The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 75

Thus Christianity was thought at first to be a sect of Buddhism. And

because these Europeans had brought with them a powerful new

weapon, namely, firearms, they instantly transformed the worldview

of Japan's rulers. Hideyoshi's use of the expression "Christian coun-

try" for Europe demonstrated that he did recognize the existence of an

area in the world that had its own characteristic culture different from

that of either Tenjiku or Shin tan. He responded to this culture by

placing it in an intellectual category that contrasted it with the concept

of the land of the gods.

Hideyoshi felt that the activities of the Christian country that he

witnessed in Kyushu were potentially dangerous to Japan. The mis-

sionaries did not merely convert the populace but ruthlessly destroyed

Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, claiming they were institutions

of idol worship. The Christian daimyo Omura Sumitada and his son

Yoshisaki had even ceded Nagasaki, an excellent natural harbor in

their domain, to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were given practi-

cally a free rein: They administered the town, dispensed justice,

owned land, and collected anchorage fees from Portuguese

ships.

How-

ever, they were not granted the right to collect a tax on trade from

ships entering the harbor.

Hideyoshi surely was aware of the parallels with an earlier example

of ecclesiastical challenge to secular authority: the Ikko ikki that

Nobunaga had had such great difficulty in suppressing. The Ikko

believers, too, had destroyed Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in

an attempt to promote a "single-minded, exclusive practice" (ikko

senju),

built towns within temple compounds that were relatively inde-

pendent of secular authority, and pitted themselves militarily against

daimyo authority.

Hideyoshi was convinced, on the basis of his experience, that such

"heresies" would present obstacles to national unification. The Society

of Jesus, moreover, was identified as being a foreign lord. Because

Hideyoshi was attempting to unite the lords of Japan under his own

authority, he could not tolerate the existence of a separate authority

that was not integrated into that system of unity. On 1587/6/19 he

ordered that trade and foreign travel be permitted only so long as they

did not disturb the practices of Buddhism, but he instructed the mis-

sionaries to leave Japan within twenty days.

The identity of the new state that Hideyoshi built was based on the

land of the gods concept and was enhanced by an additional element,

the notion of an inherent conflict between a strong Japan and China

dominated by effete aristocrats and Buddhist clergy. This was illus-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

76 THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY UNIFICATION

trated by Hideyoshi's instructions for the invasion of the continent in

1592:

"With only five hundred or a thousand men I succeeded in

uniting Japan, a country of warriors and furious internecine struggles.

Since so many of you are in the vanguard against 'the long-sleeved

country of the Great Ming,' I am confident of the outcome. Subjugate

it speedily."

Two concepts, "Japan,

country of warriors and furious internecine

struggles," and "the long-sleeved country of the Great Ming," were

used in opposition to each other. The term "long-sleeved" referred to

aristocrats and Buddhist clergy; when used by warriors, it expressed

contempt. Hideyoshi, who had united the Japan's warrior bands and

built a state composed of

national coalition of daimyo, was keenly

aware of that state as a nation of warriors. His disdain for the "long

sleeves" was particularly strong, perhaps because his regime itself had

had to derive its legitimacy from his adopting the title of imperial

regent. Although the leaders of the Kamakura and the Muromachi

shogunates had been drawn from warrior bands, they were unable

ultimately to free themselves from the organizational principles advo-

cated by the "long sleeves." Hideyoshi ruled Japan through the mili-

tary power that had unified the daimyo. This military power then

became the basis of

new state structure that put an end to the nobles'

control of the state. In his terms, both the Ming empire and the

Muromachi shogunate were "long-sleeved" administrations.

