The Reestablishment of National Unity
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maining vassals of Nobunaga. He reconstructed the great castle at Osaka as the seat of his military government, but he gave evidence of a reviving interest in the imperial court at Kyoto by taking for himself the old Fujiwara posts of Prime Minister and Civil Dictator.
In 1587 Hideyoshi crushed the power of the great Satsuma realm of southern Kyushu and thereby won control over all western Japan. Three years later, all of eastern and northern Japan submitted to him after he had eliminated the chief Daimyo realm in the Kanto area. The restoration of political unity in Japan had at last been completed, and peace came to the land suddenly after more than a hundred years of incessant civil war.
Hideyoshi found himself in control of a superabundance of professional warriors who knew nothing but warfare. Possibly in order to drain off some of their excess fighting spirit, and probably because he himself, like many successful generals before him, fell victim to the world conqueror complex, Hideyoshi decided to embark on a program of world conquest, which for him meant the conquest of China. To do this he needed passage through Korea, and when the Koreans refused, he invaded the peninsula from the south in 1592. The Japanese armies rapidly overran almost all of Korea, but were eventually checked when they over-extended their lines of communication and met the armies of China, which had come to the aid of its Korean satellite. The Japanese were forced back to southern Korea, where they held on for several years despite a gradually deteriorating situation and difficulties in maintaining their communications by sea. The death of Hideyoshi