How Did Three Samurai Warlords Unite Japan?

Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: How Did Three Samurai Warlords Unite Japan?
Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Chris Harding (Cultural Historian of Japan, India, East-West connections)
Date: February 5, 2026

This episode dives into one of the most pivotal eras in Japanese history: the turbulent 15th and 16th centuries, culminating in the unification of Japan by three extraordinary warlords—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Dan Snow and historian Chris Harding explore the bloody Sengoku Jidai ("Warring States" period)—its chaos, shifting alliances, power grabs, and how the ambitions and ruthlessness of these three men shaped the foundations of modern Japan.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Sengoku Jidai: Fragmented Japan

Timestamps: 03:06–08:57

• Pre-War Japan Structure:

  • Around the 1400s, Japan was officially ruled by the Ashikaga Shogunate from Kyoto, with the emperor reduced to ceremonial duties.
  • Political control was exerted through provincial ‘warrior constables’, but their autonomy grew as the shogunate weakened.

• Onin War and Descent into Chaos:

  • Dispute over shogunal succession erupted into the Onin War (1467–1477), burning much of Kyoto and shattering central authority.
  • Japan became “a patchwork of about 120 warring domains” (Chris Harding, 05:55).

“Town burned. Populations put to the sword. This was the Sengoku Jidai, Japan’s warring states period.”
—Dan Snow [01:33]

• Ordinary People’s Experience:
  • Little sense of national identity; people identified by village or domain.
  • Most just wanted peace, not necessarily unity.

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2. Oda Nobunaga: The 'Demon King'

Timestamps: 09:12–26:59

• Unexpected Origins and Ruthlessness:

  • Born 1534, derided as "the Great Fool of Owari Province" for eccentric behavior (09:12–10:18).
  • After his father’s death, quickly asserted control, consolidating power through ruthlessness—even killing rival family members.

• Strategic Innovation:

  • Transforms battlefield tactics by quickly adopting and mobilizing Portuguese firearms (arquebuses).
  • The Battle of Okehazama (1560): Defeats a much larger army by surprise (11:09–11:52).

• Relationship with Religion:

  • Aggressively opposed Buddhist militant power. The Siege of Mt. Hiei (1571): Massacred thousands, including monks, women, and children, to annihilate Buddhist resistance (17:18–19:18).

“Not even a badger or a fox moved on the mountain anymore.”
—Chris Harding, [19:08] (on the destruction of Mt. Hiei)

• Power over the Shogun:

  • Puts Ashikaga Yoshiaki on the throne as puppet shogun, ruling "the realm by force" (15:31–16:05).

• Downfall:

  • Murdered in 1582 at Honnō-ji temple by his own general, Akechi Mitsuhide—possibly motivated by humiliation and revenge (23:44–26:59).

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3. Toyotomi Hideyoshi: The Peasant Who Became Ruler

Timestamps: 29:02–43:09

• Meteoric Rise:

  • Initially a sandal-bearer for Nobunaga; mocked as “the little monkey” and “bald rat” but considered a masterful battlefield strategist and negotiator.

• Seizing Power:

  • After Nobunaga's death, Hideyoshi avenges him and eliminates rivals (including Nobunaga’s sons) to secure authority.
  • Gains court rank and legitimacy through imperial titles, presenting himself as the rightful heir.

• Domestic Reforms:

  • Initiates major tax reform, the “sword hunt” (confiscating weapons from peasants), establishes a strict class hierarchy, and institutes a hostage system to keep rival lords in check.

“He has this phrase—squeeze them [peasants] like seeds in terms of their tax money... peasants should be suspended between life and death.”
—Chris Harding, [37:57]

• Hostility to Christianity:

  • Distrusts Christian influence, cracks down on missionaries and converts (including the infamous crucifixions at Nagasaki), but preserves lucrative trade with Europeans.

• Ambition & Overreach:

  • Invades Korea (1592–1598), aiming to use it as a springboard to China and India. The campaigns are disastrous, leading to mass death and no gain.

