During the chaotic century of Japan's Warring States, countless warriors seized the opportunity to become famous in one fell swoop. Obviously, everyone's ultimate goal is not just to become famous, but to become a world of people. In such a group of samurai standing at the top, it is a blessing and a sad thing to be able to meet the opponent. Date Masamune was not very good among these people, he was not very bright, and he even achieved nothing in the end, grinding to death. However, it was also Date Masamune, who in the last years of the Warring States period became a color that lit up the times.
<h1>One. Date Masamune's boyhood</h1>
Regarding Date Masamune, there are mixed reviews, but I don't know why, whether it is in Japan or China, there are many people who "black" him. I do not recognize or support this kind of unjustifiably bad judgment of a person without knowing a person, so I choose to calmly look at the saddest heroes in this warring country from history.
Date Masamune suffered from smallpox when he was a child and became blind in his right eye, so he was called "One-Eyed Dragon". This one-eyed dragon was probably the loneliest of the Warring States warriors, who obviously had the power to seize the world, but he was not born at the right time. Thirty-three years younger than Nobunaga, thirty years younger than Hideyoshi, twenty-five years younger than Ieyasu, and too far from Kyoto because of his hometown location (Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture), he would have been able to become a man of the world. Perhaps because of this, his actions are often unexpected, and he likes to dress strangely, so the surname "date" has also become synonymous with "novelty" and "elegant style" in Japanese. In his later years, he left a Chinese poem "Drunken Slogan": "Immediately after the teenager, shiping white hair." Forgiveness of the heavens, how unhappy it is.
The last sentence, "How unhappy" can be interpreted as a positive "should be happy in time" and a helpless "what if you can't be happy", combined with his life experience, I think the latter is most likely. From this poem, it can be seen that in his old age, Date Masamune's ambition and fighting spirit have been lost, and this has a great connection with his experiences in his youth and youth.
Date Masamune inherited the position of head of the family when he was nineteen years old, and the reason why he ascended the throne so early had a lot to do with the philosophy of his father, Date Keizong. The main reason for the previous infighting in the Date family was the delay in the father's generation to abdicate, resulting in the division of the family into two factions, resulting in the ironic end of the father and son. Date Huizong had witnessed and heard about this kind of family farce since childhood, and knew that if the previous generation had long been in love with the power of the family, it was very likely that it would evolve into a father and son in the same room, so the cave candle machine gave way early. When Masamune was eighteen, the Date family was in a peaceful state with neither internal nor external troubles, and it was a good time to give way. As a result, Masamune officially ascended to the position of governor of the Date family and began his career as an Oshu cyclops.
It can be said that Masamune ascended to a high position by stepping on his father's ideal of strength, and in order to live up to his father's wishes and to fill his own ambitions, the nineteen-year-old Date Masamune embarked on the road of aggression and expansion.
<h1>Two. Aggression and defeat</h1>
If I had to find an adjective for Masamune Itachi's half-life, I think the most appropriate one would be a pathetic person. During the four years from the age of nineteen to twenty-two, Date Masamune continued to conquer the northeast, seizing as many as the fifty-three counties of Oshu and the thirteen counties of Deyu, a veritable hegemon of Southern Oshu. Heaven forbid.
At this time, Japan was under the control of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the daimyo of various places were all vassals to Toyotomi. However, we should know that at this time, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's main scope of activity was in the Western Kingdom, which was controlled by the Hojo clan for many years, and the Eastern and Western countries were isolated from each other, and even the language and culture were not the same, let alone the more remote Tohoku region. Although Toyotomi had a strong desire to unify and conquer, no one in the Eastern Kingdom at this time ignored him, and Date Masamune was even more enthusiastic, wanting to follow the Fujiwara clan of four hundred years ago to establish a local independent state in the Tohoku region, that is, a down-to-earth anti-Toyotomi faction.
