When Toyotomi Hideyoshi died in 1598, the new Japanese state was not yet sufficiently stable, and the council of five sages appointed by the shōgun to manage the country until his son was old enough to rule quickly fell apart. War broke out again.

It was Tokugawa Ieyasu who emerged victorious two years later, winning the decisive battle of Sekigahara, which would determine the future of Japan for more than two and a half centuries. This battle is nicknamed 天下分け目の合戦.

天下分け目の合戦
Tenkawakeme no kassen – The decisive battle for the whole country.

Tokugawa Ieyasu was both an effective military man and a shrewd politician. On the death of Oda Nobunaga, of whom he was a daimyō, he opposed Toyotomi Hideyoshi for the succession, but the war being unfavourable to him, he had the intelligence to pledge allegiance, offering one of his sons as a hostage, as was the custom at the time.

He is not trusted by the Council of Five Wise Men. The others are convinced that he wants to seize power alone, to the detriment of the council and Hideyoshi’s son. This is exactly the plot of the Shōgun series, which tells the true story of an English sailor who arrived in the middle of this power struggle between Tokugawa Ieyasu and the other four members of the council.

The series ends before the decisive battle of Sekigahara, the fact that he is going to win it is simply mentioned. Over 150,000 samurai clashed on 20 and 21 October 1600. Tokugawa’s opponent, Ishida Mitsunari, was initially at the head of 120,000 samurai, but betrayals and defections meant that they were down to 82,000 by the time of the battle. Some joined Tokugawa Ieyasu’s camp, while others did not intervene. What’s more, Tokugawa had 18 cannons seized from a Dutch ship, which wreaked havoc on the opposing ranks. Losses at the end of the battle vary between 12,000 and 42,000 depending on the source.

Victorious, Tokugawa Ieyasu would not fall into the same trap as his predecessor Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Rather than seeking new conquests, he would completely transform the status of the samurai in the new era he inaugurated, the Edo period, named after his new capital.

This capital would be renamed Tōkyō (literally “the Eastern Capital”) in 1868 by Emperor Mutsuhito following the Meiji Restoration, which restored imperial power and definitively ended the Tokugawa shogunate, a regime that lasted 268 years.

He also created pleasure districts in the capital Edo, which many samurai would become regular patrons of. In the series Shōgun, the future founder of these pleasure districts is depicted arriving on a muddy riverside in Edo, a plot of land given to her by Tokugawa Ieyasu as a reward for her services. She immediately understands all the profit she could make from it.

However, Tokugawa Ieyasu still had one task to complete: to annihilate the last possible source of opposition to his power, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s son and his supporters. They had rebuilt Osaka Castle and gathered opponents to Tokugawa rule there. Near Osaka Castle, a bell was installed in a nearby temple, inscribed with the words: “May the state be peaceful and prosperous; in the East it greets the pale moon, and in the West bids farewell to the setting sun.”

The East refers to Edo and the Tokugawa clan; the West refers to Osaka and the Hideyoshi clan. The insult to the shōgun was clear. In 1615, he launched an attack on Osaka Castle with an army of 150,000 samurai. On June 3, the Battle of Tennōji turned against Hideyoshi’s son, who committed seppuku at the age of 21; his mother, Yodo-dono, followed suit. The total death toll is estimated at 25,000, mostly among the castle’s defenders. After this battle, Japan would experience 250 years of peace under the Tokugawa clan’s rule, which would ultimately be overthrown by imperial loyalists in 1868.

At that time, while not all tensions had yet been resolved, the idea of a unified and strong country had already taken root among the Japanese nobility. The Tokugawa dynasty would develop Japan internally but would also isolate it from the West through a policy instituted in 1633 by Tokugawa Iemitsu, Ieyasu’s grandson, known as 海禁. Another term would emerge in 1690 due to a book written by a German traveler working in Nagasaki, and from then on, the term 鎖国 would be used.

海禁
Kaikin – forbidden sea.

鎖国
Sakoku – closed country.

Tokugawa Iemitsu played a very important role in establishing his clan as the undisputed ruler of Japan. Having become shōgun in 1623 at the age of 19, he quickly realised that, in order to rule without fear of revolt, he had to weaken his vassals, the daimyō. He therefore instituted the 参勤交代, which obliged the daimyō to spend every other year in the capital Edo and to leave their wives and children there permanently as hostages.

参勤交代
Sankin kotai – duty rotation.

By generalizing the system for daimyō, Tokugawa Iemitsu ensured their loyalty. By forcing them to come to the capital every other year, he forced them to huge expenses, since the daimyō moved with all their suite and wanted, in addition, to impress each other. Japan had hundreds of daimyō, so these transhumances were spectacular daily comings and goings. This also explains how Edo, a small fishing village, quickly became the great city that is Tokyo today.

The second important task of Tokugawa Iemitsu was to ruthlessly pursue the Catholics, whom he saw as a threat to the country. He executed or expelled all missionaries, and forced all Japanese to register in the Buddhist temples. He thus erases any possibility of evangelization of Japan by the Catholics. Even today, Japanese Catholics represent only 0.36% of the Japanese population. The number of Christians in Japan is estimated at 2 million, regardless of their religious background, but 75% of them are not Japanese. Most come from Korea or the Philippines, two countries that have been largely evangelized.

The third measure of Iemitsu is the closure of the country to the West, except for a small artificial island in Nagasaki where Dutch and German Protestants can reside. The Japanese are forbidden, under penalty of death, to leave the country without authorization from the shogunate. This policy of closure was not lifted until 1853, when the American commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open, which led 14 years later to the end of the shōgun of the Tokugawa dynasty and the restoration of the emperor’s power. The Edo era ends and gives way to the Meiji era: it is the entry of Japan into the modern western world.

Bibliography

• Souyri, Pierre-François. Nouvelle histoire du Japon. Paris : Perrin, 2010.
• Souyri, Pierre-François. Les guerriers dans la rizière. La grande épopée des Samouraï. Paris : Flammarion, 2017