When Nobunaga died in the Honnō-ji temple in 1582, Hideyoshi reacted faster than anyone else. He immediately made peace with the Mōri – without consulting Nobunaga’s heirs – and marched 200 kilometres back to Kyoto in five days. This “Great Return March” is without precedent in military history. Hideyoshi’s troops covered an average of 40 kilometres a day, through mountains and in the rain.

At Yamazaki he met Akechi Mitsuhide, Nobunaga’s betrayer.

The battle was no tactical masterpiece. Hideyoshi won through sheer numbers and speed. Mitsuhide fled and was reportedly killed by peasants. Hideyoshi presented himself as the avenger of his lord. It was brilliantly staged.

Portrayal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi by Kanō Mitsunobu, ca. 1598 © CC-PD-Mark

The Takeover: How Hideyoshi Seized Power

Nobunaga’s heirs – his eldest son Nobukatsu and his second son Nobutaka – were weak, at odds with each other and inexperienced.

Hideyoshi played them off against each other. Officially he supported Nobukatsu.

In practice he took control of Nobunaga’s armies, castles and territories.

In 1583 it came to a confrontation with Shibata Katsuie, another of Nobunaga’s generals, who distrusted Hideyoshi’s rise. At Shizugatake Hideyoshi defeated him. Katsuie committed seppuku. With that, the way was clear.

Hideyoshi’s strategy differed fundamentally from Nobunaga’s. Where Nobunaga broke, Hideyoshi forged alliances. Where Nobunaga burned, Hideyoshi bought. He offered defeated daimyō generous terms: keep your territories, recognise me as overlord, provide troops when I call. Berry describes this system as a compromise: the daimyō lost their autonomy but kept their landholdings. In return, Hideyoshi limited the wealth of his own house – a decision that secured his rule but was to prove fatal for his successors (Berry 1982: p. 85).

The test came in 1584. At Komaki-Nagakute Hideyoshi came up against the only opponent he could not defeat militarily: Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi’s vanguard suffered a painful defeat – Ieyasu’s troops, more experienced and on the defensive, killed several of Hideyoshi’s generals. The campaign ended in a stalemate that Hideyoshi could not accept. But instead of continuing the war and forcing a victory that would cost tens of thousands of lives, he chose the diplomatic route – he sent his own mother to Ieyasu as a hostage. An unprecedented act of humiliation that worked: Ieyasu formally submitted in 1586. Hideyoshi had neutralised his most dangerous rival without destroying him. Berry assesses this as Hideyoshi’s strategic masterstroke: he accepted a tactical draw in order to win a political victory (Berry 1982: pp. 64–80).

The same pattern was repeated in the following years. On Kyūshū the Shimazu mobilised a huge army in 1587, but against Hideyoshi’s combined forces of over 200,000 men – the largest army Japan had ever seen – they stood no chance. Instead of wiping them out, Hideyoshi confirmed the Shimazu in their core holdings in Satsuma. The Mōri in western Japan, the Chōsokabe on Shikoku – they all kept their lands in exchange for oaths of loyalty and the provision of hostages. It was a system of carrot and stick: whoever submitted survived. Whoever did not was destroyed.

The last and most impressive demonstration came in 1590 before Odawara.

The Hōjō, the last independent power in the east, had entrenched themselves behind their castle walls. Hideyoshi besieged them not with assaults, but with patience – and theatricality. He had a tea festival held before the gates, invited travelling merchants, built a temporary town.

The message was unmistakable: I have all the time in the world. After three months the Hōjō clan capitulated. Japan was unified.

The Kampaku Title: A Political Invention

But military power was not enough. Hideyoshi needed legitimacy – and here his political genius showed most clearly. The title of shōgun was traditionally reserved for the Minamoto clan. Hideyoshi, a nobody without a pedigree, could not claim it. So he got around the system.

In 1585 he had himself adopted into the Fujiwara family – one of the oldest dynasties of the court nobility – and assumed the title of kampaku, imperial regent, the highest civil dignity after the emperor. A title that had been purely ceremonial for centuries. Hideyoshi filled it with real power.