Although the volunteers are grand and can be perfectly implemented in action, they cannot withstand toyotomi's strength and strength. After Toyotomi Hideyoshi led his subjects to garrison Odawara, he named Masamune Kamiro. The twists and turns in this process are not too much to dwell on, but we should note that although Zhengzong at this time still has ambitions to establish an independent state in the northeast, he is not as firm as in the past. This was the first crisis he had encountered.
After that, in the process of several toyotomi's ascensions, Masamune was completely wiped out the flame in his heart little by little. During the invasion of Korea, because of the targeting from the Kanto region, Ada's subjects were killed and wounded in large numbers, and most of them were not killed in battle, but died of illness or starvation caused by the incompatibility of water and soil. Asano Nagamasa, who crossed the sea with Jeongjong to Busan, was in charge of supplies and food, but the Date Army did not receive any supplies at all during his time in Busan, and Masamune could only watch his subjects starve to death one by one. This battle completely extinguished the flame in Zhengzong's heart, and many of his letters to his mother clearly revealed a strong sense of homesickness and war weariness. Allowing this proud young man to reveal his negative emotions so unabashedly shows that his ambition has completely disappeared: he has completely given up his ambition to become a man of the world.
In the turbulent decades that followed, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu followed the same strategy: he listed Date Masamune as a dangerous person, ordered him to live in convenient places such as Kyoto and Edo, changed places frequently, and did not allow him to return to his hometown, trapping this dangerous person completely under the eyes of the rulers.
It can be said that Date Masamune was once a capable and powerful candidate who could become a person in the world, but in the end he could not fight these old foxes who had already experienced the war, and finally they were grinded to death.
<h1>Three. Date Masamune his anecdotes</h1>
For history, the anecdotes of Date Masamune himself are more enjoyable than his exploits.
I have to say that it seems that many of Date Masamune's "black materials" are from novels. In a certain novel, it is rumored that there is a discord between Masamune's mother and son and brother, and the mother has tried to support her younger brother Kojiro to ascend to the throne of the family, but the rebellion fails, and eventually the younger brother is executed, and the mother is sent back to the upper family. In fact, at this time, neither the Date family nor the top family had the heart to do this. At this time, the Date family was in a dilemma due to Toyotomi Hideyoshi's first request to go to Thera, and if they were not careful, they would follow in the footsteps of the Hojo family, and the most upakaya was even more worried than the Date family because of the invasion of Shonai, and they had no spare energy to plan the action of poisoning masamune, and their own lives were difficult to protect. Moreover, there is no evidence of incompatibility between Masamune and Yoshihime, and there is even a very heavy Oedipal complex.
In addition, Date Masamune was a man who liked to write letters. When he finished his work outside, he wrote letters to his courtiers, to his uncle, who was the most senior, and to his mother, Yi Ji, at home. Many of the letters he wrote have been preserved and have become the talk of later speculation about his life.
It can be said that, leaving aside the political and military level, Date Masamune himself is a very good person, a qualified superior, and a dear family member. He loved his mother and trusted his mother, which led to a large number of dissected letters sent to his mother Yi Ji during the war of aggression against Korea; he trusted his own courtiers, and after the "Massacre of Little Hand Mori Castle", he exaggerated his military achievements dozens of times in his family letters to his mother and uncle, but honestly explained to his courtiers that only 200 people were killed.
<h1>Four. summary</h1>
Date Masamune's place in the history of Japan's Sengoku period is delicate. He never reached a high position, without strong allies and assistants, and his life was uneven. But it was also such a not-so-brilliant person who became the focus of discussion on the history of Japan's Sengoku period, and no one could fail as much as he did, and succeed as much as he did. Without him, how much loneliness would there be in this hundred years.
Reference Books:
[1] Shohachi Yamaoka: Date Masamune, New World Press, 2008
[2] Hongye: "Swift Wind and Thunder: Date Masamune", Station Culture, 2017
[3] Mao Lumeiye, Warring States Japan 1: The Taste of Time, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013
[4] Mao Lu Meiye, Warring States Japan 2: The Aesthetics of the Loser, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013