Under the sixteenth-century unifiers, the land of the gods had be-

come a state organized around the daimyo. Opposition to this new

state was seen to come from the "long sleeves" of both Japan and

China. Moreover, with the Ming empire in a state of collapse and

Europeans arriving in Japan in ever-increasing numbers, the new cen-

ter of authority for a secure international order was not to be "long-

sleeved" China but, rather, the militarily powerful "country of war-

riors and furious internecine struggles": Japan. Hideyoshi thought

that because he had pacified both the land and sea and had made travel

safe at home and abroad, the Chinese should dispatch a mission to

thank him. Obviously, he was applying knowledge gained from his

narrow domestic experience in a simpleminded fashion to complex

international problems. He had, as well, a haughty, insular view of the

outside world. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that he made an

23 Tokyo daigaku shiryo hensanjo, ed., Dai Nihon

komonjo,

Iewake 8, Mdri-ke

monjo,

vol. 3, pp.

164-8 (doc. 904). Asao Nashiro, "Sakokusei no seiritsu," in Rekishigaku kenkyukai and

Nihonshi kenkyukai, eds., Bakuhansei shakai, vol. 4 of Koza Nihonshi (Tokyo: Tokyo

diagaku shuppankai, 1970), pp. 59-74.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 77

effort to develop a new conception of state that would displace the

international order based on China, then in a state of decline.

In 1591 the Jesuit

visitator

Alexandra Valignano, returning to Japan

from a trip in which he had taken four young Japanese samurai from

Kyushu to Europe, brought to Hideyoshi a letter from the Portuguese

viceroy of the Indies (Goa). In his reply to the viceroy, Hideyoshi

revealed still more of his idea of Japan's world status. He

himself,

wrote, had united by force of arms the more than sixty provinces of

Japan that had suffered years of disorder. He had stabilized public

affairs so that even foreign nations sent tribute to him. Moreover, he

suggested that he was planning to conquer the great Ming empire in an

effort to wield his authority beyond Japan's borders. He continued by

saying that Japan was the land of the gods

(kami)

and that the gods of

Japan were the origin of

all

things. Worship of the

kami

was equivalent

in Japan to Buddhism in India and Confucianism in China. Finally, he

had forbidden the Christian missionaries, who remained unaware of

these teachings, from coming to Japan, although he promised to guar-

antee the safety on land and sea of those who would come seeking

friendship and trade.

In a letter to the governor general of the Philippines sent in that

same year, Hideyoshi omitted the passage about the land of the gods

but emphasized the mysterious quality of his authority, by describing

the omens that appeared at his birth. He mentioned Korea and the

Ryukyus as countries that rendered tribute, and he threatened to

attack the Philippines immediately if tribute were not forthcoming.

He sent a letter of the same import to Taiwan (Takasagun) in 1593,

revealing more details of

his

miraculous birth, such as how the rays of

the sun filled the room when his mother and father conceived him. He

likened himself to a child of the sun: The sun causes everything to

grow, he said, adding that it also had the power to wither everything.

The letter went on to say that he had already launched an attack on

Korea, that the Chinese ambassador had come to surrender, and that

the Europeans

(namban)

and the Ryukyus were sending tribute. This

claim about tribute was not true in either case; in essence, Hideyoshi

was trying to extend the military power by which he had united Japan

to be the central principle of

new regional order.

The former international order from the Chinese viewpoint was

based on a dichotomy between China and the barbarians. In this sys-

24 Hideyoshi's letter to the viceroy of the Indies (Goa) in English translation appears in Ryusaku

Tsunoda, W. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, eds.,

Sources

of Japanese

Tradition

(New

York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 316-18.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

78 THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY UNIFICATION

tern China was the land of culture, rites, and etiquette, and the barbari-

ans were the foreign countries beyond this realm. Hideyoshi put for-

ward a Japanese version of the Chinese-barbarian concept, placing the

militarily powerful "country of warriors and furious internecine strug-

gles"

at the center and then arranging the neighboring countries

around it. It is simple to point out how devoid this concept was of

substance, as seen from outside Japan. But to the unifier of the Japa-

nese state, the claim of international hegemony was not farfetched.