In 1586 he went even further: the emperor granted him the new family name Toyotomi – a name that had not existed before. On paper, the nameless peasant’s son had become an aristocrat.

The high point of this legitimisation strategy was the imperial visit (gyōko) to the Jurakudai Palace in 1588. Emperor Go-Yōzei personally visited Hideyoshi’s residence – an honour traditionally reserved for the high nobility. The assembled daimyō swore loyalty: “In all things, we will not violate in the least the orders of the Kampaku” (Berry 1982: p. 185). Anyone who paid their respects to the emperor could hardly reject the man who had invited him.

By 1590 Japan was unified. The Hōjō in Kantō fell after a siege of Odawara. Hideyoshi ruled – not as shōgun, not as emperor, but as something new: a man who had created his own legitimacy. But what was he to do with hundreds of thousands of unemployed warriors?

The State of The Taikō: Reforms and Control

Japan was unified – but not tamed. The daimyō had accepted Hideyoshi’s supremacy, but they governed their provinces as they saw fit. Peasants carried weapons, warriors tilled fields, and anyone with enough courage could change his station – just like Hideyoshi himself. If his rule was to survive, he had to put an end to this fluidity.

Taikō Kenchi: Surveying Power

Hideyoshi’s first instrument was the land itself. Between 1582 and 1598 he had the whole of Japan surveyed – the Taikō Kenchi, a cadastral survey of unprecedented scale. Every rice field was recorded, classified and assigned to a specific taxpayer. What sounds like dry bureaucracy was a revolutionary act of power: the survey removed control over landholdings and tax revenue from local elites. It was no longer the village headman who determined who owned what – Hideyoshi’s administration did.

The standardised koku system (one koku ≈ 180 litres of rice, the annual ration of an adult) made wealth measurable and performance comparable. A daimyō with 100,000 koku owed Hideyoshi a proportional number of soldiers and taxes. Whoever refused lost his land. The practical consequences were enormous: for the first time there was a nationwide tax system that did not depend on the goodwill of local lords. Hideyoshi’s surveyors went through every village, measured every basis of the Toyotomi state” – without it his federalism would have remained an empty promise (Berry 1982: p. 145).

Wakita confirms: the Kenchi created for the first time a direct link between central authority and village level that partly bypassed the daimyō as intermediaries (Hall 1991: p. 99).

Katanagari and Heinō Bunri: The Door Closes

In 1588 came the second blow: the Katanagari edict, the “sword hunt”. All peasants had to hand over their weapons.

Officially, the metal was to be used to cast a great Buddha. In fact, it was the end of social mobility.

Enforcement was more thorough than in any previous attempt at disarmament. Hideyoshi’s officials searched villages and confiscated swords, spears, even hunting weapons. Resistance was severely punished – not only the individual peasant, but the entire village was held collectively liable. The threat worked. In provinces such as Kaga, which had a long tradition of armed peasant uprisings (ikkō-ikki), the system of peasant resistance collapsed.

The Katanagari was only the most visible element of a more comprehensive social policy. The principle of Heinō Bunri – “separation of warriors and peasants” – became law. A samurai remained a samurai, a peasant remained a peasant. No one was allowed to leave his station, and no one was allowed to pursue two occupations at the same time: whoever grew rice was not allowed to carry a sword. Whoever carried a sword was not allowed to grow rice. Hideyoshi, who had himself risen from foot soldier to ruler, closed the door behind him. The irony was not lost on his contemporaries: the man who had blown the system apart cemented it for posterity. Berry interprets the sword hunt not as disarmament, but as targeted social engineering: it served the separation of the estates, not peace (Berry 1982: pp. 206–215). These edicts created the rigid class system that was to define Japan for over 250 years.

Koshirae (sword mount) of a katana, Samurai Museum Berlin — Koshirae (sword mount) of a katana from the Samurai Museum Berlin © Samurai Museum Berlin

Tea as Politics: The Case of Sen no Rikyū

Under the Taikō, chanoyu became a political instrument. Precious tea bowls – some priceless, some personally appraised by Rikyū – served as a substitute for fiefs. Whoever owned a famous bowl possessed a status that could not be measured in rice. In 1587 Hideyoshi himself held the “Grand Kitano Tea Gathering” – a mass spectacle to which everyone was invited, from daimyō to peasants.

