The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A hostage boy from a minor house who outwaited, outlived and outmanoeuvred three stronger men, Ieyasu treated patience as a weapon rather than a virtue: he bowed to whoever was stronger, kept an ally behind every enemy, guarded his own health like a treasury, killed his wife and eldest son when an overlord demanded it, and at seventy-four turned a sworn peace into a trap to wipe out his late master's line so that his own family could rule Japan for two and a half centuries.
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Critical acts
- 1
Breaking Free After Okehazama, 1560-1562
He did neither at once. Urged to withdraw, he refused until a runner confirmed the death, "because if the news should be false and Yoshimoto still be alive, it would not look at all well." He then camped at a temple outside Okazaki rather than enter while the Imagawa garrison was still inside, "for...
- 2
Ordering the Deaths of His Wife and Eldest Son, 1579
He "reproached Tadatsugu with not having known how to lie to save his son," but "did not think it politic to break with Nobunaga, and so consented." When Nobuyasu's tutor offered to die in the young man's place, Ieyasu refused, because "Nobunaga would not be satisfied... and that would mean the sacrifice of two valuable lives instead of one."
- 3
Fighting Hideyoshi to a Draw, Then Bowing, 1584-1586
At Nagakute he caught a raiding column Hideyoshi had sent behind his lines and destroyed it, killing 2,500 for a loss of 590. Hideyoshi exclaimed, "Here's a leader you can't catch either with net or line!... Well, I shall get him in Court dress at Kyoto sooner or later!"
- 4
Accepting Exile to the Kanto and Building Edo, 1590
He accepted on the spot. The Kan-hasshu-kosen-roku has the two men looking at Odawara castle: "'Good. Let's piss on the bargain, then,' replied Ieyasu, and the pair of them went over toward the castle and pissed together."
- 5
Waiting Out Hideyoshi, Then Forcing the Issue at Sekigahara, 1592-1600
Through the Korean war "Ieyasu stayed in Japan, losing neither men nor resources, but on the contrary rather gaining prestige and advantage through the troubles of the others." Sadler notes of Hideyoshi's lavish entertainments that "patience was his strong point, and he looked forward to the day when he could bleed others."
- 6
Handing Over the Title, Keeping the Power, and Destroying the Toyotomi, 1605-1615
In 1605 he resigned as shogun in favour of his son Hidetada, who went to Kyoto for his commission "with an army of seventy thousand men," while Ieyasu kept real power from his retirement castle at Sumpu (Shizuoka).
Maxims
Never trust to one string
He always had an ally behind his enemy: the Imagawa against the Oda, Nobunaga against the Takeda, the Hōjō against Hideyoshi. Even while he was formally reconciled with Hideyoshi, he was dancing in a comic role at the Hōjō court to keep them close.
Win the Empire by yielding
He beat Hideyoshi at Nagakute, then bowed before him at Osaka and asked for his war coat as a token that Hideyoshi need never fight again. He accepted exile to the Kanto without complaint.
Confirm the news before you move
After Okehazama he refused to withdraw until a runner had confirmed Yoshimoto's death, and would not enter his own castle until the Imagawa garrison left of its own accord.
After victory, tighten your helmet
He fought Sekigahara bareheaded in a silk hood and armed himself only once the enemy had broken. See "After Victory, Tighten Your Helmet."
Let the other lords do the fighting and the paying
He spent Hideyoshi's Korean war at home, let his allies storm Gifu, and made rival lords haul the stone for Edo. "Patience was his strong point, and he looked forward to the day when he could bleed others."
Part IThe Story
The Hostage on the Verandah
The Imagawa mansion at Sumpu was a small copy of the Shogun's court, full of courtly relatives, poetry and tea, and paid for by its lord's "hard-pressed peasants." Its New Year reception was "a most stately and ceremonial function, when all the vassals and allies came to congratulate Yoshimoto." Sitting among the notables was a nine-year-old hostage named Takechiyo, the boy who would become Tokugawa Ieyasu.
One lord pointed him out to his neighbour as the grandson of Kiyoyasu. The other doubted it, and "two or three were discussing it when the subject of their surmises got up and made his way unconcernedly through the assembled notables to the edge of the verandah of the hall of audience, where he proceeded to assume the attitude of the famous manikin who is the oldest citizen of Brussels." He relieved himself off the verandah, "finished his business and returned to his place" in "quite a natural and unflurried manner." The doubter conceded: "Yes, you're right. He's the grandson of Kiyoyasu."