“A bloody series of battles... possibly the bloodiest war in the whole of the 16th century anywhere in the world. Up to a million people... die to achieve literally nothing.”
—Chris Harding, [41:04]

• Deathbed Reflection:
  • Hideyoshi’s death poem reflects on the impermanence of his achievements and life itself—“All of Osaka is dream after dream.” (43:09).

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4. Tokugawa Ieyasu: The Consolidator

Timestamps: 44:40–57:22

• Background:

  • Early ally of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi; bides time in the resource-rich region of Edo (now Tokyo).

• Securing Power:

  • Upon Hideyoshi’s death, avoids immediate conflict, but after a few years orchestrates the decisive Battle of Sekigahara (1600) (47:15–49:21).
    • Uses negotiation, bribery, and tactical opportunism to encourage key defections.

“At the crucial moment... he has some of his men fire on the positions of the guy who’s made this promise, that goads him into action... the war is won.”
—Chris Harding, [49:13]

• Building a Lasting Order:

  • Executes the largest land redistribution in Japanese history to weaken rivals.
  • Moves the seat of actual power to Edo while keeping the emperor as figurehead in Kyoto.
  • Claims the title of Shogun and establishes the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868).
    • For the first time, successful hereditary succession follows.

• Isolation and Control:

  • Halts foreign expansion; institutes sakoku (national isolation), bans Christianity, and restricts European contact exclusively to Dutch traders confined to a single artificial island (Dejima) in Nagasaki.

• Sustaining Stability:

  • Maintains order with the hostage system, economic controls, and forced alternate residence for lords in Edo—progressively impoverishing rivals and eliminating opposition.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Oda Nobunaga... probably the best known, maybe not best loved, figure in their history... he dresses badly, likes to wrestle in the mud with commoners... he gets this nickname, 'The Great Fool of Owari.'”
  —Chris Harding [09:12]

• “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.”
  —Chris Harding [11:59]

• “Nobunaga pounded the rice, Hideyoshi baked the cake, Tokugawa Ieyasu ate it.”
  —Chris Harding (reciting a Japanese proverb) [29:02]

• “All of Osaka is dream after dream.”
  —Hideyoshi’s death poem, as quoted by Chris Harding [43:09]

• “He learns from people like Hideyoshi. So foreign adventures are very definitely off the menu.”
  —Chris Harding, on Tokugawa Ieyasu’s domestic focus [51:06]

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Critical Timestamps

• 03:06–08:57 — Breakdown of Japanese social and political order, the Onin War, and the rise of autonomous domains.
• 09:12–26:59 — Biography, strategy, and legacy of Oda Nobunaga; his rise and fall, brutality, and innovations.
• 29:02–43:09 — The ascent of Hideyoshi, his crucial reforms, anti-Christian policies, failure in the Korean campaigns, and death.
• 44:40–57:22 — Tokugawa Ieyasu’s cautious moves, the Battle of Sekigahara, shogunate establishment, and policies of stability and isolation.
• 57:13–57:48 — Chris Harding on the unification’s long-term results: stable, cohesive, prosperous Japan.

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Episode Closing Thoughts

This episode brilliantly explores how the ambitions, brutality, and calculated genius of three very different men forcibly ended a century of civil war, cementing the unity and later isolation of Japan for centuries. The discussion provides rich parallels with European history while emphasizing the distinctiveness of Japanese development, and illustrates the human costs and consequences—both immediate and lasting—of state unification.

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Recommended for listeners interested in:

• Japanese history, feudal and military history, state-building, comparative history, and the origins of modern East Asia.

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For further reading or questions, contact [e-mail]

Transcript

[Chris Harding]

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[Dan Snow]

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 internecine struggle. Now armies crisscross 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 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 the brutal decisions that built the foundations of modern Japan. Joining us today, I'm very pleased to have 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 gonna take us through the lives of these three pivotal figures in in Japanese history. Enjoy.

[Chris Harding]

T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Good to see you, Chris. Thanks for coming on the show.

[Chris Harding]

Thank you for having me.