Indeed, one can even find some basis for Hideyoshi's claim. From

his time Korea and the Ryukyus were consistently ranked as tribute-

bearing countries. This pattern was continued in the Edo period,

when both countries were defined as "emissarial countries"

(tsushin-

koku)

that sent envoys to the shogun, with the So and Shimazu daimyo

serving as the respective intermediaries. The Ainu suffered military

suppression at the hand of the Matsumae and were set on a course of

assimilation with Japan in the Edo period. Despite the fall of

the

Ming

dynasty, China continued to hold its place as an entity with a unique

culture. India (Tenjiku) disappeared from the three-realm Buddhist

world view formerly held by the Japanese. Europe, as the Christian

country with a culture different from either China's or Japan's, came

to occupy a prominent place in the Japanese worldview, evidence of

which can be seen in Hideyoshi's direct seizure of diplomatic relations

with Portugal and Spain, and the relationship between the Tokugawa

shogunate and the Netherlands, which later monopolized Europe's

diplomatic relations with Japan. In the Edo period the Netherlands

and China were given roughly equal status as "trading countries."

THE POWER STRUCTURE OF THE UNIFIED STATE

The transcendental

authority

of the "men of the realm"

The state created by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi was

basically a military hegemony imposed on the heads of all warrior

bands of daimyo who had staked out their own local territorial claims.

One important feature of the history of this state structure is that it

was imposed from

above

by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, instead of being

formed through a process in which the daimyo, as a result of pro-

tracted warfare, would have accepted mutually from

below

the rule of a

superior authority

after

having attained control over their own territo-

ries.

Why was the state not formed by the mutual consent of a coali-

tion of independent daimyo?

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE POWER STRUCTURE 79

With the policy of strict separation of the samurai and peasant

classes, the daimyo cut off their bands of retainers from private

fiefs

the countryside and reconstituted them as a well-defined warrior class

that administered the various landholdings that made up the domain

and that carried out legislative, judicial, fiscal, and other functions

under the lord's direction. This policy

was

implemented from above by

Hideyoshi, to whom the daimyo had sworn allegience. By accepting

this scheme, the daimyo were able to safeguard their own positions and

achieve greater control over their own domains. Only by entering into

lord-vassal relationships with Nobunaga and Hideyoshi could the

daimyo ensure their own positions as proprietary lords. The social and

economic functions necessary for everyday

existence,

including agricul-

ture,

handicraft production, and commerce and distribution, were left

entirely to farmers, merchants, artisans, and others of

the

ruled popula-

tions and were not open to warrior participation. In institutional terms,

the rights of rule and administration were lodged in the hands of the

legally defined warrior status, but the day-to-day administration in

each town or village was for the most part entrusted to functionaries

within the ruled statuses of farmers, artisans, and merchants.

The ruled classes of late medieval Japan were clustered in villages

(mura) and town wards

(machi).

Customarily, villages would combine

to form autonomous groups, that is, self-governing village associations

(sosori).

These self-governing village associations were particularly

prominent in the economically advanced regions, such as the Kinai

and surrounding provinces, and especially within the domains of the

religious proprietary lordships, including the Ikko ikki and also tem-

ples such as Kofukuji, Negoroji, and Enryakuji.

The self-governing village associations sometimes formed district-

wide alliances

(gunchuso)

or even provincewide associations

(sogoku

ikki).

The province and the district (kori) were local administrative

units of the ancient state, but their boundaries no longer conformed to

the contours of sixteenth-century political realities. Rather, the an-

cient units served as a basis for the formation of autonomous groups.

As a monk of the Ikko sect of Omi Province aptly recorded, these

alliances geographically symbolized their abhorrence of ties to the

private lord-vassal system maintained by individual warrior lords

and, at the same time, demonstrated their preference for the jurisdic-

tion of the court, aristocracy, and religious institutions of Kyoto.

