Tokugawa Ieyasu

#1September 1600. Two huge coalitions were moving toward a showdown that would become the Battle of Sekigahara.

#2Tokugawa Ieyasu was heading west. His opponents were gathering an army big enough to make the result anything but obvious.

#3But Ieyasu wasn't only counting troops.

#4He was working on the men inside the enemy coalition.

#5A letter dated September 3 survives. In it, Ieyasu praises a warrior who had been positioned with Western-aligned forces and had come over to the Eastern side. Keep helping, Ieyasu urged him.

#6That's a different way to look at an army.

#7You can count eighty thousand men on the other side. But will all eighty thousand actually fight you? Who'll hesitate? Who won't move? Who's already talking to your camp?

#8The main battle hadn't begun yet.

#9The fight over allegiance had.

#10And that's striking because twenty-eight years earlier, Ieyasu had handled a stronger enemy almost the opposite way.

#11Ieyasu was born in 1542 as Matsudaira Takechiyo.

#12His family controlled a small territory in Mikawa, squeezed between two bigger powers: the Oda to the west and the Imagawa to the east.

#13For a house that size, choosing the wrong ally could be fatal.

#14And the child paid part of the price.

#15Takechiyo was sent away as a political hostage.

#16Even that didn't go according to plan. On the way toward the Imagawa, he fell into Oda hands. Later he was exchanged and ended up under Imagawa control instead.

#17So the future founder of a shogunate grew up with very little say over some basic questions.

#18Where would he live? Which great house would his family depend on? Would he even be with his own family?

#19Other people's alliances decided those things.

#20Decades later, daimyo across Japan would have to decide whether they stood with Ieyasu or against him.

#21As a child, he couldn't even make that choice for himself.

#22By 1572, Ieyasu had become a daimyo in his own right. He controlled Mikawa and much of Totomi and was allied with Oda Nobunaga.

#23Then Takeda Shingen came into his territory.

#24Shingen was one of the most formidable warlords in Japan. His army pushed hard into Tokugawa lands and threatened the area around Hamamatsu.

#25Ieyasu had a castle.

#26He could've stayed behind its defenses.

#27He didn't.

#28He went out to fight.

#29At the Battle of Mikatagahara, the Tokugawa army met Shingen's forces and got smashed.

#30Ieyasu had to flee back to Hamamatsu. His men died in the collapse and retreat. Some stayed behind fighting so their lord could get away.

#31Later generations piled memorable stories onto the defeat: tales of Ieyasu disgracing himself in fear, or having a miserable portrait painted so he'd never forget the lesson.

#32You don't need any of them.

#33The basic scene is enough.

#34Ieyasu chose to meet a much stronger opponent. He lost. He escaped. Some of the men who served him didn't.

#35It's tempting to turn that into a tidy transformation.

#36Mikatagahara taught him patience.

#37Except his later life doesn't really cooperate with that story.

#38Shingen remained dangerous after Mikatagahara.

#39Ieyasu didn't come back, defeat him, and erase the humiliation.

#40Then Shingen died in 1573.

#41Ieyasu was still there.

#42The Takeda house lasted several more years, but in 1582 it finally collapsed under attacks from Oda and Tokugawa forces.

#43That pattern shows up again and again in Ieyasu's life.

#44He didn't personally destroy every man who stood above him.

#45Sometimes he lost. Sometimes he backed down. Sometimes the board changed while he was still on it.

#46But that doesn't mean he sat around waiting for stronger men to die.

#47When an opening appeared, he could move very fast.

#48In June 1582, Nobunaga was killed in the Honnō-ji Incident.

#49From a distance, it looks like a giant political opportunity.

#50For Ieyasu in that moment, it was first a survival problem.

#51He wasn't safely inside his own territory. He was near Sakai with a relatively small party when the political order around him suddenly collapsed.

#52Before he could take advantage of Nobunaga's death, he had to make it home.

#53Ieyasu and his group made their way through Iga toward Mikawa, relying on help from several local figures, warriors, and merchants.

#54He survived.

#55Then he moved.

#56The former Takeda lands were suddenly up for grabs. Ieyasu entered the struggle for Kai and Shinano, competing with the Hojo and other forces.

#57He eventually secured Kai and southern Shinano and emerged controlling five provinces.