[Dan Snow]

Tell me about Japan in around 4, 1400, before this great crisis, what do we mean when we talk about Japan? How united and powerful is it?

[Chris Harding]

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. So this is the Ashikaga Shogunate, it's called. They've been around for a while, but across the 1400s their power over Japan is starting to crumble.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, but in 1400 or so it's still one reasonably coherent kingdom, I think.

[Chris Harding]

So, yeah, it's divided into provinces and the Ashikaga Shogunate ruling most of those from Kyoto with a kind of reasonably iron fist.

[Dan Snow]

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 in their own little regions? Is Europe a decent sort of parallel at this period?

[Chris Harding]

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 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.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so what goes wrong in the 1400s?

[Chris Harding]

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.

[Dan Snow]

So the shogun controls the emperor, but now these families want to control the shogun?

[Chris Harding]

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, in 1477, half of Kyoto goes up in flames. 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 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.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Chris Harding]

Absolutely. So I suppose in Japan, the real source of wealth is gonna 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 bases 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 court 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.

[Dan Snow]

And meanwhile, before we talk about some of the great warlords that emerge, 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?

[Chris Harding]

Yeah. Do you know what? You've got to now and again, I think, feel a bit sorry for the empress in Japan, if you go back long enough. They kind of had a heyday around 900 and 1000. 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.

[Dan Snow]

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 do is unify again. Like, does that unifying idea drive those warlords?

[Chris Harding]

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 arm, to 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 shoguns 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.

[Dan Snow]

Normal people just want peace.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, they just want to get their.

[Dan Snow]

Peace while the lunatics who have power over us are fighting it out and the rest of us bleed and pay for it. Okay, so tell me about these families. Touch emerge the unifiers, because we've got a couple of warlords that one after the other. Tell me about the first warlord.

[Chris Harding]

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, Owari 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.

[Dan Snow]

Very relatable.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, the Great fool of Owari Province. So he dresses badly. He likes to wrestle in the mud with commoners. Even though he's of, you know, quite high samurai status, he wanders around town, sort of stuffing his face with rice cakes, et cetera. I think the senior people around his father in Owari 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 rivals. 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, Okehazama, against a much larger force. There's a very, very powerful warlord called Imagawa Yoshimoto. He wants to go through Oda Nobunaga's province to get to Kyoto. You know, this big prize. You'd have thought it'd be quite easy because Oda Nobunaga is this young man, not very well experienced, not many troops, but actually, Oda Nobunaga at dawn, surprises his enemy in the rain, defeats him, kills Imagawa, and suddenly this guy, this strange young man from a family, looks like being a major player. And that is where I think his kind of rise to become this great warlord begins.

[Dan Snow]

It's so funny. It's a bit of a digression here as 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, thinking, oh, that's a bit like the Plantagenets, you know, you seize the throne, deal with your annoying nephew, secure your Own and then you start fighting outside is what strikes you about Japanese history. While we're on the subject, quickly, diversion. Yeah. Is it useful to think about these similarities or is that dangerous, do you think?

[Chris Harding]

No, I think it's good. I think so much depends on blood.

[Dan Snow]

And on family, and that's consistent across this vast distance.

[Chris Harding]

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 Oda 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.

[Dan Snow]

Really?

[Chris Harding]

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.

[Dan Snow]

Well, right. Cause King Stephen had William the Marshal as a boy and led him to the gallows. And William Marshal was apparently quite sweet and. Oh, I'm not gonna kill him. Can't do that. He's a nice lad.

[Chris Harding]

See, I don't see much of that in Japan.

[Dan Snow]

Well, but then King Stephen, you know, didn't thrive. Right. He ended up. Anyway, never mind, we don't have to go there. But. So, yeah, maybe he should have been a bit more like the Japanese. Okay. So he, the great fool is turning out not to be such a fool. He's doing well.

[Chris Harding]

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, that warfare, you've got, of course, samurai on horseback, bows and arrows. You've also got what they call ashigaru, foot soldiers. Peasants fighting for loot, generally.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. So again, samurai, sort of high status knights with all the kit on horseback. Right, okay.

