The Osaka campaign – or rather campaigns, because it consisted of two distinct winter and summer operations – holds a unique place in Japanese history. The battle of Tennoji in 1615, with which the fighting at Osaka concluded, was to be the last occasion in which two armies of samurai would engage one another in a pitched battle. It also saw the final appearance on the field of war of Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose victory at Osaka secured his family’s hegemony for the next two and a half centuries. But the Osaka campaign was also notable for a number of firsts. Because the fall of Osaka Castle was publicized by means of a woodblock-printed broadsheet, the campaign became the first event in Japanese history to be reported in anything resembling a newspaper. It was also the first major occurrence in Japan to be described in the English language – this was through the reports and letters prepared by the East India Company from its trading post in Japan. It was entirely appropriate that they should do so, because artillery supplied by the East India Company played a decisive role in the fall of the castle when it was used in the first long-range bombardment in Japanese history.
The period of Japanese history between 1467 and 1615 is known by analogy with ancient China as the Sengoku Jidai (‘Age of Warring States’). Throughout this time Japan suffered from sporadic civil wars between powerful daimyo (feudal lords), a long process that was finally brought to an end by the conflict at Osaka.
In their struggle for survival the rival warlords completely ignored both the nominal rule of Japan’s sacred emperor and the supposed rule of the Shogun, or military dictator, a position created in 1192. The power of the Shoguns had declined rapidly during the Age of Warring States, and the post was temporarily abolished in 1568. From that year onwards, however, Japan had moved towards reunification under two particularly outstanding generals. The first to take steps in this direction was the brilliant Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), but he was killed in a surprise attack in 1582. The man who succeeded him was called Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98). He was an accomplished general, and by 1591 Hideyoshi had conquered the whole of Japan. He then over reached himself with a disastrous war against China that was fought on the Korean peninsula. Hideyoshi died in 1598 in the manner that all dictators dread, because his son and heir Toyotomi Hideyori (1593–1615) was then only five years old. Very soon Japan split once again into armed camps. On one side was a loose coalition of daimyo who nominally supported Hideyori, while on the other were the supporters of his deadliest rival: Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616).
Tokugawa Ieyasu was one of history’s great survivors. Taken as a hostage when a child, and made to fight for one of Japan’s least successful daimyo when a young man, he gradually asserted his independence and allied himself in turn with Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. His territory in eastern Japan, presented to him by a grateful Hideyoshi, allowed him to avoid service in Korea, and this ensured that his troops were in better shape than many of his rivals who had suffered in that conflict. By the summer of 1600 Ieyasu’s potential was recognized by all, including the Portuguese traders, who had regular dealings with him and whose reports paint a vivid picture of the turmoil Japan was then experiencing.
Spain and Portugal had existed as a joint monarchy since 1580, a political unity that had enhanced the monopoly of Japanese trade that the two countries enjoyed between 1543 and 1600. Japanese arquebuses, copied from Portuguese originals brought in 1543 and then mass-produced, had made a considerable impact on the conduct of Japanese warfare. In 1600, however, Protestant rivals joined the Spanish and Portuguese when a Dutch ship visited Japan for the first time. The five vessels that made up the inaugural fleet left Rotterdam on 27 June 1598, but only one made it to Japan, having become the first ship of any nation to do so via the Straits of Magellan. The vessel was the Liefde, which arrived off Bungo province in Kyosho, the main island of southern Japan, on 9 April 1600. To complete a trio of ‘firsts’, also on board the Liefde was the famous William Adams, the first Englishman ever to set foot in Japan.
The threat that this arrival posed to the existing Iberian trading hegemony became immediately apparent when the Portuguese insisted to anyone who would listen to them that the Land of the Rising Sun had just taken delivery of ‘a party of piratical heretics’. This unflattering complaint was made very forcibly to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who is referred to by Adams as ‘the great king of the land’ – a prescient statement, for this was effectively what Lord Tokugawa was shortly to become.
As well as apprehending the crew, Ieyasu confiscated the armament of the Liefde for his own uses. The haul consisted of a score or so cannon, 500 arquebuses, 5,000 cannon balls, 50 quintals of gunpowder and 350 fire arrows, some of which may have been used at his decisive victory at Sekigahara on 21 October 1600. This huge battle destroyed the rival coalition, and three years later Tokugawa Ieyasu revived the post and title of Shogun. He made his own castle town, which lay 300 miles to the east, into Japan’s new administrative capital. It was called Edo, and proved to be a highly successful choice, as may be judged from the fact that Edo is now known as Tokyo.
