From Ashikaga to Azuchi: Japan’s Road to the Sengoku Period
How a succession quarrel in Kyoto, a decade of urban warfare, and a century of provincial bloodshed created the fractured Japan that the Portuguese walked into.
Topic
Military
Arquebuses, sieges, and the great battles of the Sengoku and early Edo period, and the European weapons and warriors that helped decide them.
Early Contact (1543–1568)(3)
From Reconquista to Tanegashima: How a Crusade on the Iberian Frontier Led to a Beach in Japan
The five-century chain of holy wars, navigational gambles, spice monopolies, and strategic overreach that put Portuguese merchants on the shores of an island they didn’t know existed.
Tanegashima, 1543: First Contact and the Gun that Changed Japan
When Portuguese merchants introduced the matchlock arquebus in 1543, they unknowingly handed the warring daimyō a tool that would reshape Japanese warfare. Within decades, Japan possessed more firearms than any European nation.
Azuchi–Momoyama (1568–1600)(13)
The Sword Was at Hand: Konishi Yukinaga, the Merchant’s Son Who Refused Seppuku, c. 1555–1600
A drug shop in Sakai, a printing press hidden in the Amakusa islands, and a forged letter of surrender that fooled the Ming court for three years. Konishi Yukinaga rose from merchant's son to Toyotomi commander, and died in 1600 refusing the one death his class expected of him.
Lord Fool to Demon King: The Life and Personality of Oda Nobunaga
He threw incense at his father’s funeral, dressed like a vagrant, and befriended a Jesuit. From provincial fool to the man who nearly unified Japan, the life of the warlord who embraced Portuguese firearms, patronized the Jesuits, and, by their account, declared himself a living god.
The Demon King and the Monks: Oda Nobunaga’s War on Buddhist Power
From the burning of Mount Hiei to the decade-long siege of the Ishiyama Honganji, how Nobunaga systematically dismantled the most powerful religious institutions in Japan, and why the Jesuits cheered him on.
Takayama Ukon: The Samurai Who Chose God Over Japan
One of the finest generals of the Sengoku age, a master of the tea ceremony, and Japan’s most powerful Christian lord, Takayama Ukon chose faith over everything, and lost everything.
40 Seconds at Shitaragahara: The Battle of Nagashino, 1575
A samurai cut his way through belled cables in a night river to carry a message 27 miles, and was crucified in front of the walls for shouting the wrong thing. Six days later Oda Nobunaga destroyed the Takeda army from behind 2,100 meters of fence, and then somebody made the story better.
Fortress by Fortress: How the Iberian Union Destroyed the Portuguese Empire
Portugal had spent a century carefully staying out of other people's fights. In a single dynastic accident it inherited them all, and 60 years later the Dutch had taken Malacca and Ceylon, the English had taken Ormuz, and the empire that pioneered the sea route to Asia was paying protection money to the nation that had followed it there.
The Monkey Who Became God: The Life and Personality of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Born a nameless peasant, he talked, fought, and schemed his way to the summit of Japanese power, the most improbable biography in pre-modern Japan and one of the most extraordinary tales of social mobility in the early modern world.
The Stage of Empire: The Building of Osaka Castle, 1583–1590
60,000 conscripted laborers, a fortress raised out of marsh in a single year, and a peasant-born dictator who wanted the Jesuits, and everyone else, to know exactly who was in charge. The castle was not merely where the diplomacy happened; the castle was the diplomacy.
The Warlord Descends: Hideyoshi’s 1587 Kyūshū Campaign
When Toyotomi Hideyoshi marched a quarter of a million men onto the island of Kyūshū, he came to crush a Japanese clan. What he found instead was a fortified Jesuit port city, an armed Portuguese galley, and a priest who thought he could broker a deal. The consequences would reshape the Nanban encounter.
The Sword Hunt of 1588: The Peasant Who Welded the Ladder Shut
The most improbable man in Japanese history had climbed from the rice paddies to the Imperial Regency by violating every boundary his society possessed. On a summer day in 1588, he issued an edict designed to ensure that no one else would ever do the same.
Hideyoshi's Manila Demand of 1591: The Con Man Who Forged a War
A failed Jesuit pupil turned Nagasaki trader walked into the court of the most powerful man in Asia and sold him a war that did not yet exist. The crisis that followed was engineered, mistranslated and forged into being by a single merchant, and it ended with 26 crucifixions in Nagasaki.
The Capture of the Madre de Deus: The Prize That Launched an Empire
In 1592, English privateers seized a Portuguese carrack so enormous and so rich that it rewired England's understanding of what the East was worth. Hidden among the pepper and silk was a little Jesuit book that would help birth the East India Company.
The Imjin War: Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Korea and the War That Broke an Empire
In 1592, the most powerful man in Japan sent some 160,000 men to conquer China. Korea was in the way. The seven-year catastrophe involved Christian crusaders, a genius admiral, and Portuguese arms dealers.