[Chris Harding]

And then these peasants are so lowly that at the beginning you wouldn't even give them armor because they're expendable. 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.

[Dan Snow]

And, sorry, these foot soldiers. You mentioned matchlock muskets earlier, which is 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, hiring more soldiers, doing right things, or is he arming them a bit differently? Has he got a qualitative advantage over his enemies?

[Chris Harding]

I think Nobunaga's important because he's one of the warlords who is the quickest to take up the use of these arquebuses. I suppose they are. So the Portuguese. Just a very brief digression. The Portuguese arrive in Japan, you know, 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 slaves, or tens of thousands per year. And Nobunaga is one of those who gets onto this quite quickly.

[Dan Snow]

So gunpowder, pioneered in East Asia, travels along to Europe, is then sailed back to Asia by the Portuguese and reintroduced. There's now an indigenous sort of culture of innovation and building in Japan.

[Chris Harding]

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 bow and arrow or a sword, well, is kind of a lifetime task. So there's a myth that they didn't want to use them, but actually Od Nobunaga 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 armor in this period, one of the most valuable kinds of armor with the breastplate would be one with a dent in it, because you know that it can stub a 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 armor 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. But. So he marches on Kyoto, 1568.

[Dan Snow]

68, exactly, yeah.

[Chris Harding]

And he gets an excuse to do it because a young pretender, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, a member of the Ashikaga family, you know, this shogunal family, he wants the job of shogun, even though it doesn't come with much real power anymore. But Nobunaga sort of does a deal with him. He says, okay, I'll put you on the shogunal throw 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. He's 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, you know, which gods, et cetera. 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. Or he believes in two things, really. Absolute power and his own security. So he has this small band of horse guards, he called them, this kind of elite, like his personal security force, always round him, and he's always drinking and carousing with these guys. 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, et cetera, but they have their own mini armies, these warrior monks called Sohe, who.

[Dan Snow]

Well, I'm not surprised. Sounds like a dangerous neighbourhood.

[Chris Harding]

It really is, yeah, for your basic self defense, but actually, often it's the Buddhists who are 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 Hiei. 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 mountain into Kyoto and they'll set fire to the temple.

[Dan Snow]

Of the classic Buddhists.

[Chris Harding]

It's fun, isn't it, to really know and love. Yeah, funny. Buddhism has that reputation. But clearly 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 Hiei. 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 Nobunaga, early Autumn, I think 1571, has the mountains surrounded. 30,000 battle hardened men sends them up the 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.

[Dan Snow]

That is astonishing. So the Demon King. But is it, you know, you get this with the manga. Well, we get this in every period. Is there a sense he's justifying it, thinking actually that monstrous barbarism eventually makes it easier to achieve peace because people are less likely to oppose me. I mean, there's a demonstrative effect to that.

[Chris Harding]

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, seem 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 destiny.

[Dan Snow]

Sure, that's what they always say about themselves.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, that's true, they do. 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, you know, 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 Ashikaga Yoshiaki, that's that guy who he promotes, has installed as 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 over the Buddhists, right on Mount Hiei. 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 remember main 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 Shingen. And they do start to club together. He gets really lucky. Maybe it's destiny. He gets really lucky.

[Dan Snow]

He's touched by destiny. Yeah.

[Chris Harding]

Takedasingen 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 up Sticks 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 arquebusiers in ranks behind Palisades because it takes a while, right, to reload, get ready again, he has them firing in ranks. And this, it's 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 other 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, is quite a big moment. And really after that, he's almost unchallenged. He's just mopping up enemy after enemy.

[Dan Snow]

And what's his relationship with the Shogun who was working against him?

[Chris Harding]

So the Shogun? Yeah, Poor old Ashikaga 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.

[Dan Snow]

But does the Shogunate endure so that.

[Chris Harding]

Yoshiaki 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.

[Dan Snow]

Penniless, and he's effectively unified Japan now?