At the centre of this world stood Sen no Rikyū, the greatest tea master of his time. Rikyū served Hideyoshi as a cultural adviser, but his influence grew too great. In 1591 Hideyoshi ordered his closest confidant to commit seppuku. The reasons are disputed to this day – pride, politics, a failed mediation? Berry interprets the conflict as a power struggle over cultural authority: whoever determined taste controlled a network of patrons, merchants and daimyō (Berry 1982: pp. 168–180).

The Korea Catastrophe: Hideyoshi’s Greatest Mistake

In 1592 Hideyoshi invaded Korea. His justification: Korea refused to help with a planned invasion of China. The true motives were more complex.

Japan was unified, but the warriors were restless. Hundreds of thousands of samurai had spent their lives fighting. Now there was peace – and with it unemployment. Hideyoshi needed an outlet for this pent-up violence. Korea presented itself. Berry suspects calculation rather than madness behind it: the war was meant to direct the energy of the unified warrior caste outwards before it turned inwards (Berry 1982: p. 225).

The first invasion began spectacularly. 158,000 Japanese soldiers landed at Pusan and advanced north in nine columns. Within 20 days they had captured Seoul. The Korean army, which had not fought a major war for over a century, disintegrated on first contact. The Japanese samurai – hardened by decades of the Sengoku civil war and equipped with firearms modelled on European designs – were superior to their opponents in close combat and tactics. Konishi Yukinaga, one of Hideyoshi’s generals, marched so fast that he reached Pyongyang before a coordinated defence was possible. It seemed as if Hideyoshi would subjugate Korea within weeks.

But three factors destroyed his plans.

Firearm with different family crests, Samurai Museum Berlin — Firearm with different family crests from the Samurai Museum Berlin © Samurai Museum Berlin

The Korean navy. Admiral Yi Sun-sin used the famous “turtle ships” (geobukseon) – armoured warships with cannon – to cut the Japanese supply lines. Turnbull quotes a source: “Hardly a single ship escaped and countless numbers of Japanese were hit by arrows and fell dead into the water.” Without supplies, the Japanese troops in the interior starved.

China’s intervention. The Ming dynasty could not allow Japan to conquer Korea. 50,000 Chinese soldiers marched south. The Japanese armies, overextended and undersupplied, had to withdraw.

Guerrilla fighting. Korean civilians and irregular troops (Ŭibyŏng, “righteous armies”) attacked Japanese supply lines, burned down camps, killed soldiers in ambushes. Buddhist monks fought side by side with peasants – an irony that can hardly have escaped Hideyoshi, since in Japan he had only just stripped the Buddhist monasteries of their military power. The Japanese controlled the cities, but the countryside belonged to the resistance.

In 1593 the first invasion ended in a ceasefire.

The subsequent peace negotiations turned into a farce.

Hideyoshi’s negotiators and the Ming envoys lied to each other: the Japanese claimed that Hideyoshi was prepared to recognise the Ming emperor as overlord. The Chinese claimed that Hideyoshi had asked for forgiveness. When the truth came out, Hideyoshi was furious. The negotiations failed.

In 1597 Hideyoshi launched a second invasion. It was doomed to failure from the start. The troops were demoralised, the logistics catastrophic. Admiral Yi Sun-sin, whom the Koreans had in the meantime removed from command through intrigue, returned with only thirteen ships and defeated a Japanese fleet of over 300. At the Siege of Ulsan (1598) the Japanese defenders were so desperate that they ate horse carcasses and, according to chronicles, resorted to cannibalism. “Foraging parties had been reduced to searching the bodies of dead Chinese for grains of rice”, writes Turnbull.

When Hideyoshi died in September 1598, the invasion collapsed immediately. His generals withdrew the troops. Over 100,000 Japanese were dead – for nothing. Korea lay devastated: cities burned, harvests destroyed, population decimated. For Japan it was the last military expansion until the 19th century – the Tokugawa shōguns drew the right lesson from Hideyoshi’s disaster and closed the borders.

Faith and Power: Hideyoshi’s Policy Towards Christians

Hideyoshi’s relationship with Christianity was pragmatic – until it became dangerous.

