While Hideyoshi lay dying in the summer of 1598 he arranged for five of the greatest daimyo to govern the country as a council of regents on behalf of his five-year-old son, Hideyori. The regents naturally had to give most of their time to the administration of their own large domains, and Hideyoshi intended them to do no more than keep watch over relations between the military leaders and the imperial court, the loyalty of the daimyo to the house of Toyotomi, religious affairs, and Japan’s foreign relations. In practice, supervision meant keeping a close check on the activities of a group of five commissioners, who were personally less powerful than the regents but had earned Hideyoshi’s trust as competent administrators.
Mixed government by regents and commissioners managed to organize the recall of Japanese troops from Korea towards the end of 1598, but began to fall apart soon after that. The most powerful regent was Tokugawa leyasu; it turned out that he had an able and implacable foe in one of the commissioners, Ishida Mitsunari. This man never tired in his attempts to stir up trouble for leyasu by inciting the other daimyo against him. Apart from active intriguing, other, more static forces were at work. In the delicate situation following Hideyoshi’s death the preponderance of Tokugawa power was too great to be left alone. leyasu had either to take the final steps which would ensure the supremacy of himself and his sons, or face the prospect that jealous rivals would wait for a chance to humble them forever.
Ishida’s schemings forced the issue. On 21 October 1600 an army eighty thousand strong, led by him but provided by a coalition of “western” daimyo, attacked the same number of “eastern” troops under the corhmand of leyasu. Ishida’s forces were defeated. This decisive encounter took place at Sekigahara, about a hundred kilometers northeast of Kyoto. Fifteen years later, leyasu completed the chain of events begun at Sekigahara by besieging and eventually destroying the headquarters of the Toyotomi party in Osaka castle. The luckless Hideyori died in the flames of the final attack.
The Sekigahara and Osaka campaigns gave leyasu and his heirs military control of the entire country. Authority won by arms had been the basis of every system of political control since the various acts of submission of the court aristocracy to the Taira and Minamoto warrior families in the twelfth century. Therefore Tokugawa rulers certainly did not break any new ground in the way they achieved power. Nor were they unusual in the steps they took to shift the source of power from the battlefield to the palace, the castle, and the council chamber, and in general to convert a position of mere might into one more decently clothed in ideas of right. But while there may have been plenty of precedents for these policies of stabilization and legitimization, what was extraordinary was the resounding success with which the Tokugawa pursued them. The Tokugawa bakufu or government set up its headquarters in Edo on the Kanto plain, in time creating a metropolis out of what had been a fishing village surrounded by marshland. It lasted for over two hundred and fifty years, until 1868. For most of this long period, Japan lived at peace both with the outside world and within her own frontiers.
World History