His biographer A. L. Sadler draws a line from that verandah through the whole life: "all his life long he possessed an almost inhuman composure. Without any affectation he did just what he wanted in his own way." The hostage boy from a minor house would outwait, outlive and outmanoeuvre three stronger men and found a dynasty that ruled Japan for two and a half centuries. He treated patience as a weapon rather than a virtue. He bowed to whoever was stronger, kept an ally behind every enemy, guarded his health like a treasury, killed his wife and eldest son when an overlord demanded it, and at seventy-four turned a sworn peace into a trap to wipe out his late master's line.
A warning comes with the sources. Sadler's biography is dated, and leans on a chronicle that "is very much a pro-Tokugawa text that tends to embellish the clan's greatness and play down any inconvenient truths." Yet, as one modern foreword insists, "Sadler's account is no hagiography." What follows, one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, keeps both halves of the man that Sadler's own chapters reveal.
By the Numbers
The Tokugawa Account
5His age when he was first handed over as a hostage
22 yearsLength of his alliance with Oda Nobunaga, 'all the days of Nobunaga'
2,500 to 590Enemy killed against his own losses at Nagakute, 1584
81 of 87Western lords at Sekigahara who lost their life, fief or freedom
3,000 → 30,000Koku granted to Toda Issai, the junior officer whose advice had been right
74His age when Osaka fell and the Toyotomi line was destroyed
260 yearsSpan in which he was worshipped as the tutelary deity of the ruling powers
A Hostage Since Five
He was a hostage from the age of five. His father handed him to the Imagawa as the price of military help. On the road, a turncoat kidnapped him and sold him to the Oda, who threatened to kill him unless his father surrendered his castle. His father replied that the boy's death "would hardly be the worse for Okazaki."
Exchanged back to the Imagawa at eight, he grew up at Sumpu while Imagawa officers ran his home province of Mikawa, spent its revenues, and sent his Mikawa retainers into the front line against the Oda "to weaken the Mikawa clan so that he might get it more completely into his own hands." When he married, his wife and infant son were held at Sumpu too.
The boy learned to remember. A neighbour at Sumpu who had snapped "I've had about enough of the boy from Okazaki" was captured decades later, and Ieyasu "had him relieved of his head at once," while a man who had been kind to him was spared.
The Unhurried Return
In 1560 Oda Nobunaga killed Imagawa Yoshimoto at Okehazama. The young man, then called Motoyasu, had two obvious moves: rush home and seize everything, or stay loyal to the Imagawa. He did neither at once.
Urged to withdraw, he refused until a runner confirmed the death, "because if the news should be false and Yoshimoto still be alive, it would not look at all well." He camped at a temple outside Okazaki rather than enter while the Imagawa garrison was still inside, "for... he did not wish to appear too precipitate in grasping even what was really his own." He moved in only after they left, reasoning that "if castles were being given away, he might as well take one."
In 1561 he made the decision his councillors grumbled was "a flaw in our ancestral bow and arrow." He allied with Nobunaga, his father's old enemy, judging that the new Imagawa heir "was neither wise nor strong, while Nobunaga was both." To recover his wife and son, he stormed an Imagawa fort in 1562, captured the commander's two children, and offered them in exchange. Imagawa Ujizane accepted the swap and realised too late "that he had been done." He ordered Ieyasu's father-in-law to commit suicide and "had impaled the twelve other women and children held as hostages," which deepened "the estrangement between Ieyasu and his wife."
By 1564 Ieyasu was lord of all Mikawa. The Oda alliance lasted "twenty-two years, all the days of Nobunaga," which Sadler calls unique, since no feudal chiefs had trusted each other so long in two and a half centuries. It came at a price that surfaced in 1579. "Where policy was concerned," Sadler writes, "Motoyasu had no emotions, only calculations."
The Bare Site of the Ground
The young lord of Mikawa was not yet the patient old man of legend. In the Ikkō rebellion of 1563, two bullets fell out of his shirt when he took off his armour. In battle, one account says, he would hammer his saddle pommel with his fist, shouting "Kakare! Kakare! At them! At them!" until his knuckles bled, so often that in old age "the middle joints of his fingers got calloused and stiff."
He was already sharp in other ways. In 1564 he agreed that the rebel Monto temples should be restored "as they originally were," then pulled them down, explaining that he meant "the bare site of the ground before they were built on it." Sadler warns: "this was not the last time Ieyasu employed a piece of sharp dealing of this kind to make a military operation decisive."
He also began to build an administration. In 1565 he appointed three commissioners for Mikawa whose characters balanced each other, and the people nicknamed them "Buddha Koriki, Devil Sakuza, and Neither-one-nor-the-other Amano Saburobei." From his first alliance onward, Sadler says, Ieyasu "wielded two weapons of reasonableness and force. And when he could use the former he did, for he gained his point with less expenditure and effort. But he knew this would be useless unless backed by force." Tokutomi puts it in one line: "his militarism was diplomatic, and his diplomacy was militaristic."