#58A man who had just been scrambling to get home alive was suddenly expanding.

#59So no, danger didn't always make Ieyasu wait.

#60Sometimes it made him act.

#61The biggest winner after Nobunaga's death wasn't Ieyasu.

#62It was Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

#63Hideyoshi defeated Akechi Mitsuhide and rapidly moved into the center of the order Nobunaga had left behind.

#64Ieyasu didn't surrender right away.

#65In 1584, the two sides fought in the Battle of Komaki and Nagakute campaign. Tokugawa forces inflicted serious losses on important commanders fighting for Hideyoshi.

#66Ieyasu could hurt him on the battlefield.

#67But winning a battle wasn't the same as stopping Hideyoshi's rise across Japan.

#68Hideyoshi kept getting stronger. More daimyo entered his political order. In 1585, he became kampaku.

#69Ieyasu was running out of room.

#70Then one of his oldest retainers walked away.

#71Ishikawa Kazumasa had been with Ieyasu for years.

#72He'd served him through the difficult period surrounding the break with the Imagawa and had helped in the process of recovering Ieyasu's wife and son from Imagawa territory.

#73Then, in 1585, Kazumasa defected.

#74He went to Hideyoshi.

#75And he took his family with him.

#76This mattered because Kazumasa knew the Tokugawa house from the inside. He understood its organization and military affairs.

#77Why did he leave?

#78We don't really know.

#79Family circumstances may have mattered. Hideyoshi may have worked on him. Internal Tokugawa tensions may have played a role.

#80There's no single secure answer.

#81And that uncertainty tells us something useful.

#82Ieyasu didn't command a world of perfect, permanent loyalty.

#83Even someone who'd shared years of danger with him could leave.

#84Hideyoshi didn't rely only on armies to bring Ieyasu in.

#85He used family too.

#86His sister Asahi-hime married Ieyasu. Later, Hideyoshi even sent his own mother, Omandokoro, into Tokugawa territory as a powerful guarantee of good faith.

#87In October 1586, Ieyasu finally came to Osaka.

#88The night before his formal meeting with Hideyoshi, something unusual happened.

#89Hideyoshi came to him.

#90A contemporary diary says Hideyoshi visited the place where Ieyasu was staying, took him by the hand, led him inside, and the two poured sake for each other.

#91They'd been enemies in war not long before.

#92Now Hideyoshi was the dominant ruler in Japan, and Ieyasu was about to enter his system.

#93We don't know exactly what they said that night.

#94We don't need to invent it.

#95Hideyoshi came. He took Ieyasu's hand. They drank together.

#96The next day, Ieyasu formally submitted.

#97This wasn't a hidden victory.

#98He bowed to a stronger man.

#99But he didn't disappear.

#100Ieyasu stayed one of the most powerful daimyo inside Hideyoshi's system.

#101Then came another huge change.

#102In 1590, after Hideyoshi destroyed the Hojo, Ieyasu was transferred away from the old lands that had formed the heart of his power: Mikawa, Totomi, Suruga, and the surrounding region.

#103He was sent east into the Kanto.

#104His new center was Edo.

#105Knowing what Tokyo later became makes this easy to misread. It can look like Hideyoshi accidentally handed Ieyasu the future capital of Japan.

#106The opposite version says Hideyoshi dumped a dangerous rival in a worthless backwater.

#107Neither is quite right.

#108Ieyasu lost an old base built on generations of relationships.

#109He got an enormous new domain.

#110And he had to reorganize it.

#111So he did.

#112He wasn't overthrowing Hideyoshi. He was operating inside Hideyoshi's order.

#113But he was still building power.

#114That's why "waiting" doesn't quite capture what was happening.

#115He wasn't standing still.

#116Hideyoshi died in 1598.

#117Ieyasu outlived him.

#118That makes it very tempting to say Ieyasu had simply been waiting for this moment all along.

#119But we don't need to give him a perfect decades-long master plan.

#120While Hideyoshi was alive, Ieyasu genuinely operated inside his regime. He didn't openly try to destroy it.

#121Then Hideyoshi died, and the conditions changed.

#122His heir, Toyotomi Hideyori, was still a child.

#123The regime now depended on a balance among senior figures, including the Five Elders and Five Commissioners.

#124Ieyasu was one of the strongest men in that arrangement.

