the financial resources of the feudal barons, and a new era of rearrangement of existing landownership began: merchants were forbidden to press for repayment of loans made to warriors; new and old lands were forcefully appropriated by state officials who appointed themselves owners of the territories formerly in their charge; and strong military landowners expanded and aggrandized their estates at the expense of their weaker neighbors. In this age of disorder, Emperor Godaigo tried to rally dissatisfied barons against the military government of Kamakura. After several attempts and with the help of Takauji of the Ashikaga clan (orginally sent against him by the Kamakura authorities), Godaigo was successful to a degree in restoring imperial power in 1334.
The following year, however, Takauji drove him out of Kyoto, set on the throne a member of a rival branch of the family, and established his own military dictatorship during an era referred to as the Ashikaga period (1336-1568). Throughout this age, internecine warfare was again rampant, clans fighting among themselves, torn between the Southern Court of Godaigo in the region of Yoshino and the Northern Court of Takauji’s puppet emperors. New centers of provincial power began to emerge as the long-established feudal barons (repeating the historical mistake which had cost the emperor and the nobility their territoral empires long before) lost contact with their fiefs while maneuvering for power in the capital. In this age, the cherished ethos of clan loyalty to the immediate superior, which was to be so emphatically reasserted in later centuries, was only a pale shadow of what it claimed to be. The opposing principle of inferiors striking superiors (gekokujo) became the inspiration behind many political and military commitments. The farmers’ revolt near Kyoto in 1485, another revolt by farmers led by militant priests from Hongan-ji Temple in Osaka during the same period, and the Onin War (1467-77) finally threw the country into complete chaos, disrupting any attempts at centralized administration and substantially altering the system of land ownership so laboriously constructed during the previous age. Many Western observers in Japan during this period have left vivid descriptions of Japanese behavior as the vertical system of direct loyalty which had held the clan together began to crumble. In his letters, Alessandro Valignano, S.J., (1539-1606) was appalled at the facility with which Japanese vassals began to turn against their lords, or returned to serve former masters only to betray them once again. Joao Rodriguez (1561-1643) also noted the general proclivity to plunder, betray, blackmail, and exterminate ruthlessly, saying that he understood why the average Japanese of the time was eminently distrustful and “always kept his weapons at hand” (Cooper, 31).
At the height of this national chaos, during an age marked by the arrival of the first Europeans (1543) and the consequent introduction of firearms (tanegashima teppo, or iron rods of Tanegashima), there emerged three men of infinitely broader political vision and determination than their compatriots: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Oda Nobunaga was the son of an estate manager for the Shiba family—a clan fulfilling the function of provincial constables in Owari province. From this territory, he launched a series of progressive attacks upon all those provincial barons who were feuding among themselves. Already divided, they did not prove difficult to conquer. He eventually reached Kyoto, where, after a brief encounter with the exhausted leaders of the once powerful Ashikaga clan, he closed the period which had borne their name for almost 170 years (1568). His rise to absolute power was interrupted, however, by the application of a stratagem quite popular at the time: treason. He was surrounded unexpectedly by the troops of his vassal Akechi Mitsuhide, who was supposed to be leading those troops to the front. Father Luis Frois, S. J., (1532-97) relates that Nobunaga, although wounded by an arrow as he was washing his hands, seized a naginata and fought mightily against his many attackers until he was totally exhausted. He then “retreated into his chambers and shut the doors” (Cooper, 103). He was either burned alive or forced to commit formal suicide at his Honno-ji headquarters.
One of his most successful generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was of peasant ancestry. He immediately avenged the death of Nobunaga by defeating Akechi’s forces at Yamazaki. Fleeing, Akechi fell into the hands of looting peasants, who promptly murdered him. Hideyoshi then proceeded to conquer the rest of the country, launching swift campaigns in Shikoku (1585), Kyushu (1587), and Odawara (1590). It was Hideyoshi who, in the seventh month, eighth day of Tensho (1588), instigated what the country derisively called the Taiko’s Sword Hunt when he issued the famous decree which disarmed the nation. This decree stated that “the people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms” (Tsunoda et al., 329). Hideyoshi admitted quite frankly that widespread possession of weapons made it extremely difficult to collect taxes and tended to “foment uprisings.”
He was on his way to Korea when he died, and the powerful Tokugawa clan (allies of his and of Nobunaga before him) immediately moved to assume the title and power of the regency. The leader of this clan, the astute Ieyasu, eliminated any possible contenders—including Hideyoshi’s son, Hideyori, whom he had formally promised to protect. With the successful outcome of a series of battles culminating in the Sekigahara slaughter in 1600 and the Osaka siege in 1615, Ieyasu became the Seii Taishogun of Japan. His clan and its military dictatorship were to determine the course of Japanese history for 267 years, until political power was nominally restored to the emperor in 1868 and Japan began its rapid but painful transition from a feudal to a modern state.
At the end of the Momoyama period (1600), however, Ieyasu had inherited an exhausted but still heavily fortified Japan. The landscape was dotted with castles and fortifications of every possible size and style, which the provincial warlords had erected wherever it was feasible to station garrisons of warriors. Every strategic site which afforded a superior defense against armed attack and an optimum position for controlling the movements of people and goods had been well fortified. Castles were erected at the top of a small mountain (yamajiro, sanjo), or on the hill between a mountain and a plain (hirayamajiro, hirasanjo), as well as on the plain itself (hirajiro, hirajo). Military clans had constructed castles and established garrisons in major towns, near important temples and shrines (monzen-machi), at highway intersections (shukuba-machi) and markets (ichiba-machi), near ports and sea inlets (minato-machi), etc., thus forming that typical balance between military protection and exploitation on one side and commercial productivity on the other, which was also the salient characteristic of those medieval Japanese castle-towns (jokamachi) which had actually sprung up around a feudal lord’s manor.
In structure, the castle of feudal times had evolved into a sophisticated and, eventually, practically impregnable fortress. It was generally designed as a series of “concentric compounds isolated from each other by ramparts, moats, or walls” (Kirby, 12), and comprised such an intricate network of courts and passages that if one compound were lost to an invader, it could be recaptured from either side or totally cut off without substantially weakening the defensive strength of the other compounds. The approaches to its fortified perimeter were protected by excavations filled with water, by ditches, by swamps, or by a combination of all three. Water-filled moats (hori), as Kirby relates, were considered “the best guarantee against penetration.” Earthen walls (doi) or stone walls (ishigaki) rose massively from that first defensive line, offering only two major openings—the heavily fortified main gate (otemon) and the equally strong but smaller rear gate (karamete), both usually constructed of large timbers, plated with copper or iron, and densely studded with large nails. The passages within, linking one courtyard to another and each compound to the next, were usually designed in such fashion as to lead through cleverly arranged double gates (masugata) in which one gate was set at right angles to the second, allowing room enough between them to contain (and control from the sides and from above) only a certain number of people—which Hideyoshi had decided should never exceed a maximum of 240 warriors or forty cavalrymen.
The castle compounds (kuruwa) were generally composed of three units: the main section in the center (hommaru), surrounded by the second section (ninomaru), and then the third section (sannomaru) of fortifications,