Open Gates and Three Bowls of Rice
Late in 1572 he marched out of Hamamatsu, against the advice of his own council and of Nobunaga, to meet Takeda Shingen's far larger army of veterans on the plain of Mikatagahara. "To let an enemy come marching up to your castle without shooting an arrow at him is not to be a man," he said. His inspector asked how it was that his normally careful master "was now so rash." Ieyasu answered that the man was "possessed by the Spirit of Timidity."
In snow and falling dusk, Nobunaga's contingent broke and the Mikawa wings were overwhelmed. Ieyasu turned back to rescue a surrounded captain until the garrison commander Natsume rode out with twenty-four men to die in his place. "Leaders like our lord must think of the future of their house; it is not their business to fight like common soldiers," Natsume shouted, turned Ieyasu's horse by the bridle and whacked its rump with his spear shaft. Ieyasu reached the castle with five men.
He had already sent a rider ahead with a random head proclaimed as "Head of Shingen," to steady the town. When Torii Mototada began barring the gates, Ieyasu stopped him: "Leave them open and light great flares inside and out... To shut the gates looks as if we were frightened of them." Then, the chronicle says, a maid "served him with a meal of boiled rice in hot water, of which he took three bowls, after which he lay down and immediately his loud snores resounded through the apartment."
The Takeda vanguard reached the open, blazing gates and held back, one general warning that "you may be sure he is up to some cunning trick," and noting that every Mikawa corpse lay facing the enemy. A night raid by a hundred volunteers unsettled Shingen further, and he withdrew. He died a few months later, "most conveniently for Ieyasu."
— Tokugawa Ieyasu at Hamamatsu, after Mikatagahara, 1572Leave them open and light great flares inside and out... To shut the gates looks as if we were frightened of them.
The Muramasa Blade
His wife, the Lady Tsukiyama, had lived apart from him for years, bitter over her father's forced suicide. Their son Nobuyasu, twenty, a proven fighter, was married to Nobunaga's daughter. In 1579 the daughter-in-law obtained twelve letters in which Tsukiyama was said to be plotting with the Takeda, and sent them to her father. Nobunaga asked Ieyasu's senior retainer Sakai Tadatsugu, who happened to be visiting, whether they were genuine. Tadatsugu, who had a grudge against Nobuyasu, said they were. Nobunaga "sent Tadatsugu back to Ieyasu with a demand that Nobuyasu be told to put an end to himself at once."
Ieyasu could defy the one ally he depended on against the Takeda, or kill his heir. He "reproached Tadatsugu with not having known how to lie to save his son," but "did not think it politic to break with Nobunaga, and so consented." When Nobuyasu's tutor offered to die in the young man's place, Ieyasu refused, because "Nobunaga would not be satisfied... and that would mean the sacrifice of two valuable lives instead of one." A retainer killed Tsukiyama. Ieyasu's only recorded comment on her was that "she might perhaps have been given the option of becoming a nun."
At Futamata castle, Nobuyasu told the two men sent to witness his death that "there was no truth in the accusation," and that "after his death it would prove to be merely a slanderous tale." He asked his friend Hattori Hanzō to act as his second. Hanzō "was overcome with emotion and could not act," so the other inspector "cut off the young man's head that the matter might be finished quickly."
When they reported, Ieyasu "said nothing. Tears stood in the eyes of all in attendance," and two of his generals wept aloud. Ieyasu asked only one question: "And of what make was the wakizashi with which the second struck off the head?" "Muramasa," was the reply. "How ominous!" he remarked. "It was with a Muramasa blade that Abe Yashichi struck down my grandfather Kiyoyasu. And when I was a child... I cut myself with a sword by accident, and that was a Muramasa blade, too. And now my son is killed with one. Muramasa blades bode ill to our house. If any of you possess one he had better get rid of it."
The grief stayed below the surface, the regret was aimed at a sword, and the policy stood. The alliance with Nobunaga held, and the Takeda fell three years later. Two decades on, at Sekigahara, Ieyasu remarked, "If my eldest son had been here now things would have been easier," which Sadler calls "a purely practical observation."
A Leader You Can't Catch
After Nobunaga's murder in 1582, Hideyoshi, a foot soldier who had risen to be Nobunaga's chief of staff, took over his power. Ieyasu, now lord of five provinces, found himself "in a position of inferiority to Hideyoshi who had been merely a vassal who had risen from the ranks." In 1584 he backed Nobunaga's son Nobuo against Hideyoshi, although Hideyoshi's allies "outnumbered the Tokugawa party nearly three to one."
