Page 37 - JAPAN THE SHAPING OFDAIMYO CULTURE 1185-1868

standardized measures, so that the ruler, as well as the daimyo, would
know the resources of the domains and the country. Land was assessed
for tax purposes on the basis of its estimated annual yield measured in
koku. This practice provided a basic module for grasping the worth of
land, amounts due in taxation or levies, military obligations, and the
stipends of daimyo and their samurai. Daimyo would in future be ranked
in terms of the total anticipated yield (kokudakd) of the territory they
held. Assignments of domain were made not in terms of specific villages
or pieces of territory but in units of 10,000 koku, drawn from however
many villages in the locality it took to provide that income. This made it
easy for Hideyoshi to regulate daimyo income or move daimyo and pro-
vide them with an appropriate koku income elsewhere. After Hideyoshi's
land surveys it was calculated that the total kokudakd for the country was
approximately 18,000,000 koku. Hideyoshi and some 200 daimyo drew
upon this tax base, with a small share going to the imperial court and
Buddhist temples. Of this total kokudaka, Hideyoshi claimed 2,000,000
koku, 36 daimyo held domains assessed at 100,000 koku or more, and 68
daimyo were assessed at the minimum for a daimyo of 10,000 koku. The
largest assessments among Hideyoshi's vassal daimyo included Tokugawa
leyasu at 2,400,000 koku, Mori Terumoto 1,205,000, Uesugi Kagekatsu
1,200,000, Maeda Toshiie 835,000, Date Masamune 589,000, and Ukita
Hideie 574,000 koku. Hideyoshi also transformed society by disarming
villagers and forcing samurai, who until then had lived in the villages, to
choose between staying in the villages as farmers or keeping their swords
and their hereditary profession of arms but moving into garrison towns
as stipended vassals. Daimyo were ordered to collect swords, bows,
spears, muskets, and other weapons from farmers and deliver them to
Hideyoshi. The enforcement of this policy went a long way toward the
implementation of the four-part status hierarchy of samurai, farmers,
artisans, and merchants that was to characterize Japanese society in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Even before the last of his daimyo and their armies had returned
from Korea to Japan, Hideyoshi was dying. In a final desperate attempt
to establish a warrior dynasty he set up a council of five powerful daimyo
to serve as regents for his five-year-old son Hideyori. In spite of their
oaths of loyalty to Hideyoshi, they, and other daimyo throughout the
country, immediately began to intrigue and vie for supremacy. Daimyo
were again forced into fateful choices. While one faction continued to
support the Toyotomi cause, others clustered around the patient and
powerful eastern daimyo Tokugawa leyasu. The issue was decided on the
Plain of Sekigahara in 1600 when supporters of the Toyotomi were
routed in a great battle involving 160,000 samurai. Three years later
Tokugawa leyasu received the title of Seiitaishôgun and consolidated his
bakufu, and in 1614-1615 destroyed the remnant of the Toyotomi faction
after the siege of Osaka Castle. After centuries of instability, war, and
conquest, Japan settled into two centuries of peace, the Pax Tokugawa,
under the carefully balanced system of shogunal and daimyo rule known
as the baku-han system.
The century of transition from civil war through conquest and
national reunification to peace wrought significant institutional changes
in the character of the Japanese daimyo. This unification did not in any
sense involve the eradication of the daimyo. Although individual daimyo
houses were eliminated, the daimyo as a whole survived the process of
political reunification and were entrenched by it. It was the daimyo Oda
Nobunaga and Tokugawa leyasu who started and finished the sixteenth-
century unification. All three unifiers relied on daimyo allies to marshall
military forces, lead campaigns, and rule the provinces. Each of the
unifiers, to one degree or another, shared power with daimyo in what-

24