Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Toyotomi Hideyoshi was born a peasant, finished the unification of Japan, and then spent his last six years destroying part of what he had built by invading Korea. He entered the service of Oda Nobunaga as a foot soldier and rose through competence in siege engineering and negotiation rather than birth, which in a society organised entirely around birth was close to impossible. When Nobunaga was killed by one of his own generals in 1582, Hideyoshi force-marched his army back from a campaign in the west, destroyed the assassin within a fortnight, and turned the vengeance into a claim on the succession. He beat the rival claimants over the next three years, took the surrender of the last great independent houses in 1587 and 1590, and ended a century and a half in which Japan had no effective central authority. Because he was not descended from the Minamoto he could not be made shogun, so he had himself adopted into a court family and took the civil title of regent instead, and later the title of retired regent by which he is usually known. His settlement outlasted him by two and a half centuries. He ordered a nationwide cadastral survey that recorded every field and its yield, which turned a patchwork of claims into an assessable tax base. He confiscated weapons from the villages in a sword hunt justified as piety and intended as disarmament. Then he fixed the two together by decree: peasants could not become soldiers and soldiers could not farm, and the social order that the Tokugawa would police for the next two hundred and fifty years was set by a man who had personally violated every rule of it. In 1592 he sent a hundred and sixty thousand men to conquer Korea as the first stage of taking China. They took Seoul in three weeks and were then cut off by a Korean admiral who destroyed their supply fleets and by Chinese armies coming south. A second invasion in 1597 did no better. The war killed perhaps a million people, devastated Korea for a generation, and exhausted the western lords who paid for it. He died in 1598 leaving a five-year-old son and a council of five regents who were fighting each other within two years.
- Lived: 1537 CE – 1598 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