When he took power, an estimated 150,000 Christians lived in Japan, concentrated on Kyūshū. The Jesuits had been in the country since 1549, and Nobunaga had tolerated them – not out of religious sympathy, but because they controlled the silk trade between Macao and Nagasaki. Whoever protected the Jesuits profited from the most lucrative trade route in East Asia (Hall 1991: p. 321).

Hideyoshi initially adopted this calculation. But in 1587, during his Kyūshū campaign, he recognised the problem: several daimyō had become Christians. Some had destroyed Buddhist temples. Worse still – the Jesuit vice-provincial Gaspar Coelho offered Hideyoshi military support from Christian daimyō.

It was a fatal mistake. Hideyoshi saw not Christian piety, but a network that undermined his control.

On 24 July 1587 he issued the Bateren tsuihō rei – the edict for the expulsion of the missionaries. The order was surprising, but not consistently enforced. Hideyoshi wanted to get rid of the missionaries but keep the trade – squaring the circle, since the Jesuits controlled access to the Portuguese trading ships. In practice many missionaries remained in the country as long as they operated discreetly and did not disturb public order. Hideyoshi’s policy towards Christians was, like so much of his rule, pragmatic rather than ideological.

The escalation came in 1596. When the Spanish ship San Felipe ran aground off the coast of Shikoku, its pilot – whether out of boastfulness or under interrogation – allegedly revealed the colonisation strategy of the Spanish empire: first come missionaries, then soldiers. Whether the story is true in this form is disputed. The consequence was not: on 5 February 1597, 26 Christians – six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen Japanese laypeople – were crucified in Nagasaki.

The Legacy: Death and a Fragile Succession

Hideyoshi’s greatest legacy was not military, but social.

The Taikō Kenchi, the Katanagari and Heinō Bunri created the basic structures of a society that lasted 250 years. But the very thing Hideyoshi needed most – a stable succession – eluded him.

The Hidetsugu Affair

The problem was dynastic. Hideyoshi’s only son Tsurumatsu died in 1591 at the age of three. In his despair he adopted his nephew Hidetsugu and made him kampaku – the regent who was to govern Japan in his name. Hidetsugu was young, ambitious and, according to some sources, brutal: contemporaries called him Sessho Kampaku, the “murderer regent”. Whether the reports were exaggerated in order to justify Hideyoshi’s later actions remains disputed.

In 1593 everything changed. Another son was born: Hideyori.

Suddenly Hidetsugu was no longer the heir, but a rival.

In 1595 Hideyoshi ordered his nephew to commit seppuku.

Hidetsugu obeyed. Then Hideyoshi had Hidetsugu’s entire family executed – wives, children, concubines. More than thirty people died on the bank of the Sanjō river in Kyoto. It was an act of calculated brutality that shook even loyal retainers and leads Berry to conclude that Hideyoshi’s political rationality declined in his final years (Berry 1982: p. 236).

The Council of Five Regents

When Hideyoshi died in 1598, Hideyori was only five years old. To secure his rule, the dying taikō had appointed a Council of Five Regents (Go-Tairō) – the most powerful daimyō in Japan.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, Maeda Toshiie, Ukita Hideie, Mōri Terumoto and Uesugi Kagekatsu swore to protect Hideyori and to maintain the balance.

It was an unstable construct. The five regents were not neutral administrators, but rival warlords, each pursuing his own interests. Ieyasu, by far the most powerful among them, controlled the Kantō plain – the richest agricultural land in Japan. Berry’s verdict: Hideyoshi failed to create institutions that could outlast his death. His rule rested on personal authority, not on a system (Berry 1982: p. 238).

Without the taikō, the council lacked cohesion. Maeda Toshiie, the only regent who could still restrain Ieyasu’s ambition, died in 1599 – barely a year after Hideyoshi.

After that, everything escalated. Ieyasu forged a coalition against the Toyotomi loyalists under Ishida Mitsunari. In 1600 the factions faced each other at Sekigahara – the largest samurai battle in history. Ieyasu won, partly because several daimyō changed sides on the battlefield – exactly the pattern that Hideyoshi’s “fragile federalism” had encouraged. In 1603 Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1615 Osaka Castle fell after a devastating siege. Hideyori, the son for whom everything had been arranged, died. The house of Toyotomi was wiped out.