Early Tokugawa (1600–1614)(6)
The Battle of Sekigahara: Six Hours That Made the Shogunate
On a fog-choked morning in October 1600, Japan’s feudal warlords staked everything on a single engagement. When the smoke cleared, one man controlled the archipelago, and the fate of every Christian, Portuguese merchant, and Jesuit priest hung on his next move.
Crosses on Both Sides: The Christian Daimyō at Sekigahara and the Victory That Ruined Them, 1600
A baptized governor of Nagasaki charging a baptized lord, a general who could not open his own belly, and 100,000 Christians in a domain that changed hands in a month. The Christian lords fought on both sides at Sekigahara, and the ones who won lost almost as completely as the ones who lost.
The Patient Conqueror: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu
Born a hostage and forged into the most patient political mind in Japanese history, the man who ended a century of civil war, shut the door on the Christian mission, and built a state that lasted 250 years.
The Company: How the VOC Conquered an Ocean and Inherited an Island
The world’s first multinational corporation was built to destroy an empire, monopolize a spice, and wage a private war across three oceans. That in Japan it ended up confined to a three-acre artificial island in Nagasaki harbor was not part of the original plan.
Prize of War: The Dutch Captures of the Santo António
Three Portuguese ships, all named for the patron of lost things, fell to Dutch privateers between 1605 and 1618. The capture off Meshima in 1615 forced Tokugawa Ieyasu to arbitrate the first international legal case in Japanese history.
The Madre de Deus Affair: The Ship That Blew Up a Century
A brawl in Macau, a siege in Nagasaki harbor, and a captain who chose to detonate his own carrack rather than surrender, the destruction of Portugal’s richest ship set off a chain of events that ended the Christian Century in Japan.
Persecution (1614–1635)(4)
The Siege of Osaka: The Last Battle and the Banners of the Cross
In 1615, the largest battle in Japanese history destroyed the Toyotomi clan, and the Christian banners flying over the battlefield sealed the fate of the faith in Japan.
The Word Pirate Is Shameful in Japan: The 1621 Edict Against Dutch and English Privateering
In the summer of 1621, the Tokugawa shogunate did something no European power had managed: it looked at the Dutch and English privateering fleet operating out of Hirado, waging a private corporate war on Iberian shipping, and reclassified it as common piracy. The word it chose was bahan; it hastened the end of the Fleet of Defense and the English factory, and ended Dutch hopes of fighting their anti-Portuguese war from Japanese waters.
A Title from Siam: Yamada Nagamasa and the Japanese Quarter of Ayutthaya, 1621–1630
A gift of sharkskin and gunpowder that left two Tokugawa councillors asking who had sent it, a votive ship lost to a shrine fire, and a governorship that was a promotion and a dismissal in the same document. A Japanese merchant became one of Siam's most powerful men, and a 1942 schoolbook turned his career into a national glory it never actually claimed.
The Ayutthaya Incident: How a Spanish Freelancer Burned a Japanese Ship and Cost Portugal Two Years of Silver
In May 1628, a Spanish commander sent to punish the Siamese went hunting for Japanese instead. He took 42 prisoners, stole the Shogun's vermilion-seal pass, and watched his countrymen in Manila refuse to pay for it. The bill landed on the Portuguese merchants of Macau, and on one Lisbon-born factor whose career with the incident would end, 12 years later, with his head on a stake above Nagasaki.
Sakoku (1635–1650)(5)
The Boy on the Water: Amakusa Shirō and the Manufacture of a Messiah, 1621–1638
A red wistaria blooming on a dead cherry tree in the garden of one of the five men who most needed a prophecy fulfilled, and within weeks a farmer's son in his teens was supreme commander of 37,000 rebels. Almost everything the world remembers about Amakusa Shirō was assembled by other people, some of it before he died and most of it a century after.
The Castle That Was Already a Ruin: Hara-jō, the Siege of 1637–1638, and What the Excavators Found
50 fishing boats cut up for roof beams, a Dutch land battery, a forensic examination of the stomachs of the dead, and a lead crucifix cast from the besiegers' own musket balls. The last Christian stronghold in Japan did not fall to European artillery; it fell to hunger.
The Shimabara Rebellion: The Siege That Sealed Japan
In the winter of 1637, 37,000 starving peasants, many of them crypto-Christians led by a teenage prophet, fortified a ruined castle and defied the largest army the Tokugawa shogunate had assembled since Osaka. Their annihilation ended a century of Portuguese trade.
The Restoration: How Portugal Broke Free from Spain and Fought to Survive
A swift coup in Lisbon, a 28-year war, and the desperate alliances that saved a kingdom, at the cost of its empire.
A Single Windy Night: Yui Shōsetsu and the Rōnin Conspiracy of 1651
A dyer's son from Suruga spent six years assembling a nationwide coup against the Tokugawa regime, to begin on a windy night in Edo with the arsenal detonated and the Elders cut down in the streets. Six days before the match was struck, the secret got out.