intricate arts of gardening and flower arrangement. But they allowed themselves to sink into effeminacy and sloth, as the Mikados had done before them; and political authority, after being for some time administered less by them than in their name, fell from them altogether in 1573, although the last representative of the line continued to bear the empty title of Shōgun till his death in 1597.
Meanwhile Japan had been discovered by the Portuguese (A.D. 1542); and the imprudent conduct of the Portuguese and Spanish friars (bateren, as they were called a corruption of the word padre) made of the Christian religion an additional source of discord. Japan fell into utter anarchy. Each baron in his fastness was a law unto himself. Then, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, there arose successively three great men,—Oda Nobunaga, the Taiko Hideyoshi,[1] and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The first of these conceived the idea of centralising all the authority of the state in a single person; the second, Hideyoshi, who has been called the Napoleon of Japan, actually made himself master of the whole country, and added the invasion of Korea (A.D. 1592—1598) to his domestic triumphs as a preliminary step towards the conquest of China. Shortly after his death in 1598, Ieyasu, setting Hideyoshi's youthful son aside, stepped into the vacant place. An able general, unsurpassed as a diplomat and administrator, he first quelled all the turbulent barons, then bestowed a considerable portion of their lands on his own kinsmen and dependents, and either broke or balanced, by a judicious distribution of other fiefs over different provinces of the empire, the might of those greater feudal lords, such as Satsuma and Chōshū, whom it was impossible to put altogether out of the way. The Court of Kyōto was treated by him respectfully, and investiture as Shōgun for himself and his heirs duly obtained from the Mikado.
In order further to break the might of the Daimyōs, Ieyasu
- ↑ Taiko (大閤), which means "great councillor," was the recognised title of a retired regent (kwampaku); but being rarely applied to any except Hideyoshi, it has almost come to form part of his name in popular parlance.