Hompukuji

atogaki, in Kawahara Kasuo and Inoue Toshio, eds.,

Renrtyo,

Ikko ikki, vol. 17 of

Nikon

shiso

laikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1972), pp. 185-236; citation from p. 230.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

80 THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY UNIFICATION

The farmers, artisans, and merchants insisted that they were not a

part of any warrior's band of private followers but, rather, "people"

(i.e.,

citizens) of the provinces and districts. They saw that compared

with the rule of military proprietors, the rule of the nobility was more

lenient and would intrude less on their autonomy. The slogan of one

peasant alliance

(tsuchi

ikki) in Harima Province, "There shall be no

samurai in the province," shows this clearly.

Moreover, religious ikki

crossed district or provincial borders to spread insurrection over wide

areas,

threatening the daimyo's control over their

territories.

For exam-

ple,

the Ikko ikki under the leadership of

the

Honganji (temple) waged

warfare as a union of believers drawn from more than a dozen prov-

inces.

Nobunaga felt keenly the threat posed by this Ikko ikki, and for

that reason he resorted to a strategy of total annihilation. But Nobu-

naga also realized that a government could not continue to exist

through such a destructive policy alone. The alternative that he and

his successors chose was to become "men of the realm"

(tenka bito)

and

as such to establish their own authority and legitimacy in terms more

acceptable to the people of Japan.

The term "men of the realm" was a sobriquet used by contemporar-

ies to refer to Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu; it meant "the de facto

ruler of the realm." The concept of realm

{tenka)

came from China. In

ancient Japan, the portion of the Japanese archipelago ruled by the

emperor was regarded as the entire world, and so the term

tenka

was

frequently used in a political sense to designate the universality of the

authority ruling that area. With the advent of the military regimes in

the Kamakura period, Minamoto no Yoritomo, the Hojo regents, and

the subsequent Ashikaga shoguns were often called "masters of the

realm" (tenka no shujin), meaning that they held the right to rule

universally.

But it was Oda Nobunaga who used the term "realm"

(tenka)

most

effectively. By his time it had acquired four concentric layers of mean-

ing: (i) Japan and the people who lived there; (2) Kyoto and its

environs, the locus of the regime that ruled the nation; (3) the regime

itself;

and (4) the individual rulers of the regime. Nobunaga used the

term in the first sense to criticize the shogun: "The realm," he stated,

"is reprimanding Ashikaga Yoshiaki." He then overthrew him. In this

instance Nobunaga claimed to represent public opinion. But at the

same time he continued to maintain that he had been entrusted with

26 "Sakkaiki," the diary of Nakayama Sadachika, entry for 1429/1/29 (unpublished; manuscript

copies in Tokyo daigaku shiryo hensanjo and Kyoto daigaku).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE POWER STRUCTURE 8l

the government of the realm and ascribed the third and fourth mean-

ings to

himself.

Nobunaga was at once the representative of the realm

(a ruled object) and the realm itself

(the

principal of

the

realm). As the

personification of the realm, he felt called upon to replace the old

social order. Because Nobunaga was killed halfway on his path to

unification, he could not be called a "man of the realm," but he was

nonetheless the first to develop and apply the mode of action associ-

ated with a man of the realm in actual politics.

Beyond using the notion of tenka as justification to dispatch the

Ashikaga shogun, Nobunaga's method of dealing with the religious

powers, his conception of Azuchi Castle, and his interventions in the

retainer bands of his subordinate daimyo all are clearly permeated

with the mode of action of the men of the realm, who rose above the

various autonomous groups and brought them under their control. Of

particular importance was Nobunaga's attitude toward the emperor

and the court. When he entered Kyoto in 1568, he fulfilled the em-

peror's three requests and, in one sense, restored the emperor and

court nobility, who were on the verge of being deprived of their in-

come, to their rightful positions in the ancient, Kyoto-based hierarchy.

But Nobunaga did not have in mind a resurrection of

the

ancient court

system. Rather, he aimed at creating a state structure based on the

hegemonial power of

man of the realm.

After driving out Ashikaga Yoshiaki, the court bestowed high noble

rank on Nobunaga, and he advanced rapidly in rank and office until

1578,

when he was named to the senior second court rank and was

appointed minister of the right

(udaijin)

and great commander of the

imperial bodyguards of the right

(udaisho).