[Chris Harding]

Pretty much, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Nobunaga, he's done it. He's won the Game of Thrones.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, he has. 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, et cetera. So much of the central part of Honshu, which is where all the big warlords, most of the big warlords anyway, are. Odonobu Naga 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 warlords 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, Honnno ji, 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, Akechi Mitsuhide, 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, Akechi Mitsuhide. 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 and 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 Akechi Mizuhida to do what he did. But we think think that mother story may be sort of a bit of an urban myth from a later generation. Whatever the reason, Akechi Mitsuhide 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 spear. After that, it gets to be more close quarters fighting. But it's clear it's not gonna 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 seppuku, ritual suicide. And that's the end of Oda Nobunaga. Far too early for many of his great fans.

[Dan Snow]

How old approximately, would you say?

[Chris Harding]

So he's born in what, 34. Let's do the maths. This is 82. So what about, my goodness, 48, is that right?

[Dan Snow]

He's a young man. He's just hitting his peak.

[Chris Harding]

I think so, yeah. He seemed to be sort of in fine health.

[Dan Snow]

Well, he could have had a few. Yeah, he could have had some more.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, he could have. Another 10, 15 years and he would have got further into the west of Japan. But to his enemies, the idea that Oda Nobunaga would die in a burning temple, if you think about what he did to the Buddhists on Mount Hiei, then it's sort of hubris. It's hubris and it's justice. Justice working itself out. There was a lovely legend that actually built up on the basis that his body was never discovered and that. So perhaps he was there behind the scenes or stalking his enemies, but who knows? But no, we think that was the end in a big fiery death.

[Dan Snow]

You listen to Dan Snow's history hits the best is yet to come. Stick with us. Here's how to stay alive longer so you can enjoy Boost mobile's unlimited plan with the price that never goes up. Do not mistake a wasp nest for a pinata. Stay alive and switch now at boost mobile. After 30 gigs, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay 25amonth as long as.

[Chris Harding]

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[Dan Snow]

Okay. It's just that when people say knock.

[Chris Harding]

Knock, there's usually a joke to go with it.

[Dan Snow]

Like I said, this isn't a joke.

[Chris Harding]

So the knock knock was just you knocking? Yeah, that's how doors work. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro delivered and set up by an expert wherever you are. Delivery available for select devices [e-mail] terms apply.

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[Dan Snow]

And then are we back to square one? Is there a vacuum and all the warlords pile in again, or is there a sort of success that emerges quite quickly that can retain that sort of patrimony?

[Chris Harding]

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 Ieyasu 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, 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, I think as 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 imagine, there's a big ruckus amongst his generals for who's going to basically take hold of everything that Nobunaga has built up, 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 Akechi Mitsuhide, defeated him, cut off Akechi Mitsuhide's head, and he's said to have taken the head back to Honnno Ji 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. 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, Hideyoshi is building himself up more and more, and he's someone worth getting to know. Another extraordinary personality.

[Dan Snow]

Must have been quite the balancing act, presenting yourself as the heir for those Nobunaga loyalists, but also while trying to nobble his sons. Pulling that off was quite impressive. It's a good point.

[Chris Harding]

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, Toyotomi. 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, 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 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 Kyushu. Nobunaga had never got there. It's a really interesting island in this period actually, because the 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, bizarrely, the Jesuits actually own, own Nagasaki. One of the warlords in Kyushu converts to Christianity and he says, look, I'll give you this port, quite 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 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 Shinto 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 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 is 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.

[Dan Snow]

Right.

[Chris Harding]

Then he writes threatening letters to the Spanish in the Philippines, Says, either you show me some respect or I'm gonna come for 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 this amount of success early on, doesn't want to put any limits on how far he might go. It's amazing.

[Dan Snow]

So before we look at what happens beyond the waves, how does he change Japan itself? Because he makes domestic. Quite important domestic reforms.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, he does. And I think this is a thread through Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and then our final person we'll get onto later, Tokuga Ieyasu. They all build on one another. So Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, 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.

[Dan Snow]

Well, that all matters.