#125When Maeda Toshiie died in 1599, the balance became even shakier.

#126Ieyasu's influence grew.

#127So did the fear of what he might do with it.

#128By 1600, the tension was turning into open conflict.

#129The immediate crisis grew around Uesugi Kagekatsu.

#130Ieyasu moved east to deal with the Uesugi problem.

#131While he was away, Ishida Mitsunari and others began building an anti-Ieyasu coalition in the west.

#132Mori Terumoto became its nominal commander. Ukita Hideie, Otani Yoshitsugu, and other major figures joined.

#133This was dangerous.

#134Ieyasu was in the east. A huge hostile coalition was forming behind him in the west. And he still couldn't simply ignore the Uesugi.

#135We know the ending.

#136He didn't.

#137So Ieyasu had to think about more than where the armies were.

#138He had to think about what those armies were made of.

#139At Mikatagahara, young Ieyasu saw a powerful enemy army.

#140He went out to fight it.

#141He got crushed.

#142In 1600, another huge enemy army was forming.

#143But this time the question was different.

#144Were all those men really one side?

#145Would every daimyo listed in the Western Army fight to the end? Did Mori and Mitsunari really want the same things? Was anyone already talking to the Eastern camp?

#146The answer was yes.

#147The coalition had cracks.

#148Kobayakawa Hideaki was positioned with the Western side.

#149But before the battle, he had already been in contact with the Eastern camp.

#150Wakisaka Yasuharu also had connections across the line. Inside the Mori sphere, Kikkawa Hiroie was talking to Ieyasu's side. Shimazu forces were present, but they didn't simply operate as an obedient extension of Mitsunari's command.

#151And movement didn't only go Ieyasu's way.

#152Otani Yoshitsugu had previously cooperated with Ieyasu in government affairs, then joined Mitsunari's side in 1600.

#153People moved both ways.

#154The Eastern and Western armies weren't two permanent teams.

#155They were coalitions held together by interests, loyalties, fears, rivalries, and calculation.

#156Ieyasu couldn't control every man on the other side.

#157But he understood that an army could begin breaking before anyone charged.

#158The main battle began on September 15, 1600.

#159One later version of the story is almost too perfect.

#160Kobayakawa Hideaki refuses to move. Ieyasu gets angry. He orders his men to fire toward Kobayakawa's position. Kobayakawa panics and betrays the Western Army.

#161Great scene.

#162Not secure contemporary fact.

#163What we can say is more interesting anyway.

#164Kobayakawa had been in contact with the Eastern side before the battle.

#165During the fighting, he attacked Western forces.

#166That widened a fracture that was already there.

#167Otani Yoshitsugu's position collapsed. Other units shifted. The Western coalition started coming apart.

#168A battle involving tens of thousands of men was effectively decided in about half a day.

#169Because the number of men standing under one banner isn't always the number willing to fight together to the end.

#170Ieyasu had been working on that gap before the battle started.

#171As a child, Takechiyo couldn't choose his own side.

#172His father's political situation could turn him into a hostage. A deal between larger powers could decide where he'd live.

#173By 1600, the relationship had flipped.

#174Now other men had to decide.

#175With Ieyasu? Against him? Fight? Wait? Negotiate? Switch?

#176The boy once moved around by other people's alliances had become the center around which other people's alliances were being rearranged.

#177Sekigahara gave him a decisive victory.

#178But it didn't finish the job.

#179Sekigahara ended in 1600.

#180Toyotomi Hideyori was still alive. Osaka Castle was still there. The Toyotomi name still carried weight.

#181Ieyasu didn't become shogun until 1603.

#182And then, after spending a lifetime climbing toward the top, he held the title for only two years.

#183In 1605, Tokugawa Hidetada became shogun.

#184Hidetada wasn't exactly the obvious hero of Sekigahara. He'd been delayed at Ueda by Sanada Masayuki and failed to reach the main battle in time.

#185Ieyasu still gave him the office.

#186But Ieyasu didn't vanish.

#187As ogosho, he continued to exercise enormous power.

#188So he handed over the title without handing over all his influence.

#189And while Ieyasu was still alive, something important had become real:

#190one Tokugawa shogun had succeeded another.

#191Earlier in Ieyasu's life, the question was personal.

