Battle, Regime Change, and Periodization as Family Crises before and after Sekigahara

• In Event: Violent Upheavals, State Legitimation, and the Evolving Politics of Elite Families in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

The battle of Sekigahara of 1600 was not the final bloodletting in Japan’s interminable Age of Warring States (1467-1615), but it did decisively elevate the victor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, above the other great regional warlords who, collectively, had dominated the country in the sixteenth century. Nearly half a million soldiers took the field in two armies, led by Ieyasu and by a motley coalition of lords great and small suspicious of his ascendancy. Many of these lords and their families perished or lost everything in the battle or its aftermath. The shifting of allegiances that preceded the battle and the settlement that followed are usually seen as a series of purely political decisions. In this paper I reconsider such maneuvers from the perspective of family, arguing that the battle was perceived not only as a threat to the survival of individual participants, but also as a commitment to one of two competing views of familial destiny. Over decades of incessant warfare, warlords had come to prize autonomy as the measure of success and the condition of their families’ survival. Now, I contend, they were forced to rethink the link between survival and autonomy—to choose between, on the one hand, submission to a hegemon and loss of most political agency, and, on the other, the promise of autonomy at the risk of familial extinction.

Author

• David Spafford, University of Pennsylvania