So it's a kind of early modern border control that he institutes. The one European power funnily enough that the Tohagga do deal with are the Dutch, who present themselves as being good Protestants interested in business only.

We're not here to spread the word. No, exactly, yeah. And so they will just be kept on this tiny little artificial island off Nagasaki. One little bridge goes across from this island to proper Nagasaki, guarded all the time. When the Dutch ships come towards Nagasaki, samurai go on board. They'll open the barrels, look for Bibles, any other kind of religious contraband. And if they're found, then the Dutch will be turned away. But the Dutch are as good as they were.

they just do want to make money. They're the only Europeans that the Japanese will deal with. And it's funny because from a couple of centuries on, looking back, that seems like a bad idea because the Japanese shut themselves off to a certain extent from knowing what's going on, right, in the rest of the world. But at the time for security and for stability, I think that's probably quite a smart move. Yeah, and we know the problems that Christianity and conversions of messanic belief would cause in China.

You can get it. I mean, it makes, yeah. I think it's fairly sensible. So he does that. I think that's one of his big and important. moves EASO and then his sons, I think, carry on the same sort of policies. For a lot of the rest of it, he's building on Hideyoshi, so he has that hostage system which keeps going across the next couple of hundred years or so, which turns out to be quite clever because it's not just

having members of the families of his rivals nearby, you know, pain of execution, if anything goes wrong, the cost of having a sort of smart, swanky residence in Edo and having one at home in your home domain as a feudal lord. And then the cost of having you and your family shipped backwards and forwards in great retinue, really expensive. The cost of doing all that, I think, is such that a lot of these big feudal families steadily become poorer and poorer. And so the chances of them being able to whip up an army that can resist the Tokugawa, just get less and less. So he's steadily impoverishing his enemies, which I think is quite clever. He also has them pay for rebuilding roads and and shrines and temples and other things all around Japan.

So their coffers are kind of being whittled down and down all the time. So again, I think that's a clever way of making sure that you are going to be properly unchallengeable. So the 17th century was a world historic catastrophe elsewhere across Eurasia and into the America's different reasons. Japan, this is remembered as a period of what's of stability, is this a sort of golden age if you're towards Japanese people today? Yeah, I think absolutely. If you think a lot of Japanese dramas today, there's a funny theme in Japanese drama.

They love a time slip. So someone from modern day Japan slipping back into the past and experiencing what life was like, and that's where the drama comes from. A favorite period for a time slip is Tokugawa, Japan. Because the outside world hadn't yet come knocking to the degree that it would later on. It's peaceful. If you have a bit of money, if you're a samurai or a merchant with a bit of money in somewhere like Kyoto or Edo or Osaka, you can have a really good time.

You've got tea ceremonies, you've got geisha, you've got courtisans, you've got kabuki theatre, you've got no theatre, you've got beautiful literature being produced, you can go on a pilgrimage here and there, absolutely beautiful. And one sign, I think, of how remarkable both 17th and the 18th centuries were onto the Tokugawa is when eventually the West does come knocking in the middle of the 19th century, some of the weapons that the samurai hold when they go out to meet the Americans when they turn up in the 1850s, long time in the future, those weapons would have been in a museum in America or Europe. This kind of technology, Japan, brilliant innovators, but there's no need.

There's just no call for innovating in the way that Europeans inventing. Not like Europe. Not like Europe. Brinkneck, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's a, I think it genuinely is quite a happy period unless you are those peasants being squeezed like seats, you know, Hilioshi says there's a phrase in, or a word in Japan, Madiki, which means, it's like an agricultural phrase, means thinning out the seedlings, awful euphemism for families who were forced to either kill their own children or leave them in the wild to be, as it were, taking care of. Because some of these families, they are being squeezed

so hard. And if you have a bad harvest and you can't keep up, life isn't great. But as I say, if you've got a bit of cash in your pocket, and if you live in one of these great urban centres, Edo is the same size as Paris in 1700, like a million people. Truly a center of civilization in the world, I think. So that's all a dividend of peace, I think, yeah. And these three unified Japan. Japan has suffered terrible defeats in the centuries that followed, but never again would it be disunited. This is the birth of Japan. The birth of Japan, that place now makes sense as a single country. More and more on the Tokugawa period, it's connected by commercial roadways, its economy is connected, a lot of it via sea all the way around Japan. Its cuisine is connected,

currency. Everything is joined up. Everything is at peace. A lot of its infrastructure gets repaired. If you think all the damage that it's gone through in the period that we're just talking about, it's a real period of recovery and foundation, I think. Yeah. Thanks very much, Chris. Come on talking about it. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to

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