Ieyasu’s destruction at Sekigahara of the rival coalition of daimyo had one notable feature: the absence of any direct involvement in the name of Toyotomi Hideyori, the child whose inheritance lay at the root of the struggle. Ieyasu also made no hostile moves against Hideyori during the course of the Sekigahara campaign. Instead both Hideyori and his influential mother, Hideyoshi’s widow Yodogimi, were successfully sidelined by political manoeuvres undertaken primarily by Katagiri Katsumoto, who had become Hideyori’s personal guardian in 1599 following the death of Maeda Toshiie.
Katsumoto’s efforts were rewarded by Ieyasu, who doubled his territories and moved him to a different province. The latter outcome was a phenomenon experienced by many other daimyo following the battle of Sekigahara, although it was not always a positive experience. They were shifted around Japan like pieces in a game of chess, with the size of their landholdings being either increased or decreased according to which side they had supported. These were the lucky ones. Others were either forced to shave their heads and become monks, or simply deprived of those heads by the swing of a samurai sword. Toyotomi Hideyori, forced into neutrality during the conflict, saw his revenues fixed at 657,400 koku, and was allowed to retain as his residence his late father’s masterpiece of Osaka Castle.
Tokugawa Ieyasu’s decision to make Edo into Japan’s administrative capital did not mean that he had neglected to establish a firm power base for the Tokugawa family in the Kyoto/Osaka area. In fact the reverse was true, because not only did Ieyasu rebuild and strengthen Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle to the south of Kyoto, where it controlled all traffic towards Osaka, he also created a new castle in the heart of the imperial city itself. Nijo Castle, of which the surviving palace is today one of Kyoto’s finest tourist attractions, was built very near to the imperial palace and became the base for the Shoshidai: the Tokugawa Shogun’s Governor of Kyoto. His chief function was to keep close control of the activities of Japan’s divine emperor and his court.
Edo, by contrast, became the focal point for controlling the daimyo. Many of them had already experienced considerable disruption to their lives by being moved to distant provinces. In the years following Ieyasu’s triumph they had to suffer the further humiliation of being invited, then requested, and finally forced to send their wives and children to live in Edo under the protection of the benevolent Shogun. By the time of the third Tokugawa Shogun this glorified hostage system was to become the most successful means of social control that the Tokugawa were to exercise. In 1603 the process was just beginning, but the experience of Toyotomi Hideyori had already given several clues as to how it would develop.
In addition to confining Hideyori inside Osaka Castle, Ieyasu had entangled him within the bonds of matrimony. Marriage between daimyo families had long been regarded as a vital tool of social engineering. Ieyasu was no exception to this view, and had used marriage to cement a union between his family and the house of Toyotomi. Ieyasu’s last consort had been Hideyoshi’s sister. His son Hidetada, the second Tokugawa Shogun, was married to a sister of Yodogimi, and in 1603, at the age of ten, Hideyori was married to Hidetada’s daughter. This meant that the Osaka campaign became a war between Toyotomi Hideyori and the man who was at the same time his uncle, his great-uncle and his grandfather-in-law.
Yodogimi, unsurprisingly, had not taken kindly to the disinheriting of her son Hideyori by this opportunist from Edo, but it was 1605 before she gave vent to her feelings in public. In that year Ieyasu retired from the post of Shogun in favour of his son Hidetada. Great celebrations were held, and Hideyori was invited to join in the festivities. Yodogimi, who was very suspicious of Ieyasu’s motives, refused to let him leave Osaka. An anecdote tells us that she stated that she and her 13-year-old son would rather disembowel themselves than leave the safety of the mighty fortress. In certain accounts this comment is attributed to the year 1611, which was to be the only year in which Hideyori was successfully prised from his mother’s grasp.
The meeting between Ieyasu and Hideyori in 1611 proved to be a memorable encounter. Prior to the event, Ieyasu took great pains to assure the Toyotomi family of his peaceful intentions, to the extent of placing two of his own sons – Yoshinao aged 12 and the nine-year-old Yorinobu – into the care of two trustworthy daimyo as token hostages. The interview with Hideyori was held at Nijo Castle and lasted two hours, and it was recorded that Ieyasu was greatly impressed by the bearing and demeanour of the young man.
