Oda Nobunaga began his career as a very minor baron, held in scant respect by his peers. He was lord of Owari at the head of Ise Bay, around the modern Nagoya, a small fief but strategically located between the ancient capital Kyoto and the largest lowland of Japan, the Kanto (Kwanto) Plain where Tokyo stands. The country was racked by the endless confused struggles of the warlords, for whom however Kyoto retained its mystique: ambitions could be legitimated by securing from the shadowy Emperor, through his little less shadowy Ashikaga Shogun, a commission doubtless disguised as for the defence of the realm against (other) over-mighty subjects, in practice to subjugate or destroy these rivals—a procedure far from unknown in medieval Europe. In 1560 Imagawa of Suruga, a much more potent magnate than Nobunaga, the lord of three provinces between Owari and Kanto, was moving on Kyoto to this end, across Nobunaga's territory. He had 25,000 men, Owari could muster a bare 3000: Imagawa saw no problem. Nobunaga surprised, routed, and slew him. By an adroit combination of political intrigue and war he then built up a power which enabled him to enter Kyoto itself in 1568, nominally in support of a claimant to the Shogunate, whom he formally installed in that dignity, only to depose him five years later.^[58]

Nobunaga's hegemony was far from undisputed, and his period of dominance was filled with much hard fighting, not least with the great Buddhist monasteries which sided with his enemies: these he crushed with great slaughter. By the time of his murder in 1582 he controlled, directly or through vassals, thirty-two of the sixty-odd provinces, and these centrally located in a belt from the borders of Kanto to the northern shores of the Inland Sea, the very heartland of Japan.^[59] He had a rough military approach to civil affairs, but this was needed, and he had grasped the importance of sound administration. Under his rule the many tax barriers which compartmented the country were abolished, and the hold of the merchant guilds on internal trade was weakened by the favouring of free markets as service centres to the castles of himself and his vassals; Nobunaga asserted his authority over Sakai, but fostered the city in its role as a major source of armaments.^[60] An innovator in tactics, making much use of arquebusiers, and in fortification, he also initiated policies later extended by Hideyoshi, notably a new- 165 -land survey and the disarming of the peasantry, far too much given, in these times of troubles, to agrarian risings. He also anticipated Hideyoshi in dreaming of the conquest of China. Basically an iron-hearted soldier, he had yet an enquiring mind which, perhaps as much as his hatred of the Buddhist monks and his taste for overseas luxuries, led him to listen courteously to the learned and tactful Jesuits.^[61]

Remarkable as Nobunaga was, he was outclassed by his successors Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Matsudaira Motoyasu, the latter better known as Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun. They could be no less ruthlessly cruel on occasion, but were more prepared to use conciliation and finesse. The three are well summed up in their traditionary reactions to the caged bird that would not sing: Nobunaga—wring its neck; Hideyoshi—force it to sing; Ieyasu—wait till it sings.^[62]

Hideyoshi, Nobunaga's leading general, was unique amongst Japanese rulers in being of humble birth: in a rough European approximation, if Nobunaga began but little above the gentry, Hideyoshi's birth was little if at all above the yeomanry.^[63] But, until in his latter years he overreached himself, he was a soldier and a politician of genius, who like Cromwell

It is ironic that by his ruthless ‘Sword Hunt’, completing the disarming of the peasantry, and by his census, land survey, and other legislation, he froze the social structure of Japan into a hierarchy of closed classes, which lasted into Meiji days: warriors, peasants, artisans, merchants, conceptually and nominally in that order, though in the nature of things the peasantry soon sank to the bottom.

When one of his generals assassinated Nobunaga at Kyoto, Hideyoshi was away in the west of Honshu, engaged in the reduction of the Mori who dominated that area. He lost no time in patching up a truce and dashing back to the capital: within twelve days he had defeated and slain the murderer. Other leading generals were absent, Nobunaga's sons ruined their chances by fratricidal quarrelling, and Hideyoshi was able to control events. He called a meeting of notables and literally carried into them Nobunaga's baby grandson, who was proclaimed heir, with a council of four army leaders to run the country. Such an arrangement could hardly last, and it was not long before Hideyoshi as Regent began to concentrate power in his own hands. This of course meant more fighting, but by mid-1583 he controlled thirty provinces, and could operate on interior lines against Kyushu or Kanto at his choice. The most dangerous rival, Ieyasu, had kept aloof from events, but now took up arms with some success; but the two were realist enough to come to an honourable arrangement, and Hideyoshi was now free to complete Nobunaga's work of unification.

He had already a footing in Shikoku, which he subdued in 1585; in 1587 he took advantage of internal strife in Kyushu to compel the dominant lord of the- 166 -island, Shimazu of Satsuma, to come to terms. The Mori, who had helped in the tough Kyushu campaign, did not finally submit until 1591. By that time Hideyoshi and Ieyasu had together overrun the Kanto Plain, which was given to Ieyasu, who seated himself in Edo (today's Tokyo), in exchange for his three provinces of Mikasa, Totomi, and Suruga—the very three whence Imagawa had launched the entry into Nobunaga's lands in 1560, the beginning of the whole coalescence. In the still backward and peripheral north there was only one really powerful lord, Date Masamune, who submitted in 1590; Hokkaido was as yet, and long remained, a barbarous no-man's land, This apart, a common soldier's son was now master of all Japan.

The building of the great castle at Osaka, which was to overshadow Sakai as a commercial centre, set the seal on Hideyoshi's dominance; with the reduction of Kyushu and the taking over of Nagasaki, he was brought into more direct

- 167 -touch with the Europeans. He could now think of asserting himself on a wider stage than the Japanese islands, and Macao and Manila were face to face not with a congeries of rival lordships but with a state which, however strange and composite its organisation—paradoxically, a sort of centralised feudalism—was yet comparable in real power with any European monarchy.^[65] The resulting involvement of those European outposts with Japanese politics was to be fateful both for the expansion of Iberian Christendom and for the polity of Japan itself.