At Nagakute he caught a raiding column Hideyoshi had sent behind his lines and destroyed it, killing 2,500 for a loss of 590. Hideyoshi exclaimed, "Here's a leader you can't catch either with net or line!... Well, I shall get him in Court dress at Kyoto sooner or later!" When Nobuo made a separate peace behind his back, Ieyasu "merely observed that it was an excellent arrangement," sent his congratulations, and refused all later invitations to resume the war.
Then he held out for two years, refusing to go to Kyoto. Only when Hideyoshi married him to his half-sister and sent his own mother to Okazaki as a hostage did Ieyasu go to Osaka. Even then he left detailed orders for two ten-thousand-man columns to march on Kyoto if he were seized. To his hawkish retainers he said that war "will mean more suffering for the people," which Sadler calls "quite an impressive picture of himself as a sacrificing servant of the people."
At Hideyoshi's private request, Ieyasu bowed deeply before the assembled lords, and then publicly asked for the surcoat Hideyoshi wore to war: "now I am by your side, you need never go forth in armor any more." The lords, seeing "even the Lord Tokugawa" bow, "realized that Hideyoshi was indeed the Lord of the Empire." Ieyasu kept his lands, his army and the reputation of the only man who had beaten Hideyoshi in the field. Sadler reads the motive coldly: "So far he had taken all he could from Hideyoshi, and now he would give him all the assistance in his power, but with the reservation of getting his own back again some day if the occasion offered." A proverb grew out of it: he "won the Empire by yielding."
Let's Piss on the Bargain
In 1590 Hideyoshi's armies ringed the Hōjō stronghold of Odawara. The chronicle Kan-hasshu-kosen-roku gives the scene: "Taking Ieyasu's hand he said: 'See, we shall soon overthrow the Hōjō now, so I promise you as your fief the Eight Provinces of the Kwanto.' 'Good. Let's piss on the bargain, then,' replied Ieyasu, and the pair of them went over toward the castle and pissed together. So to this day the children speak of them as the 'Pair of pissers on the Kwanto.'"
Behind the joke was a hard bargain. The price was his five home provinces, "one of which was his ancestral fief and the others his sword and diplomacy had won." Sadler calls the gift "an embarrassing favor, or a polite infliction." Only four of the eight provinces were actually free, the population had been loyal to the Hōjō, and the move shut him "in behind the Hakone pass." As soon as Ieyasu left, Hideyoshi planted his most trusted captains in a line of castles along the Tokaido, "completely closing the throat of the Kwanto."
Sadler thinks it "highly improbable that he was in the least unaware of any of Hideyoshi's schemes." He acted "in accordance with his principle in life of yielding for a while to superior strength, and of being wary enough to know superiority when he saw it," and a second proverb arose: "Ieyasu won the Empire by retreating." Against his retainers' advice to take the rich town of Odawara or old Kamakura, he chose Edo, which had a dilapidated castle, a reedy swamp flooded at high tide, and "some hundred houses or so." He made his formal entry within about a fortnight, and Hideyoshi exclaimed, "The Lord Tokugawa's way of doing things is really extraordinary." He refused to rebuild even the castle's shabby entrance: "Now, Sado, it isn't like you to recommend such extravagance. Besides, the stipends of our retainers must be seen to before anything else."
The Old Badger
For six years Hideyoshi poured the lords' armies into Korea. Ieyasu went to the base in Kyushu, danced at Hideyoshi's parties dressed as a reed seller, and helped pay for the new Fushimi castle. But "Ieyasu stayed in Japan, losing neither men nor resources, but on the contrary rather gaining prestige and advantage through the troubles of the others." "Patience was his strong point," Sadler writes, "and he looked forward to the day when he could bleed others."
He made a performance of harmlessness. At a court Noh performance he danced the handsome young hero Yoshitsune so badly that "everyone laughed immoderately." One watcher saw through it: "Look at that old badger making a fool of himself to diddle the Taiko!" Gamō Ujisato agreed: "he can act the fool when it doesn't matter, but be sharp enough when it does." When Hideyoshi boasted before the whole court that he had never been beaten, Ieyasu shot back, "Have you forgotten Komaki? One should be accurate in military matters!" Hideyoshi "had only said it to test Ieyasu," and a diplomatic answer would have confirmed his suspicion. Ieyasu's maxim: "If you want to tell lies that will be believed, don't tell the truth that won't."
And he guarded his body. Years earlier, when he refused a gift of out-of-season peaches, Takeda Shingen had read the gesture at once: "Ieyasu cherishes great hopes for the future, and so he takes great care of his health." Sadler notes that "he acted as though confident of outliving the majority."
Giving Ishida Rope
When Hideyoshi died in 1598 he left his five-year-old heir Hideyori under a council of Five Regents, of whom Ieyasu was the strongest. Hideyoshi had "strictly forbidden" the lords to make political marriages "as tending to form cliques." Ieyasu broke the ban at once, which let him "see how he stood."
