Toyotomi Hideyori

Toyotomi Hideyori

Tomb of the Toyotomi clan on Mount Koya

Memorial stone in Osaka Castle on the site of Hideyori and Yodo-dono's seppukus

Toyotomi Hideyori ( Japanese 豊 臣 秀 頼 ; * September 8, 1593 ; † June 5, 1615 at Ōsaka Castle ) was a Japanese samurai , daimyo , military leader and interim head of the Toyotomi clan .

Life

Toyotomi Hideyori was the second son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Yodo-dono , a niece of Oda Nobunagas . His older brother Tsurumatsu died very young before his father.

His father, with Oda Nobunaga, was one of the unites in Japan. After the early death of his father on September 18, 1598, he was appointed heir and the Council of Five Regents took over the affairs of state for him. He then lived with his mother at Osaka Castle, who was under the protection of Ishida Mitsunari . The most powerful daimyo in the country, Tokugawa Ieyasu , had his own ambitions for power relatively quickly and opposed the advice of the regents.

The disagreement between the regents led to civil war and culminated in the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The forces of the Toyotomi clan were led into battle by Ishida Mitsunari and almost completely wiped out. Ishida and his clan were wiped out, but Tokugawa Ieyasu spared Toyotomi. He could continue to live at Osaka Castle and was officially still the heir, but only in name, since Tokugawa Ieyasu held the dignity of Shogun from 1603 and the Edo period began. Toyotomi passed the time studying calligraphy .

In 1611 he met Tokugawa Ieyasu and assured him of his loyalty, but the Shogun mistrusted him and his surroundings and looked in 1614 for a flimsy reason to take action against Toyotomi. This was because a bell was also attached while work was being carried out on Osaka Castle. This bell bore the inscription: “May the land be peaceful and happy; In the east it greets the pale moon and in the west it bids farewell to the setting sun. ”The Shogunate saw this as a personal insult. The first siege in the winter of 1614 failed and ended with a peace treaty that forced Toyotomi to fill in the moat of Osaka Castle.

1615 attacked Tokugawa Ieyasu against the provisions of the peace treaty with an even larger army and achieved the annihilation of Toyotomi's troops in various battles and during the second siege of the castle. Toyotomi Hideyori and his mother were then allowed to commit seppuku . His son Toyotomi Kunimatsu was captured and executed by chopping off his head 14 days after Toyotomi Hideyori's death in Kyoto, his widow later became a Buddhist nun and his daughter Naahime was exiled as a tenshūni nun in the Tōkei-ji monastery in Kamakura .

With his death, the last opposition to the Tokugawa shogunate died out until its end under Tokugawa Yoshinobu in 1867.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ www.wiki.samurai-archives.com
2. ↑ www.historytoday.com ( Memento from August 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Toyotomi is the family name, Hideyori the first name.