And yet: the social order that Hideyoshi had created survived him. The rigid separation of the estates, the bureaucratisation through the Kenchi, control through sanctions and oaths of loyalty – Tokugawa Ieyasu took over not only power, but also the system. The Heinō Bunri was expanded under the Tokugawa into a four-estate system (shi-nō-kō-shō) comprising warriors, peasants, artisans and merchants. The koku assessment of the daimyō remained the foundation of the Tokugawa administration.

The Edo society that kept Japan at peace for two and a half centuries was Hideyoshi’s creation. Ieyasu merely completed it. That is the irony of Hideyoshi’s life: the man who disregarded every barrier of rank created the most rigid society of estates in Japanese history.

And the peace that rested on his system lasted longer than anything the restless taikō could ever have imagined.

Frequently Asked Questions about Toyotomi Hideyoshi

1. Was Hideyoshi really a peasant?

His exact origins are unclear. Contemporary sources call his father an ashigaru (foot soldier) and his mother a woman of low station. Hideyoshi had no interest in glorifying his origins – he invented himself as a self-made man. Berry documents how, after his rise, he systematically abolished the social mobility that had made him possible.

2. Why did Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea fail?

Three main reasons: Admiral Yi Sun-sin destroyed the Japanese supply lines at sea with “turtle ships”. China intervened with 50,000 soldiers. Korean guerrillas made occupation impossible. In addition: logistical problems, overextension, low morale. Berry argues that the war was intended as an outlet for unemployed warriors – but was logistically doomed to failure from the start.

3. Did Hideyoshi really unify Japan?

Militarily, yes. By 1590 he had subjugated all the major daimyō. Politically, the unification was fragile – it depended on him personally. Berry calls the system a “fragile federalism”: the daimyō kept their landholdings in exchange for oaths of loyalty. After Hideyoshi’s death in 1598 the balance collapsed until Tokugawa Ieyasu took power at Sekigahara (1600).

4. What was the Katanagari edict?

The Katanagari (“sword hunt”) of 1588 ordered all peasants to hand over their weapons. Officially, Buddha statues were to be cast from them. In fact, it was the foundation of the society of estates (Heinō Bunri) that defined Japan until 1868. Berry shows: the edict was not a disarmament programme, but targeted social policy.

5. Why did Hideyoshi have Christians persecuted?

Hideyoshi initially tolerated Christians because of the lucrative silk trade with the Portuguese. In 1587 he recognised that Christian daimyō in Kyūshū formed a network that undermined his control. The Bateren tsuihō rei (edict expelling the missionaries) was a political, not a religious decision. The crucifixion of the 26 martyrs in 1597 followed indications that European powers wanted to colonise Japan.

6. What was the Taikō Kenchi?

The Taikō Kenchi was a nationwide cadastral survey (1582–1598) that recorded every rice field in Japan and assigned it to a taxpayer. It standardised the koku system and deprived local elites of control over landholdings. Berry calls it “the fiscal basis of the Toyotomi state” – without it Hideyoshi could neither have taxed nor controlled his daimyō.

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Bibliography

Berry, Mary Elizabeth (1982): Hideyoshi. Harvard University Press (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 146). pp. 1–312.
Hall, John Whitney (ed.) (1991): The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2 (Asao Naohiro: Sixteenth-Century Unification), Ch. 3 (Wakita Osamu: The Social and Economic Consequences of Unification), Ch. 6 (Elisonas: Christianity and the Daimyo).
Turnbull, Stephen (2022): War in Japan 1467–1615. Osprey Publishing. pp. 70–80, 100–106.
Cooper, Michael (1965): They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. University of California Press.
Frois, Luis (1926): Die Geschichte Japans (1549–1578). Ed. G. Schurhammer / E.A. Voretzsch. Verlag der Asia Major, Leipzig.

Museum Catalogue

Samurai Museum Berlin (2025): Exhibition catalogue.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi: From Peasant’s Son to Ruler of Japan