Toyotomi hideyoshi biography summary graphic organizers
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Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan
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I watched a multipart documentary on the three men who re-unified Japan, namely Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. I had been previously somewhat aware of these men but had a fairly vague idea about who they were and what they had done. The documentary helped a lot and sparked my interest in the subject.
To rectify my ignorance, I picked up this book. I discovered that it is absolutely encyclopedic. One of the surprising and nice things about the book was that it provided a background section on the ancient - virtually prehistoric period - of Japan. Again, I had a vague understanding that the Emperor of Japan was more of a figurehead and that the Shogun was the power that ruled Japan.
What I learned was there there was a period
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Unification of japan
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II – Hideyoshi, His Wife Nene and His Hundred Concubines
‘Your beauty grows day by day. Tokichiro complains about you constantly and it is outrageous. While that bald rat flusters around ansträngande to find another good woman, you remain lofty and elegant. Do not be jealous. Show Hideyoshi this letter.’
So speaks the unexpectedly kindly voice of Oda Nobunaga in a letter addressed to Nene, Hideyoshi’s wife, around 1575. The imperious Nobunaga was, at the time, lord of half Japan and determined to conquer the rest of it in short order. ‘That bald rat’, Tokichiro, was Nobunaga’s right hand man, soon to become much better known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi. As the saying had it, if a nightingale refused to sing, Nobunaga would kill it. Hideyoshi would persuade it to sing – the song he wanted.
I love the way the letter takes us all the way back to 1575 and gives us a sense of Nobunaga’s, Hideyoshi’s and Nene’s personalities. At the time Tokichiro/Hideyoshi was 37 and fam