When his chief enemy Ishida Mitsunari fled to him to escape seven generals who wanted to kill him, Ieyasu protected Ishida and sent him home under escort. His adviser Honda Masanobu wanted to "give Ishida as much rope as possible" and use him "to bring the opposition to a head," since "it was easy to represent Ishida as simply working for his own hand." Ieyasu then marched east against Uesugi at a leisurely pace, "flying his hawks as usual," while his agents quietly neutralised much of Ishida's support. When Ishida rose in the west, Ieyasu turned back. He held back while his allies stormed Gifu, "because he wished these allies to do as much of the work as might be so that he could keep his own army fresh." On the eve of battle he learned that the huge Mori and Kobayakawa contingents were secretly on his side. "That's our secret," he said.
After Victory, Tighten Your Helmet
Before dawn on the day of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu ate boiled rice in hot water and refused his helmet, wearing only "a hood of brown crepe silk."
All morning the battle swayed in the mist. Kobayakawa Hideaki's 8,000 men sat on Matsuo Hill, ignoring Ishida's signal fire, and Ieyasu grew anxious: "he bit his fingers hard as he sat on horseback, a habit he had when things looked critical for his side, and ordered some of his matchlock men to open fire on him and see what he would do." Kobayakawa came down on the western flank, the cry of "Treachery!" spread, and by early afternoon the western army had broken.
Only then, "when at about two o'clock (the hour of the ram) Ieyasu saw that the victory was won and his long-wished-for supremacy gained, he took off the hood he had so far been wearing and put on a light helmet... which he fastened tightly," and sat down to view the heads. "It is from this action that has arisen the Japanese proverb, 'After victory tighten your helmet.'" He forbade the victory song "until they had entered Osaka and set free the families who were held as hostages." When the turncoat Kobayakawa knelt before him, he "rose from his campstool and greeted him warmly."
The reckoning was severe and selective. Ishida, Konishi and Ankokuji were paraded and beheaded. Of the eighty-seven lords who had fought for the west, "eighty-one of them lost either their life or their fief or their freedom." But asked to punish Uesugi's councillor Naoe, he declined: "if I punish Naoe the others will get upset and run away to their provinces, and we may have all the trouble over again." When Hidetada arrived late for the battle, Ieyasu asked whether anyone on his son's staff had advised against the wasted siege on the way. A junior officer, Toda Issai, had. Ieyasu handed him cakes with both hands and said, "It was because your position was not high that your advice was not followed. I will make it so that it will be in future." Toda's fief went from 3,000 to 30,000 koku.
Asked why he had not yet taken the title of shogun, he said: "There is no hurry about that. The country has to be set in order, and the welfare of the people seen to... When all that has been done it will be time to look to my own personal status." He became shogun in 1603.
— Tokugawa Ieyasu, after Sekigahara, 1600There is no hurry about that. The country has to be set in order, and the welfare of the people seen to.
The Title and the Reins
In 1605 he resigned as shogun in favour of his son Hidetada, who went to Kyoto for his commission "with an army of seventy thousand men." Ieyasu kept real power from his retirement castle at Sumpu. Sadler says he thereby managed "to educate his son Hidetada to continue his work by retiring from the office of Shogun and letting him carry it on for more than twelve years under his supervision."
He used the years to build a system. Once he became shogun, Edo turned into the capital of Japan, and he rebuilt it at the other lords' expense. Between 1602 and 1614 they had to ship stone from Izu in thousands of vessels and raise ramparts sixty feet high, "a crushing burden on these lords." Their families were kept in Edo as hostages, "making the best of their position as hostages in the city they had been at so much pains to build." He divided the lords into fudai, the hereditary retainers who had followed him before his rise, and tozama, the outsiders who submitted later. The fudai held the key posts but small fiefs. The tozama had large revenues but were kept out of power. After Sekigahara, of 190 lords above 10,000 koku, "half consisted of members of the Tokugawa house and its hereditary retainers."
The court was boxed in. His laws confined the Emperor to letters and poetry, "limited to the contemplation of flowers, birds, snow, wind, and moon." Christianity he tolerated while it brought trade, then turned on. In 1614 he ordered all Jesuits out of Japan and forbade samurai and nobles to profess the faith, and leading converts such as Takayama Ukon "were sent away to die abroad."
He stayed curious, asking the shipwrecked English pilot Will Adams at once, "Had his country any war just then?", and keeping him in Japan as too useful to lose. And he stayed frugal. As ruler of Japan he kept two boxes for socks, one new and one soiled, and never let any be thrown away. He made his ladies keep washing his white robes though it made their hands bleed: "some of this I must give to the people, and some I must keep for my descendants... so that I cannot afford to waste a single garment." Sadler adds that the thrift was calculated, for "he never grudged money when there was any profit in spending it."
