Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: The Three Men Who Remade Japan While Christianity Was Knocking at Its Door

There's a period in Japanese history that tends to get reduced to a few dramatic images — warlords in armor, burning temples, a man dying in flames. The reality behind those images is stranger and more interesting than any of them suggest. When Christian missionaries were making the deepest inroads Japan had ever seen from the outside world, three men happened to be alive at the same time who would each, in their own way, determine what Japan was going to become. This is the story of the first of those men.

Japan in the sixteenth century was not one country in any meaningful sense. It was a collection of territories held by lords who fought, negotiated, betrayed, and occasionally cooperated with one another across decades of civil war. Into this fractured landscape, Portuguese and later Spanish missionaries arrived carrying a religion that had never existed in Japan before — and they found, somewhat to their surprise, that it spread. The timing matters. Christianity was gaining ground in Japan at exactly the moment when three men were climbing toward dominance over the whole country. Their names were Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, and each of them would have a completely different relationship with the foreign faith. Nobunaga was, by most accounts, genuinely friendly toward it — not because he believed any of it, but because he understood what it could do for him politically. Ieyasu, the last of the three to hold power, would eventually turn the full weight of the state against Christianity with a ferocity that nearly erased it from the country entirely. Between those two poles, the story of how Japan got consolidated under a single authority is one of the more fascinating stretches in the country's long history. And it starts with Nobunaga.

Japan during Nobunaga's rise was fractured into competing territories, each held by lords whose power depended as much on military skill and political cunning as on birth.

A Small Lord With Larger Ambitions

Nobunaga's starting position was not impressive. He was a daimyo — a regional lord — but not one of the top tier. His landholdings were modest. What he had going for him were a well-trained body of troops, a real talent for military command, and one other thing that turned out to matter more than either of those: Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi started out as a common soldier in Nobunaga's service. He was not from the nobility. He had none of the family connections that typically smoothed a path to leadership in feudal Japan. What he had instead was a particular kind of mind — restless, inventive, always looking for the angle that the other side hadn't thought of yet. He rose fast. By the time Nobunaga's campaigns were hitting their stride, Hideyoshi was functioning as his second-in-command, and people talked about his presence in an army the way you might talk about a secret weapon. The saying went that having Hideyoshi arrive to reinforce your side was worth an extra ten thousand men. That's not a small claim in a world where the size of armies measured in the thousands. It says something about how much his tactical creativity was valued, and how well Nobunaga understood the asset he had in him.

The Road to Kyoto

The opportunity Nobunaga had been watching for came through the dysfunction of the Ashikaga Shogunate. The Ashikaga shoguns had been mismanaging things badly enough that one of them was murdered, and a younger brother of the dead man came to Nobunaga for help. He wanted the position for himself. Nobunaga agreed. He marched on Kyoto with a large army, installed his candidate as Shogun, and was rewarded with the title of Vice-Shogun through the emperor's formal blessing. From that position, he and Hideyoshi set about bringing the capital back under workable control. There were great lords who refused to accept the new order, and Nobunaga moved against them. In these campaigns he had both Hideyoshi and a man named Ieyasu at his side — Ieyasu being from a branch of the old Minamoto clan, a name that carried considerable weight in Japanese aristocratic politics and one that would eventually produce its own line of shoguns. For now he was Nobunaga's ally, and the combined force was enough to break the resistance. But new enemies appeared almost immediately, and these ones had powerful backing — the Buddhist monks of a massive monastery just outside Kyoto.

Kyoto was the symbolic center of Japanese political authority. Whoever controlled the capital and the emperor's court held a legitimacy that no regional lord could manufacture on his own.

The Monks Who Picked the Wrong Side

Anyone who pictures Buddhist monasteries in feudal Japan as quiet places of contemplation is missing something important about how they actually functioned. The major monasteries were political and military powers in their own right. They had armies. Their warrior monks were known fighters, and a large monastery could put a meaningful force into the field. The monastery near Kyoto — described as essentially a small city, with three thousand buildings within its walls — had been interfering in the capital's affairs for years before Nobunaga came along. When his enemies moved against Kyoto, the monastery gave them shelter and resupplied them. Whether this was driven by genuine political conviction or simply an old habit of backing whoever seemed most useful is hard to say at this distance. What is clear is that Nobunaga dealt with it by surrounding his enemies so completely they had no choice but to negotiate and retreat — and then turned to the monastery. He burned it to the ground. He killed large numbers of monks and drove the survivors out. The year was 1571. It was not a measured response, and nobody at the time seems to have expected it to be. From that point forward, Nobunaga's relationship with organized Buddhism was one of sustained mutual hostility, and the monasteries knew they were dealing with someone who did not treat their walls as limits on what he was willing to do.

Why Nobunaga Liked the Christians