[Chris Harding]

It does.

[Dan Snow]

It might not be the most glamorous, but yeah, building the big war chests, regularizing taxation, all that stuff.

[Chris Harding]

Yes, you need it. And if you've got economic historians out there, that's literally their bread and butter. We shan't be rude about it. So they do that. Hideyoshi also launch is 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.

[Dan Snow]

Of.

[Chris Harding]

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, 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. Ironic.

[Dan Snow]

From his background.

[Chris Harding]

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 Tokha Gaaba 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.

[Dan Snow]

He's taken away their weapons, he's taken away their sort of ability to aspire to progress, to sort of build their own following.

[Chris Harding]

Yes.

[Dan Snow]

And he's taking away all their surplus and value. They're just battery packs for his state.

[Chris Harding]

Exactly. He's really hammering. I suppose what they get in return is that the risk. Exactly. The risk of having samurai charge across 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, actually.

[Dan Snow]

He's made Japan great again.

[Chris Harding]

He has, yes. That's a lovely way of putting it.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Okay, so he's done all that domestically. Does he start acting out his grandiose ambitions? Does he sail beyond the seas?

[Chris Harding]

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 Kyushu, this southern island, across to the southern part of Korea in 1592.

[Dan Snow]

I don't want to open up a whole nother can of worms. Is this the first time we see Japan extend beyond the archipelago? Or is there a deep history of Korea, or has it often been a tilt yard for Japanese ambitions?

[Chris Harding]

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, et cetera. And wars on the Korean peninsula and wars within Japan often spill over, sort of one until. So there's quite a bit of a history. The strait, of course, between the Korean Clinton and Japan is very thin.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Chris Harding]

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 Pusan, 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.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Chris Harding]

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 their them their due. They have these amazing ships which have an iron ceiling, so you can't fire arrows at them. They have spikes around the sides 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, Hideyoshi's forces are then pushed right the way back down the Korean peninsula and. 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 deep, lasting animosity between Korea and Japan. And it's hard to see why Hideyoshi was so. 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 Sen no Rikyu. He's probably the most famous tea master, right, in the whole of Japanese history. He serves Nobunaga, later he serves Hideyoshi. And Hideyoshi falls out with him so badly, I think, because. Because of Hideyoshi's paranoia that not only does he have Sen Norikyu take his own life, he then has a wooden statue of Sen Norikyu nailed to a cross and paraded through Kyoto as a sign of Hideyoshi'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, yeah, he's descending into a kind of, at best, paranoia and at worst, a broader kind of madness.

[Dan Snow]

Right. It's a story as old as time. And he achieves nothing in Korea.

[Chris Harding]

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 and a castle. And the poem goes something like this. My life came as dew. It vanishes like dew. All of Osaka is dream after dream. It's beautiful. All of Naniwa is dream after dream. So this sense at the end that he has this Buddhist inspired sense of the impermanence of everything that he's achieved.

[Dan Snow]

Shakespeare would write in the Tempest, only years apart, you know, our little lives are rounded with asleep. All that we inherit shall dissolve.

[Chris Harding]

Do you?

[Dan Snow]

And like this insubstantial pageant faded. I mean, it's exactly the same, isn't it? Fascinating.

[Chris Harding]

And if you want to get a sense of impermanence, to be someone like Hideyoshi, to build up so much and to realize that you're gonna hang onto none of it. Yeah, there's a romance there. I don't 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, stables taken away, stable. So who gets hold of that?

[Dan Snow]

Well, that's the question I was about to ask you. Well, that's the big question. Who gets it?

[Chris Harding]

So who gets it?

[Dan Snow]

So has he got any sons?

[Chris Harding]

He does have a son, actually, Hideyori. And his hope is, when I set this up, you'll know how it's gonna go. His hope is his son's too young to take power, so he sets up a council. Yeah, yeah. It was 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 Hideyori 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 Ieyasu 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 Ieyasu was he tried while he was still alive, to. 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 at a place called Edo, which is now Tokyo.