The Bell Inscription
Hideyori, the late Hideyoshi's son, still sat in Osaka castle with an income of 637,400 koku and the loyalty of his father's old captains. Ieyasu had coaxed him into spending his father's treasure on rebuilding the Great Buddha in Kyoto, while privately calling it "a piece of eccentricity of Hideyoshi's." "He liked to make other people bankrupt," Sadler notes, "by making it difficult for them to avoid building these things."
By 1614 the temple's great bell, "fourteen feet high and seventy-two tons in weight," had been cast with a learned Chinese inscription. Just before the dedication, the Governor of Kyoto stopped everything on the grounds that the inscription insulted the Shogun. The phrase Kokka anko split Ieyasu's name with the character an, and "In the East it greets the pale moon, and in the West bids farewell to the setting sun" made the lord of the east the lesser light.
Ieyasu used it with precision. He charmed the envoy ladies from Osaka and said nothing about the bell, while refusing to see Hideyori's guardian Katagiri, who was told only to find some way of placating him. The two messages set Osaka against Katagiri, the one man there working for peace. Sadler is clear on why. With Hideyori now grown and his father's old captains dead one by one, "he had come to the conclusion that he could not afford to wait any longer." The English Company's records show him buying guns and powder "long before Osaka showed any signs of wanting any." He "kept on circulating rumors of Hideyori's intention to rebel," and when Osaka prepared to defend itself he called that a casus belli. Sadler concludes that "it was he who forced on the rupture."
The End of the Toyotomi
In the winter siege of 1614 he negotiated a peace sealed with blood from his little finger, then used the terms to have Osaka's outer defences levelled "night and day." The Jesuits called it "not a treaty to ensue peace, but a covenant to prepare for further war," and it became "a byword ever since for the folly of pacifists." It was the bare site of the Monto temples again, fifty years on.
In the summer of 1615 he attacked again. He invited the enemy commanders to peace talks just before the assault, so that when they were seen riding back "it was enough to instil some doubt into the minds of their officers and men." Osaka fell. Hideyori and his mother killed themselves in the burning keep. Accounts disagree over whether cannon fire on the keep was ordered by Ieyasu or by others acting without his permission. What is not in doubt is that "Ieyasu hunted out Hideyori's small son Kunimatsu, aged eight, and had him beheaded in the Rokujo Kawara execution ground," which Sadler calls "clear proof of his determination to leave none of Hideyoshi's line alive." Missionaries described rōnin heads on planks between Kyoto and Fushimi in "eighteen rows, some with as many as a thousand heads."
Tokutomi's verdict: "He was the same at Osaka at seventy-four as he had been at Mikata-ga-hara at thirty-one... He was indeed a matchless hero, though a sinister one." Sadler admits that the seizure "has not gone to improve his reputation with posterity," and that if his house would have risen anyway, "his unscrupulous action was an unnecessary blot on his reputation."
The God of the East
In 1615 he issued the laws for the military houses: thirteen articles, read aloud to the lords at dawn before a Noh performance, banning unreported castle repairs, private marriage alliances, large retinues and harbouring fugitives. Tokutomi calls them "a velvet bag full of gunpowder."
His temper did not mellow with age. On a hawking trip he had his attendant cut an oil seller in two for getting in his way, and in his last year he "ordered a servant to be executed... for damaging one of" his hawks. On his deathbed he checked that his son would crush any lord who disobeyed, and was "pleased... immensely" when Hidetada said he would. He was still punishing the priest who wrote the bell inscription, "or that he alleged did so."
He died in 1616 and left instructions for his burial at Kunozan and his removal to Nikko. His monk-adviser Tenkai turned the instructions into a cult, and as Tōshō Dai-Gongen, "Illuminating the East," Ieyasu "remained the tutelary deity of the ruling powers" for 260 years. The rationalist who had written that good and bad luck "are not things that can be got by praying," and dismissed talk of divine lightning with "As if lightning were any chooser of persons!", saw, in Sadler's words, "that there was a need of gods for the new era, and stepped in to supply the deficiency."
Part IIThe Playbook
Ieyasu is the patron saint of the long game. He was rarely the strongest man in the room; he was trying to be the last one standing. His methods rest on habits rather than genius: patience, redundancy, thrift, self-control and an unsentimental read of who is stronger. The same unsentimentality produced the Muramasa blade and the execution ground at Rokujo Kawara, and the playbook carries both.
The principles
- 1.Never trust to one string.
- 2.Yield to superior strength, and only for a while.
