The Battle of Sekigahara
Flying Pig
Sekigahara was the battle which confirmed the dominance of Tokugawa Ieyeasu over Japan. It was fought on 21 October 1600, in an area of Japan’s Gifu prefecture which is covered in valleys between the armies of Tokugawa Ieyeasu and Ishida Mitsunari; who were both locked in a struggle to dominate the whole island of Japan. What followed would, in no uncertain terms, decide the fate of a nation.
To understand the battle, it is essential to understand a little of Japanese culture at that time. The system in place for governing Japan was that parts of the archipelago (which was seen to be one country) were governed by different warrior aristocrats (who were technically subject to the Tennō, or Emperor, but in practise the most powerful aristocrat controlled him), who gave land to their best warriors in exchange for military service and tribute. In a manner similar to that of the feudal system in medieval Europe, these ‘knights’ or samurai then gave their land to peasants in exchange for their crops, enabling the samurai to focus totally on the arts of war and bushido, their incredibly strict code of honour. The difference, however, between the samurai of Japan and the knights of Europe was that the samurai were strictly a servant class; their duty in life was to serve and protect their lord.
Now, at that time Japanese warfare was fairly primitive. The chain of command was simply that the officers had sworn fealty to their immediate superior officer, but the nature of the terrain (especially at Sekigahara) meant that armies were divided into companies under small lords, generally from the same village or family, and these companies operated pretty much independently of the overall commander. They were governed by honour and the will to seek it out, and so battles were fought as a series of apparently random, small-scale attacks by individual companies in accordance with a very vague tactical plan. Weapons used by these soldiers varied; the samurai sword, or katana, was the close-combat weapon of choice for the lords, but most soldiers carried longbows, either on foot or on horseback; or long spears. Firearms had been brought in by European sailors, and so were availiable to soldiers, but due to the nature of them in the sixteenth century a unit firing had to remain in formation while reloading for a long time, so they were not common – emphasis was on weapons and tactics which could be used for rapid, mobile and autonomous action in the valleys and hills.
There was, in this system, constant infighting to be the most powerful of the lords, and thus rule Japan, or to establish their claim to ‘protect’ more and more land. By the end of the 16th century, the mightiest lords were Oda Nobunaga, Uesugi Kenshin, Toyotomi Hedeyoshi, Takeda Shingen, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. For the ten years before he was forced to commit suicide in 1583 (probably by the other lords, who disliked the idea of an emperor who actually wielded power) Oda Nobunaga practically controlled most of Japan, and upon his death Hideyoshi managed to take his position, ruling all of Japan except the northern island of Hokkaido, and setting up his capital in Kyoto. He died in 1598 with an infant son, and so named his five most powerful vassals as regents: Ieyasu, Maeda Toshiie, Uesugi Kagekatsu, Mori Terumoto and Ukita Hideie. Of course, these men resumed the old pattern of fighting to control the young lord.
Ieyasu, who had been sent by Hideyoshi to the Kanto plain around what is now Tokyo, got together the largest number of retainers (it was common practise for weaker lords to ally themselves with the stronger ones) while surviving the attention of rivals. In 1599, fuelled by the death of Maeda Toshiie, he moved into Osaka Castle (Hideyoshi’s seat of power) in a bid to make himself the master of the confederation, but was forced the next year to move most of his men back to Kanto, fearing an attack by Uesugi Kagekatsu, which allowed his enemies to bring 128000 men from western Japan to defeat him (as stated earlier, the lords were very wary of any one man becoming too powerful). In October of 1600 Ishida Mitsunari led these men around a mountain pass, known as Sekigahara, to block Ieyasu’s march home to Kyoto and Osaka. However, their plans at ambushing the lord failed, since he found out about them and so advanced on Sekigahara in good order to meet the enemy, with about 75000 men at his back.
What the Western Army defending the pass did not know was that one of its officers, a certain Kobayakawa Hideaki, had been convinced by Ieyasu by offers of land, wealth and position to betray his lord, as had a few other officers of the Western Army. This not only gave Ieyasu more soldiers, but a valuable trap which would spring, probably at a critical moment. One of the traitor lords also managed to convince another high-ranking Western Army officer to keep out of the battle.
Tokugawa Ieyasu attacked early on the 21st October and a melee sprung up, which continued at stalemate until the afternoon. The traitor Hideaki did not send in any of his troops until Ieyasu called in support from his musket-armed troops, which was taken as a signal, and Hideaki ordered his men to attack Mitsunari’s army. This forced Mitsunari himself to flee the battle, causing his men to surrender. It is important that had the men Ieyasu had convinced to betray their army instead attacked him, he would have faced almost certain defeat and been surrounded on three sides.
Ten days after the battle, Tokugawa Ieyasu marched his army, having lost 6000 men at the battle, into Osaka which made his claim to being the successor of Hideyoshi legitimate. He also had Mitsunari executed, and exiled almost all of the lords who had opposed him in the largest land reform in Japanese history, which caused him many enemities including one with the family of Hideyoshi, which he had to wait until 1615 to settle. In 1603 the Emperor named Ieyasu the Shogun, or highest-ranking military ruler, giving him supreme power over Japan with Imperial blessing, at which Ieyasu moved his capital to Edo (now Tokyo) on the eastern coast. The office remained with his descendants until 1867 and the abolition of the Shogunate. One of Ieyasu's first moves as Shogun was to ban the posession of firearms by peasants, since he knew that they threatened to uproot the social order and remove the rigid heiracy with the samurai above the peasants and the Shogun above the samurai.
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