But in the same year he

resigned his posts and held none thereafter for the rest of his life,

remaining at the senior second rank with the honorary title of former

minister of the right. Nobunaga refused to be bound by the traditions

and restrictions of the court system, which he would have had to

accept if he had taken office; instead, he sought to put himself into a

position that permitted more freedom. But he did have his eldest son,

Nobutada, serve in court ranks and offices. This pattern was repeated

by Nobunaga's successors: Hideyoshi became Taiko (retired imperial

regent), and Ieyasu became Ogosho (retired shogun or shogun's fa-

ther).

Bearing these honorary titles, they conducted themselves as the

ones with the greatest actual power, setting themselves the task of

forming a unified state.

In 1581 a court messenger came to Nobunaga to request that he

accept appointment as minister of the left (a more prestigious post

82 THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY UNIFICATION

than minister of the right). Nobunaga replied that he wished the em-

peror Ogimachi to abdicate and that he would in time provide the

funds for an accession ceremony for Imperial Prince Kotohito, whose

coming of age ceremony Nobunaga had also underwritten. Only then

would Nobunaga accept the post. While the construction of Azuchi

Castle was under way, Nobunaga also built a residence for himself in

Kyoto that served as his point of contact with the ceremonies of the

imperial court system that were useful in supporting his claims to

legitimacy. But in 1579 he gave this residence, called the Nijo

gosho,

Prince Kotohito. Here a group of nobles surrounding the twenty-

seven-year-old prince worked full time, and a great deal of court busi-

ness was conducted here rather than at the court of Emperor Ogi-

machi, who was then in his late sixties. People called Ogimachi's

residence "the upper palace" from its location north of Prince Koto-

hito's Nijo

gosho,

which was then termed "the lower palace," thereby

recognizing the functional division of court government. There is little

doubt that Nobunaga planned sooner or later to install Prince Koto-

hito as "Nobunaga's emperor."

In 1582, upon Nobunaga's triumphal return from pacifying the

eastern provinces, the court sent another messenger with the offer to

appoint Nobunaga to the post of shogun, linked traditionally to the

conquest of the Kanto. An imperial council at that time even dis-

cussed appointing him grand minister of state or imperial regent, the

highest offices among the nobility's official posts, an indication that

the court was thinking seriously of treating Nobunaga as the highest-

ranking person in the imperial court system, save only the emperor

himself.

But on this occasion, too, Nobunaga declined the offer. One month

later Nobunaga died in Akechi Mitsuhide's rebellion, without reveal-

ing his motives for refusing the appointment. But it can be assumed

that the complexity of asserting claims to political hegemony by work-

ing through the old imperial court system was distasteful to him.

First, he would have had to tie his political future to the will of the

emperor, whose subject and subordinate he would always remain.

Second, he would have had to convince the general populace that he

did in fact dominate the emperor and court nobility, despite his out-

ward dependence on the emperor. And in turn, this might mean that

Nobunaga would have had to conspire to install a new emperor and

high nobility who would be receptive to maintaining the

fictive

aspects

of the dependency-dominance relationship. In the end, this was not a

road to power that Nobunaga chose to tread, and so it fell to Hideyoshi

THE POWER STRUCTURE 83

to put this plan into practice, with the enthronement of Emperor Go-

Yozei and Hideyoshi's own appointment as grand minister of state.

By establishing their authority as men of the realm, Nobunaga and

Hideyoshi also opened up the possibility for the daimyo lords under

them to fashion a concept of public authority that they could employ

to govern the people below them. Within their domains the daimyo

ruled with the legitimacy of state authority and not simply as private

entities that used force to compel obedience. Through Hideyoshi, the

daimyo were even given rank in the court system. As a result, their

jurisdiction over their own territories was recognized as official, their

position as public lords confirmed. Now, for the first time the daimyo

could use concepts of state and public authority to maintain their

claims to hold proprietary lordships, and with time they were able to

confront the general populace of

the

provinces and districts as autono-

mous public persons.