- 3.Confirm the news before you move.
- 4.Keep force ready so that you rarely need to use it.
- 5.Let the other side spend its armies.
- 6.Treat your health as a strategic asset.
- 7.Play the fool when it costs nothing.
- 8.After victory, tighten your helmet.
- 9.Sift men like gravel.
- 10.Spend on men, never on marvels.
- 11.Hand over the title early; build the system that outlives you.
Principle 1
Never trust to one string
Sadler's summary of the method is that "in accordance with his maxim of realizing one's limitations he never trusted to one string but always took care to have an ally. When he fought Nobunaga it was Imagawa and when he opposed Takeda it was Nobunaga, and when he faced Hideyoshi he was supported by Hojo." Even "while shaking hands with Hideyoshi he was meditating a closer alliance with Hojo." In 1586 he visited the Hōjō "as an inferior," sat below his own son-in-law, and on the way home had his frontier castle of Numasu torn down in front of a Hōjō councillor. With the Hōjō he even played the Chinese retainer in a comic Noh, "well knowing, no doubt, that his rotund figure made him distinctly ridiculous in such a role."
Tactic: Before you commit to any single partner, investor or platform, line up the alternative that would keep you alive if it turned on you, and maintain it quietly even when the main relationship is going well.
Principle 2
Yield to superior strength, and only for a while
Ieyasu beat Hideyoshi at Nagakute and then bowed before him at Osaka. He gave up his ancestral homeland for a swamp behind a mountain pass without complaint. Sadler's judgment is that his "judgment of the right time to make a concession certainly justified the saying that he 'won the Empire by yielding.'" The yielding was never permanent. It came, in Sadler's words, "with the reservation of getting his own back again some day if the occasion offered."
The key skill is "being wary enough to know superiority when he saw it." He fought Shingen, fought Hideyoshi to a standstill, and held out two years before going to Kyoto. When he did yield, he extracted a price: Hideyoshi's half-sister as a wife and Hideyoshi's mother as a hostage.
Tactic: When a stronger rival offers terms, distinguish a temporary concession from a permanent surrender; take the deal that preserves your core assets, and make the stronger party pay a visible price for your submission.
Principle 3
Confirm the news before you move
After Okehazama, the most consequential news of his young life, he refused to withdraw until a runner had confirmed Yoshimoto's death, and he would not enter his own castle until the Imagawa garrison left of its own accord. He "did not wish to appear too precipitate in grasping even what was really his own." Sadler sums up his mind in a saying: "All men are thieves and it will rain tomorrow."
Tactic: When a sudden opening appears, verify it before acting and let the other side vacate the position on its own; grabbing too fast makes you look like the aggressor and exposes you if the news is wrong.
Principle 4
Keep force ready so that you rarely need to use it
Nobody "valued armaments more," yet he "never used them rashly, and unless driven to it by unavoidable necessity." The Legacy puts the idea in an image: "The right use of a sword is that it should subdue the barbarians while lying gleaming in its scabbard... Similarly the right use of military power is that it should conquer the enemy while concealed in the breast. To take the field with an army is to be found wanting in the real knowledge of it." At Sekigahara the western "hundred thousand" contained so many men secretly pledged to him that "the real enemy amounts to no more than" twenty or thirty thousand.
Tactic: Build real capability and make sure the other side knows it exists, then use it as a negotiating backdrop; most of your wins should come from deals made in the shadow of force rather than from the fight itself.
Principle 5
Let the other side spend its armies
He sat out Hideyoshi's Korean war with his forces intact. He let his allies storm Gifu so his own army stayed fresh. He steered Hideyori into rebuilding the Great Buddha, and made the rival lords haul the stone for Edo. The Legacy turns it into a rule of government: when a wealthy lord offends, "instead of criminating the offender, appoint him some arduous duty, incommensurate with the amount of his revenue."
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Who Paid for Ieyasu's Rise
At each stage, someone else's men or money bore the cost.
1590s
Hideyoshi's lords bleed in Korea; Ieyasu stays home, "losing neither men nor resources."
1600
Allies storm Gifu so that Ieyasu "could keep his own army fresh."
1602–1614
Rival lords ship Izu stone in thousands of vessels to build Edo.
1614
Hideyori drains his father's treasure on the Great Buddha and its bell.
Tactic: In a long contest, conserve your own resources and let competitors exhaust theirs on prestige projects, wars of choice and obligations you helped arrange for them.
Principle 6
Treat your health as a strategic asset
Ieyasu's final advantage over Hideyoshi and his loyal captains was simply that he outlived them. That was not entirely luck. He ate plain food, refused out-of-season delicacies, hunted and swam into his seventies, studied the medicine of his day and kept a numbered pill-box. Sadler credits fortune too: "Even the spirochaete was on his side." When the strategy depends on time, the body is the strategy.
