This week we learned about Azuchi-Momoyama period of Japan, where though at first Japan was cut into different shapes of land being divided along with different alliances with this puzzle making transporting harder due to not only worrying about getting ambushed but because of the fact that since each warlord wanted to make money, their were taxes for everyone who wanted to pass their territory, so if one alliance wanted to trade with another in Japan and it passed a rivaling neighbor to get there, they would get taxed. Japan’s puzzle of land started to come into more unified shape thanks to the work of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi who started the unification of Japan starting at the most logical place to start: the capital, Kyoto. When someone controls the capital, they have essentially found the country’s pressure point, or the weakest point of the country, the capital is the eye of the country, so if you stab the eye you become the eye. Through Nobunaga, trade started to ease slightly because with unification came the removal of those annoying taxes which were to go through enemy territory, and this ease was something liked by everyone who had experienced it. The most interesting thing that we learned this week though would be about Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his rags to riches story and then his takeaway from his own life. He started off as a farmer and went up the ranks to eventually become the leader of Japan, succeeding Oda Nobunaga, yet his takeaway was that he wanted people to stay where they were. The painter is a painter, the carpenter is a carpenter, etc. This was confusing to me because hypothetically if I were him and saw the beauties of being able to rise, I would personally want to change the system to reflect that, instead he became a hawk to keep everything how they were.
Citations
Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850, edited by Karl F. Friday. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
“Denial of Traditional Authority”. In David John Lu. Japan: A Documentary History, 174-186. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.
“Japan’s Christian Century”. In David John Lu. Japan: A Documentary History, 199-201. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997
Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey, edited by Mikiso Hanen and Louis G Perez. Second ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 2015.
Oda Nobunaga. “Letter to the King of Korea”. In Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600, compiled by Wm. Th. de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, 465-67. Second edition. Introduction to Asian Civilizations. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001.
Haboush, JaHyun Kim, and Kenneth R Robinson. A Korean War Captive in Japan, 1597-1600: The Writings of Kang Hang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
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