#192How do I survive?

#193Now another question mattered.

#194How does this survive without me?

#195Hideyori remained in Osaka.

#196And the relationship between the two houses was complicated by family: Ieyasu's granddaughter Senhime was married to Hideyori.

#197In 1611, Ieyasu met the grown Hideyori at Nijo Castle.

#198Later stories claimed Ieyasu saw what an impressive young man Hideyori had become and immediately decided he had to die.

#199That's too neat.

#200What we do know is that eleven years after Sekigahara, the Toyotomi question still wasn't settled.

#201In 1614, conflict turned into war.

#202The dispute over the inscriptions on the Hokoji bell became one piece of a larger political confrontation.

#203The Siege of Osaka began.

#204Warriors from around Japan gathered on the Toyotomi side. At the Sanadamaru defenses, Sanada Nobushige inflicted serious losses on Tokugawa troops.

#205The winter fighting ended in negotiation.

#206Then war came back the next year.

#207In the Osaka Summer Campaign of 1615, Hideyori and Yodo-dono died.

#208The Toyotomi house disappeared as a rival political power.

#209Fifteen years after Sekigahara.

#210During the final fighting at Osaka, Sanada Nobushige's men pushed dangerously close to Ieyasu's headquarters.

#211Later legends make it even more dramatic, claiming Ieyasu considered suicide.

#212We don't need that.

#213His headquarters was threatened.

#214That's enough.

#215At thirty-one, Ieyasu fled the disaster at Mikatagahara.

#216In his seventies, after becoming the dominant political figure in Japan, he could still find an enemy driving toward his own position.

#217He lived a long time.

#218That doesn't mean he lived safely.

#219Once the Toyotomi were gone in 1615, the Tokugawa regime moved more clearly toward regulation.

#220Measures such as the Buke Shohatto and rules governing the imperial court and court nobility began defining how powerful political actors were supposed to behave.

#221Ieyasu didn't build the entire Edo system by himself. Hidetada and later Iemitsu continued developing it.

#222But the direction is clear.

#223The question was shifting from:

#224Who wins the next war?

#225to:

#226How do you make it harder for another war like this to happen at all?

#227For Ieyasu, surviving one more enemy was no longer enough.

#228The structure had to survive him.

#229There's a famous image of the three unifiers and a cuckoo.

#230If it won't sing, Nobunaga kills it. Hideyoshi makes it sing. Ieyasu waits until it sings.

#231It's memorable.

#232It also wasn't Ieyasu's own recorded saying.

#233And his life doesn't fit it very well.

#234At Mikatagahara, he didn't wait. He went out against a stronger army and got crushed.

#235After Nobunaga died, he didn't wait. Once he made it home, he moved into the struggle for former Takeda territory.

#236He fought Hideyoshi. Then he submitted when the balance turned decisively against him.

#237Inside Hideyoshi's system, he built a new base in the Kanto.

#238After Hideyoshi died, he moved again.

#239Before Sekigahara, he attacked the cohesion of the enemy coalition before attacking the army itself.

#240After becoming shogun, he handed the office to his son.

#241Ieyasu wasn't always patient.

#242He wasn't always aggressive either.

#243He didn't always resist.

#244What he kept changing was the method.

#245At Mikatagahara, young Ieyasu saw a stronger enemy army and went out to meet it.

#246At Sekigahara, older Ieyasu asked something first:

#247Is that enemy army really one army?

#248And near the end of his life, the question changed again.

#249Not just:

#250How do I survive?

#251But:

#252How does this survive when I'm gone?

#253Ieyasu died in 1616.

#254Takeda Shingen was gone. Oda Nobunaga was gone. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was gone.

#255But the thing Ieyasu left behind wasn't simply an old man who'd outlived everyone else.

#256His son was already shogun.

#257Tokugawa power had already moved into another generation.

#258The boy whose allegiance had once been decided by other people had become the man around whom everyone else's allegiances turned.

#259And before he died, he'd started making sure that the center of that system no longer had to be him.

#260In 1611, something very strange arrived in Ieyasu's world: a European mechanical clock connected to the king of Spain.

#261The clock had been made in 1581, and it still survives in Japan.

#262How did a warlord who'd spent his life fighting across Japan end up receiving a clock from a king on the other side of the world?