In the light of subsequent developments it is tempting to read great significance into the conversation at Nijo Castle, which was to be the last time that the two rivals ever came face to face. Tokugawa Ieyasu was then 69 years old. His own heir Hidetada was fairly competent in his position as Shogun, but Ieyasu’s continued and enormous influence on the development of Tokugawa power indicates that his confidence in Hidetada was somewhat less than total. One very reassuring factor for Ieyasu was the comforting thought that the successor of the great Hideyoshi was a mere slip of a lad who was no more the equal of his father than was Hidetada of his. Throughout Hideyori’s childhood his guardian Katagiri Katsumoto had carefully propagated this myth of his effeminate weakness as a way of dissuading any disgruntled daimyo – and Sekigahara had provided many who fell into that category – from entertaining rebellious thoughts. If Ieyasu had ever believed in the myth himself, then the two hours he spent at Nijo Castle in 1611 completely dispelled it. Here was a unique and talented young man who, alone in Japan, had the lineage and the personality to challenge the Tokugawa. From that moment on, Hideyori’s fate was sealed.
This is not to say that Ieyasu had previously ignored the potential threat from Hideyori. He had, in fact, been engaged on a long and largely successful campaign to force Hideyori to spend some of the lavish fortune that his father had amassed, much of which was sitting in Osaka Castle in the form of gold bullion. The major item of expenditure to which Hideyori was directed was the rebuilding of the Great Buddha of Kyoto. It had been Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s pet project. As early as 1588, when the reunification of Japan was well in sight, Hideyoshi had conceived the idea of creating a superlative religious image for the spiritual welfare of the nation. That Japan’s spiritual well-being was not the sole consideration soon became apparent when Hideyoshi set in motion his notorious ‘Sword Hunt’. This was a process by which offensive weapons of all kinds were forcibly removed from minor daimyo, temple officials, farmers, sea captains and anyone else of whom Hideyoshi did not approve. The official line was that the weapons thus removed were to be melted down and used to provide metal bolts for the construction of the Great Buddha, but it is likely that very few were used for this purpose. Most were stockpiled and issued to the loyal daimyo who took part in Hideyoshi’s disastrous invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597. The Great Buddha was nevertheless constructed, only to be totally destroyed in the great earthquake of 1596. Its replacement, again for the spiritual welfare of the Japanese people, but now also as a fitting memorial to the great Hideyoshi, was an ideal pretext for emptying the coffers of Osaka. By 1602 the second image was complete up to the level of its neck, but as the workmen were engaged in casting the head early in 1603 the scaffolding caught fire and the entire statue, along with the temple that housed it, was reduced to ashes.
Work was resumed in 1608 under the supervision of Katagiri Katsumoto, and by 1612 a colossal statue of Buddha that rivalled those of Nara and Kamakura rose above the temple roofs of Japan’s ancient capital. But although its construction had made a hole in the Toyotomi gold reserves, the fact that the ports of Osaka and Sakai were owned by Hideyori provided the means for his wealth to be constantly replenished. The heir of the house of Toyotomi was clearly not going to be neutralized by economics alone.
Over the next two years Ieyasu’s attitude to Hideyori changed from one of accommodation and surveillance to one of military confrontation. There is no better measure of the process than the evidence provided in the fascinating correspondence and reports of England’s East India Company, which had come into being during the year that had seen the battle of Sekigahara. On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I put her signature on the Royal Charter that gave birth to the ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ – commonly known as the East India Company (EIC). Two years later ‘John Company’, to use the EIC’s popular nickname, was joined by ‘Jan Compagnie’ when the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company) was founded in Amsterdam in March 1602.
It took almost a decade for the EIC to express an interest in trade with Japan, and the first EIC vessel to sail there was the Clove, which reached Japan on 11 June 1613. The ship docked at Hirado, where the Dutch were already established. They provided no opposition, and the Englishmen were warmly welcomed by the local daimyo Matsuura Shigenobu (1549–1614). There was a short delay while they waited for William Adams to arrive, and then the party headed east to meet Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sumpu (modern Shizuoka). This audience was followed by a visit to the Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada in Edo. With the help of Adams, who had settled in Japan and become a close confidant of the Tokugawa family, the English obtained permission to trade with Japan through a ‘factory’ (trading post) on the island of Hirado. Among its staff were three names that we will come across in accounts of the Osaka campaign. Richard Cocks was appointed the head of the English factory in Hirado, William Eaton was based in Osaka, while Richard Wickham spent most of his time in Edo.
The political situation that existed between Ieyasu and Hideyori is first hinted at by the EIC in terms of its effects on the price of English gunpowder. In a letter from Richard Cocks in Hirado to Richard Wickham in Edo in January 1614, we read that there is ‘also gunpowder, although it be under twenty taystaystaystays