Tactic: If your plan pays off over decades, invest in your health with the same seriousness you bring to capital allocation; outlasting rivals is a real and underrated competitive edge.
Principle 7
Play the fool when it costs nothing
"The outstanding feature of Ieyasu's character was his self-control in word as well as in deed. So well had he disciplined himself in the part he considered it necessary to play that it became a second nature." His part was the plain, honest soldier. Before a visit from Hideyoshi he refused to lay on anything clever: "It was much wiser to appear just an ordinary honest fellow without any tricks."
The bad Yoshitsune, the comic roles for the Hōjō and the blunt "Have you forgotten Komaki?" were all the same performance, and each reassured a suspicious superior.
Tactic: Around a powerful and suspicious superior, let yourself look less clever than you are on matters that don't count, and save your sharpness for the decisions that do.
Principle 8
After victory, tighten your helmet
He fought Sekigahara in a silk hood and put his helmet on only once the day was won. Then he forbade the victory song until the hostages in Osaka were freed. The proverb his gesture produced is the most famous thing he left behind. He paired that vigilance with restraint, declining to punish Naoe and greeting the turncoat Kobayakawa warmly.
Tactic: Treat the moment of victory as the moment of greatest exposure; secure the gains, punish narrowly enough that you don't create the next coalition against you, and postpone the celebration.
Principle 9
Sift men like gravel
When he took over Kai he compared judging men to panning gravel: the character for "decision" is made of "pebbles," "sand" and "earth," and "you must sift them and wash them in water so that the earth is removed and the stones appear." The Legacy makes this a rule: "a hammer will not answer the purpose of a chisel, nor can a gimlet be used for the purpose of a saw... Make use of a wise man's wisdom; of a brave man's courage; of a strong man's strength; of a weak man's weakness." After meeting a famous fencing master he said that what a lord needs is not swordsmanship but "the capacity to judge the capacity of the people he uses."
He balanced characters in his commissioners, promoted the junior officer who had been right, and re-employed Shingen's faithful men in Kai.
Tactic: Assign people to the work their temperament fits rather than forcing them into a template, and when a junior's ignored advice turns out to be right, promote that person visibly.
Principle 10
Spend on men, never on marvels
Given rare peaches by Nobunaga, he handed them round, saying "People who have any sense won't bother about rarities," because a taste for luxuries means "there will be less money to pay good retainers." He left Edo's entrance unrepaired so that stipends could be paid first. "If those at the top are extravagant," he said, "taxes mount up and the lower orders are embarrassed."
The thrift had a hard edge. His councillor recalled him telling tax officers "that the best thing was to keep the peasants so that they just got a bare living, and were able to pay the taxes," a policy Sadler compares to feeding cormorants "dieted to a nicety." The frugality served the house first.
Tactic: Cut spending on status and display before you cut spending on the people who do the work; loyalty is bought with reliable pay, not with a grand entrance.
Principle 11
Hand over the title early; build the system that outlives you
He resigned the shogunate to Hidetada in 1605 and supervised him from Sumpu for more than a decade, so that the succession was tested while he was still alive to correct it. Around it he built machinery meant to run without him: Edo as a capital paid for by rivals, hostages in the capital, the fudai and tozama division, the laws for the military houses and court nobles, and finally his own cult. Deng Xiaoping ran a similar arrangement nearly four centuries later, ruling for years without the top title.
The dark side of this principle is total. "He never spared individuals where the interests of the Empire or of his house, which he considered identical, were in question." That logic killed his wife and son in 1579 and an eight-year-old boy in 1615.
Tactic: Transfer the formal role to your successor while you can still coach and correct them, and invest the remaining years in rules and structures that make the organisation hard to break.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Never trust to one string. The Imagawa against the Oda, Nobunaga against the Takeda, the Hōjō against Hideyoshi. There was always an ally behind the enemy.
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Win the Empire by yielding. He beat Hideyoshi in the field and then bowed before him, and two proverbs grew out of it: he "won the Empire by yielding" and "by retreating."
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After victory, tighten your helmet. Bareheaded through the battle, helmeted once it was won.
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Let the other lords do the fighting and the paying. "Patience was his strong point, and he looked forward to the day when he could bleed others."
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Outlive your rivals, and plan as if you will. Shingen died, Hideyoshi died, and Hideyoshi's loyal captains died one by one while he watched.
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Promote the junior who told the truth. "It was because your position was not high that your advice was not followed."
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Patience is the restraint of the emotions. "There are seven emotions, joy, anger, anxiety, love, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to these he can be called patient."
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When the house is at stake, spare no one. It is the maxim that made him and the one that stains him.