There was no single means for a daimyo to obtain court rank:

Petitions to the emperor could be made through members of

the

impe-

rial family, the nobility, or a prominent military family. Hideyoshi set

out to control the warriors' access to court rank, and he succeeded in

building an ingenious structure that would induce the emperor and

court to work his will while still preserving the respect due them. The

most effective answer to Hideyoshi's need was to claim the authority

of the men of the realm to establish "one's own emperor" from whom

to receive court rank and high office. Once this public gesture was

made, the final step was to return his posts and honors to the emperor

and adopt the guise of "the master of the nation," free from the

shackles of historical precedent. Thus the emperor was made the basis

of a new state structure. He, of course, held the highest authority

within it but possessed little actual power. This allowed Hideyoshi to

show that the authority of the men of the realm and the daimyo was

the legitimate public authority of the imperial court system.

In comparing the concept of the land of the gods with notions of

legitimacy in China, an important historical fact becomes apparent. In

China the dynasties frequently changed, whereas in Japan the imperial

house reigned in an unbroken line. But now in the crucible of change

that was late-sixteenth-century Japan, the actual guardian deities of

the land of the gods were no longer the spiritual kami but, rather, the

men of the realm who had assumed that responsibility. Then, to com-

plete the historical circle, these men were themselves deified. After his

death Hideyoshi was given the divine name of Toyokuni daimyojin by

the court, just as Ieyasu was to be given the name Tosho daigongen

84 THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY UNIFICATION

after his death. Both were thus worshiped as deities. According to the

missionary Luis Frois, Nobunaga even had himself worshiped as a

deity at Azuchi a few weeks before his death. In premodern Japan

those who had died with hatred in their hearts were worshiped as

deities to pacify their spirits, but the men of the realm were the only

commoner statesmen to be recognized as Shinto deities.

From shogun and imperial

regent

to the authority of the

retired

imperial

regent

The men of the realm, whose lives spanned the creation of the new

state,

faced numerous obstacles and difficulties in legitimizing their

authority. Hideyoshi, born into a farming family, underwent particu-

larly great hardships, but it appears that early in his life he dreamed of

becoming shogun some day. His lord, Nobunaga, had been asked to

accept appointment as shogun by an exceptional decision of the impe-

rial court; consequently, it was only natural that Hideyoshi, who

self-

consciously played the part of Nobunaga's successor, would choose

that course.

Indeed, there are indications that soon after Hideyoshi

had consolidated his hold over central Japan in the mid-1580s, he

began negotiations with Ashikaga Yoshiaki, the nominal shogun who

had fled from Nobunaga. Hideyoshi purportedly offered to let Yoshi-

aki return to Kyoto, in return for which Hideyoshi would become

Yoshiaki's adopted heir and future shogun. Had this plan succeeded,

Hideyoshi would have obtained painlessly the title of unifier of the

daimyo. But it is widely believed that this proposal was rejected by the

proud Yoshiaki. Hideyoshi then made plans to "conquer the east,"

that is, the eight Kanto provinces. Doubtless he had recalled the

traditional connection between the subjugation of the eastern prov-

inces and appointment to the post of

sei-i

tai-shogun.

But Ieyasu stood

in his way, and in the end Hideyoshi chose the path that led to his

becoming imperial regent.

But here too, Hideyoshi encountered strong resistance because of

his lowly birth. The Shimazu, daimyo of Satsuma, even went so far as

to ignore Imperial Regent Hideyoshi's orders for a cessation of hostili-

ties in 1586, after Otomo Sorin, another Kyushu daimyo, had re-

quested Hideyoshi's help in his long struggle against the Shimazu.

27 It had been thought that only members of the Minamoto lineage could become sei-i tai-

shogun. Nobunaga's family had no relationship to either the Minamoto or the Taira, but he

claimed to be a Taira in that he had overthrown the Ashikaga house that claimed descent from

the Minamoto.