[Dan Snow]

You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up.

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[Dan Snow]

Year.

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[Chris Harding]

Today, in a world where swords were sharp and hygiene was actually probably better.

[Dan Snow]

Than you think it is, two fearless.

[Chris Harding]

Historians, me, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive head first into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History. Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dan Snow]

And the clue is probably in.

[Chris Harding]

The clue is probably in there, the.

[Dan Snow]

Fact that this is a big city.

[Chris Harding]

That we've now heard of.

[Dan Snow]

So he's a sort of useful follower. Don't want to get rid of him, but a little bit worried about his ambition. So put him on the edge.

[Chris Harding]

Exactly that. And what that turns out to do for Tokugawa Ieyesu is extraordinary things because of course, Edo is far away, but it's also surrounded by really rich and fertile land. So what Tokuga Iesu 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 Ieyasu 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 1600, 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, part, feudal lords are behind Hideyori, the son of Hideyoshi. Most of the east of Japan is behind Tokugawa Ieyasu. And they come 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 Sekigahara. And this is one of the most pivotal moments, I think, in Japanese history. They're fairly well matched. But again, Tokugawa Ieyasu, 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 Ieyasu is watching him, and he 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 goads him into action. He turns against his own side, and the war is won. It's a classic title.

[Dan Snow]

Stanley's at Bosworth, Richard III doomed. Okay, so clever. Both a military commander and a diplomat. Absolutely, yeah.

[Chris Harding]

And then what he does, having 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 Jap, so he's not completely upsetting them, but he's 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.

[Dan Snow]

Does he move the emperor up to Edo?

[Chris Harding]

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 Ieyasu 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.

[Dan Snow]

He eats the rice cake.

[Chris Harding]

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.

[Dan Snow]

So it's 1603. He's now the shogun. Massive land redistribution. Has he abandoned ideas of foreign conquest? Is it just about sort of stabilizing and extending his power in the Japanese archipelago itself? Why is he so successful?

[Chris Harding]

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, 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, Japanese Christians, when one of their number is burned at the stake or 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. 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 Ieyasu and then his sons progressively, they stamped down on Christianity. 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 Tokugawa do deal with are the Dutch, who present themselves as being good Protestants, interested in business only, not in.

[Dan Snow]

We're not here to spread the word.

[Chris Harding]

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 of way. 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.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. And we know the problems that Christianity and conversions of messianic belief would cause in China. And you can get it. I mean, it makes you.

[Chris Harding]

I think it's fairly sensible. So he does that. I think that's one of his big and important, important moves. Ieyasu 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 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.

[Dan Snow]

So the 17th century was a world historic catastrophe elsewhere, across Eurasia, into the Americas, different reasons. Japan, this is remembered as a period of what sort of stability of is this a sort of golden age, if you talk to Japanese people today?

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, I think. Absolutely. If you think a lot of Japanese dramas today. There's a funny theme in Japanese drama. They love a tiny 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 courtesans, you've got kabuki theater, you've got Noh theater, 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 under 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 invent, not like Europeans do.

[Dan Snow]

Breakneck.

[Chris Harding]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a. I think it genuinely is quite a happy period, unless you are those peasants being squeezed like suits. You know, Hideyoshi says there's a phrase or a word in Japan, mabiki, which means it's like an agricultural phrase, means thinning out the seedlings. Awful euphemism for. For families who were forced to either kill their own children or leave them in the wild to be, as it were, taken 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 centers, 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.

[Dan Snow]

And these three unify Japan. Japan has suffered terrible defeats in the centuries that followed, but never again would it be disunited. This is the birth of Japan.

[Chris Harding]

The birth of Japan. That place now makes sense as a single country more and more in 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 of all the damage that it's gone through in the period that we just talked talking about, it's a real period of recovery and foundation, I think. Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Thanks very much, Chris. Coming on, talking about it. My pleasure.

[Chris Harding]

Thank you for having me on.

[Dan Snow]

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. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to some subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday. Friends. Don't miss out.

[Chris Harding]

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